PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 83

build two schools to separate the Arab Palestinian from the Jewish students, while the Palestinians, until then, wanted to maintain a certain degree of coexistence? My father, for example, worked at the Department of Agri- culture and his colleagues, whether Christians, Jews or Muslims, would all come to visit us at weekends. Why turn a school, an environment perfectly placed to teach open-mindedness, into a tool for division? Anyhow, the Kadoorie School applied the same partitioning to its pupils in 1933 that we were to suffer later, in 1948. Walking from the Kadoorie School back to Jibiya, my village, though forests and olive groves, I saw, as in a film, all the schools where I had studied since I was small. They were all state schools, as my father could not afford private education for his six children. Access to education had never been easy for us; I had to walk long hours through fields before getting to the classroom. But it was worthwhile. I had always been an exemplary pupil, ranking first or second in my class. I started school in 1929, when, at the age of six, I had to cross a valley to go from Jibiya to Kubar, which was the only place in the area to offer children some school- ing. Our teacher gave classes to 25 children under a big olive tree. We had to keep moving around the tree during the course of the day to avoid having the sun in our eyes. After six months, our school had to close, and nat- urally I went back to work in the fields with my father while learning to hunt wild rabbits and gazelle. In Jibiya I was the only one of the 62 residents who could read, write and count a little bit. It did not change who I was, however. As a little boy, I liked village life very much. My favourite pastime was to watch the women as they prepared musakhan, a dish based on bread, olive oil and onions, which made them cry, and chicken smell- ing of spices, the lot swimming in olive oil. I would happily follow the women into their houses when they prepared for a wedding. The henna ceremony, the day before the union, was one of my favourite moments, and I watched in wonder as they drew intricate designs on their hands. The next day, the bride, seated on her camel, paraded through the village, while all the chil- dren joined the procession with songs and dances. In 1935, a high-ranking family friend discovered that I was no longer going to school and he enrolled me in a state primary school in Bir Zeit. It was a five-kilo- metre walk over the hills. Then, in 1937, I was admit- ted to El Bira School in Ramallah. I had to stay at a friend’s house there, as cars were particularly scarce due to the general strike against the Balfour Declaration and the ominous partition plan it was predicting. The strike spread everywhere in Palestine and became the “Great Arab Revolt”, lasting from 1936 to 1939. During that time, the English arrested two of my friends under the false pretext that they were thuwar, the revolutionaries of the period. The British soldiers barged into their homes while they were sleeping and took them to a house in Ramallah, a jail named “the well”, because its doors and windows had been blocked and the prisoners were lowered into it from an open- ing in the roof. When the family of the prisoners went to complain to the British governor, he replied, ‘They broke the curfew!’ This was ridiculous, since both of my friends had been arrested inside their houses. Two years after the end of the Revolt, in 1941, I was given a place at Al Rashidiye High School in Jerusalem. It was a boys’ boarding school. 3 It was here that officials from the Kadoorie School recruited me. With my diploma in agronomy, I opted to work in education, keen to transmit my knowledge and help develop Palestinian agriculture. Like all the young peo- ple of my generation, I was aware of the land-acquisition plan organized by the Zionist movement and the Jew- ish National Fund (JNF). 4 We had witnessed numer- ous actions aimed at taking over and controlling lands before 1948, but we did not realize how organized they actually were. It was only much later, after reading a book by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, that I understood how cen- tral agriculture had been to the Zionist strategy and how this led to the first violent actions. By being dispos- sessed of his land, the Palestinian farmer was deprived of his status and an essential part of his identity. Ilan Pappé also wrote that nothing had been left to chance, that everything had been planned. He explained how the JNF, 5 starting in the 1930s and then more systemat- ically in the 1940s, had produced maps and reports on every Palestinian village. These documents contained as much detail about the topography as about the access roads, the resources, the religion, the relations with the nearby villages, the age of the men, and data about local notables. All this crucial information would be used by the Zionist paramilitary groups in 1948 when they organized raids and targeted certain villages, including Deir Yasin, Tantura and Dawayima. The pictures of the massacres committed in these villages and elsewhere ‘Abd Al Rahman 81