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
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