PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 84

were intentionally made public to provoke panic and
incite people to flee. After the Arab residents were forced
out, many of their demolished villages were replaced by
Jewish settlements.
I myself witnessed what had happened in Al Qibliya,
near Lydda. I went the day after the murderous raid led
by Ariel Sharon and his Unit 101 of the Israeli army,
which occurred on October 14, 1953, at about 9.30 pm.
For Sharon, it was a punitive expedition to avenge the
murder of a woman and her two children when a gre-
nade had exploded in the Israeli village of Yehud. In
the Palestinian village of Al Qibliya, 69 people were
massacred, three-quarters of whom were women and
children. What I saw there I will never forget. Bodies
were everywhere on the streets. In deathly silence, fam-
ilies were roaming through the ruins, looking for their
relatives under the rubble. Strangely, everybody was
avoiding a half-destroyed house. I learned that it was
the house of the school teacher who was not from the
village. The Jordanian army came to remove the bodies
of the family, which included three children.
Until the middle of the 1960s, I worked as a supervi-
sor and teacher of agriculture in the whole of the West
Bank. I was fascinated by the enthusiasm of the stu-
dents. When I distributed seeds, the whole class took
them away and planted them. The rural communities
were thirsty for knowledge and brazenly displayed
their desire for autonomy. This way of asserting our
vision of the world and refusing all control suited me.
We improved the yield of bee hives, poultry, vegetable
gardens and orchards.
The Jordanian Ministry of Education, on which
I depended, offered me several grants to continue
my university education abroad. I went first to the
American University of Beirut (AUB) in 1954, then
to the University of Oklahoma in the United States
in 1958, where I obtained my Bachelor of Science
degree. Finally, I attended Texas A&M University in
1965, where I studied and obtained a Master’s degree,
producing a thesis entitled “Managing an Institute of
Agriculture at the Highest Level”.
When I got back from the United States in 1966, I
was promoted by the Ministry of Education to manage
agricultural education throughout Jordan. In Amman
I was reunited with my brother, Suleyman, who was
11 years younger than me, and who had chosen polit-
ical activism over education. A year earlier he and
hundreds of other young political activists had been
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Memories of 1948
released from Al Jafr prison, in the south of Jordan. As
one of the Marxist revolutionaries, Suleyman had been
sentenced, in 1957, to 18 years of prison. At the time,
being part of that movement was severely punishable
under Jordanian law. However, after eight years he was
pardoned, but as soon as he was released, he re-joined
his militant friends. The famous Palestinian poet,
Mahmoud Darwish, was one of my brother’s friends
and dedicated a very beautiful poem to him.
On June 5, 1967, when the Six-Day War started, I
was in East Jerusalem, in a school examination centre.
My family was living in Amman, 6 so I set off in that
direction, as did thousands of Palestinians who were
running from the bombardments in the West Bank,
wading across the River Jordan because the Allenby
Bridge had been destroyed. That was when I saw some
Palestinians, members of the older generation, refusing
to leave. Having experienced dispossession in 1948,
they knew what awaited those who left their homes
and their lands. They knew that once they left the West
Bank, it would be practically impossible for them ever
to return.
After 1967, it became difficult, even impossible, to
continue my job at the Jordanian Ministry of Educa-
tion. I was used to moving around all over the West
Bank, but was refused a post in Hebron that year
because the Israeli authorities, who now controlled
the Allenby Bridge, would not give me a “laissez-pas-
ser”, the document required to enter the West Bank.
We have to remember that after August, 1967, Moshe
Dayan, Israel’s Minister of Defence, played a double
game, advocating one thing and doing the opposite.
On the one hand, he announced he would implement
a policy of “open bridges” which would allow the West
Bank to maintain its economic links with Jordan and
avoid the separation of families; on the other hand, he
was integrating the West Bank economy and infrastruc-
ture into the State of Israel, forbidding any development
of industry or agriculture which would compete with
Israeli companies. That is how he transformed the occu-
pied territory into a big importer of Israeli products. 7
This was exactly what I had been fighting against by
teaching my pupils how to become autonomous.
I was outraged and expressed my anger openly, but
that cost me dearly. In 1971, the Jordanian Ministry of
Education forced me to retire. I was only 45 years old,
I did not have the right to leave Jordan any more, and
nobody would hire me. Then I heard about an opening