PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 86

father smile by telling him that he wanted to change
his teeth anyway.
It was only a long time after his release that Suley-
man told us how he was put in a cage 1.6 metres high
and 60 centimetres long (he was 1.78 metres tall), with
a black cloth bag over his head. In a few words, he
described how he had been tied to a column and beaten
on the kidneys, liver, legs, and how he was left to fall
on carefully placed sharp stones to deepen his wounds
and cause infections. He also told us how he had erased
everything from his memory, names, places, dates in
order to mock the interrogators’ questions, in order not
to die of shame. He told us how by remaining silent,
he had lost all his teeth. He also said that he made his
jailers smile when they asked him if he had slept well
and he would answer that ‘a pillow would have helped’.
For Suleyman, the two detentions were not the
same. The first time, at Al Jafr prison in Jordan, he
considered himself a political prisoner, but in Israel, he
was a prisoner of war, a title which the Israeli author-
ities refused to admit. For them, any Palestinian who
resisted them was a terrorist.
I was proud of my younger brother. I admired his
heroism, knowing that I was not cut out for it myself.
Not everyone can give his life for a cause that he
believes in. I knew that I would not have been able to
tolerate all the suffering, as he did. The United Nations
offered me a good way to be what I was, a specialist in
agronomy who was an advocate for nutritional auton-
omy. During the two years of my mission in Liberia,
I helped people to improve their work on the land by
planting orchards, multiplying incubators, and plan-
ning a twice-yearly rice harvest. But I quickly learned
that Liberian agriculture did not hold the central place
in their society that it did in the West Bank, where
farmers looked for a way to survive free from the con-
trol of Israel. The political stakes were not the same.
In 1976, I moved from Liberia to a post in Iraq,
where agriculture was being neglected. The country was
changing from a rural economy into an oil state, and this
meant having to import foodstuffs at a considerable cost.
There were six of us experts in agronomy from the United
Nations, and we were named “advisors to the Iraqi Min-
ister of Agriculture”. Our mission consisted not only of
helping farmers 10 to increase their production, but also of
contributing to reinvigorating this sector.
Approximately 5000 Palestinians (today there are
around 50,000) had been living in Iraq since the exo-
dus of 1948. They had been well received, even though
they did not have the right to own land or to vote. I
quickly made friends. Alas, the objective of Unesco
ended in a notorious failure: the farmers and people
in charge were lured by the easy money coming from
oil and completely lost interest in the training we were
offering. We were of no use to them. Courses were con-
stantly cancelled because at the last minute we could
not find a vehicle to drive us to the place where we were
supposed to offer the training. Even when a course did
take place, there would be only five people there instead
of the 40 expected. Over and above all that, we never
saw the minister whom we were supposed to “advise”.
I was extremely disappointed. During my missions
for Unesco I never encountered the same enthusiasm
that I found in Palestinian and Jordanian farmers for
developing local agriculture. Unfortunately, I saw this
enthusiasm waning over time, and even disappearing.
This suited the Israelis who, relying on an Ottoman
law from the nineteenth century, declared that if a
piece of land was not cultivated for three consecutive
years, it became the property of the State. 11 That is why
I cultivate my land every year; I have the right to go to
Palestine to visit my land because I was given a green
ID card in 1994 by the Palestinian Authority. Cultivat-
ing my land is my way of resisting. 
‘Abd Al Rahman Al Najjab died on September 20, 2018 at the age of 95,
a few months after he gave us this interview.
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Memories of 1948