Living Memories

By Falestin Naili

Historian, Researcher at the French Institute for the Near East (Ifpo)

There are dead who sleep in rooms you will build there are dead who visit their past in places you demolish there are dead who pass over bridges you will construct there are dead who illuminate the night of butterflies, dead who come by dawn to drink their tea with you, as peaceful as your rises left them, so leave, you guests of the place, some vacant seats for your hosts . they will read you the terms of peace . with the dead!

From The "Red Indian's" Penultimate Speech to the White Man, by Mahmoud Darwish, translation by Fady Joudah

Living Memories

On May 15, 2018, thousands of Palestinian demonstrators gathered on the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel to demand their right to return and to oppose the relocation of the United States Embassy to Jerusalem. Seventy-one years after Al Nakba (1948), these demonstrators, most of whom were under 30 years old, surprised the world by the longevity of their memory. They shouted loudly and strongly about their right to return to nearby villages and neighbouring towns in Gaza, like Ramle, Lydda, Majdal and Jaffa. These young people, who have known no reality other than military occupation, wars and blockades, form part of a collective destiny with 1948 as its tragic point of departure. For them, the border constitutes the line drawn between their lives in the refugee camps of Gaza and the bygone days in the villages and towns of their forefathers, some of which are visible from the border. It is the demarcation between their present reality and a past from which they were forcibly cut off and on which they cannot turn their backs.

In May 2000, similar scenes played out following the retreat of the Israeli army from southern Lebanon. The border, once again accessible after 28 years of military occupation, was the backdrop for visits and family reunions for Palestinian refugees who had settled in Lebanon and their relatives living in the north of Israel.1 Many Palestinian refugees today live very close to the places they came from but to which they cannot return, even for a visit. Sohaila Shishtawi testifies to this; living in Amman, she is only 80 kilometres away from her native Jerusalem: 'I recently applied for a visa at the Israeli embassy in Jordan to go and visit my nephew in Jerusalem, but it was turned down. I do not understand; how could an 89-year-old Palestinian woman, 1.4 metres tall and weighing 38 kilos, possibly pose a threat to Israel?'

Nevertheless, since 1948, the "absentees" have been making their presence felt, even if it is physically impossible. The 19 stories offered here illustrate different ways of being present, of counting, of making oneself heard and of having some weight. In the face of erasure - imposed through terror, through the destruction of their villages,2 by being uncounted during population censuses, by being deprived of their right of residence - in the face of the confiscation of their property and their marginalization in the dominant historiography on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 11 men and eight women tell their stories of 1948. They retrace the effects of this historic cataclysm and the different strategies for survival, perseverance, creativity and resistance that they deployed.

These 19 stories obviously cannot cover all of the experiences Palestinians lived through in 1948, but they give a fairly representative idea. From Gaza to Nazareth, the narrators come from towns and villages in different parts of historical Palestine. Today, some live in refugee camps, others in towns and cities in the region or much further afield. They come from different social classes, different professions and represent various degrees of social and political engagement. Some of the stories emanate from public figures such as the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah and the intellectuals Ilham Abughazaleh and Feissal Darraj, but the majority of the testimonies are those of people who have left no written traces of their experiences. It is thanks to the passionate work of the team of editors that their voices can be heard. This book can thus be seen as a response to the call made some ten years ago by Ahmad Sa'id and Lila Abu Lughod to make it possible for 'Palestinian stories to slip through the wall of the dominating history of 1948 and open it up to factual and moral questioning.'3

These very personal stories deal with themes that are often combined: the land and rootedness, creativity and resistance, and finally, the space of the possible.

The collapse of a world

Over and above these themes, these texts evoke the terror, the wrenching and the intense sense of loss experienced by these men and women, the majority of whom were still children during the war of 1948. Depicted by Israel as the war of independence; it has been the subject of many books and special editions of journals; yet until recently, the Palestinian perspective remained marginal. It is in the details of the tragedy afflicting the Palestinians that we find the reasons for its name: Al Nakba - the catastrophe. Fear of death, violence, the loss of loved ones, separation, exile, of being deprived of one's home and all means of subsistence, all of those fears are part of the moment when the world of the Palestinians falls apart.

In these testimonies we hear the suffering of wandering and the extreme vulnerability of the families: during their flight, many families were broken apart and children were lost in the general panic. Nakhle Shahwan of Beit Jala remembers that in the aftermath of the war of 1948 Radio Jerusalem devoted two hours each afternoon to messages from refugees who had lost a family member during the flight, often children. We also hear the simple words used by the children to express their fear and revolt, like those of Halima Mustafa, fleeing the invasion of Fir'im, near Safad, her mother's sewing machine on her sister's head: 'Dar, dar abuna wa jayin el ghuraba yetarduna.' (This is our father's house but strangers are coming to evict us.)

Between the lines of these stories of flight lies the fear of massacre. Rushdieh Al Hudeib is a survivor from the village of Dawayima, to the west of Hebron, in which a battalion of the Israeli army committed a massacre in late October 1948 (after the foundation of the State of Israel). Around 500 civilians were killed. It happened more than six months after the massacre in Deir Yasin, carried out by paramilitary Zionist groups which the Zionist propaganda had exploited to frighten the Palestinians and push them into abandoning their villages. Deir Yasin had a traumatic effect on the Palestinian population,4 as Sohaila Shishtawi tells us.

In spite of the collective trauma caused by these massacres, around 150,000 Palestinians stayed in their towns and villages and found themselves integrated into the new territory of the State of Israel. Both Samira Khoury from Nazareth and Suad Qaraman from Haifa bear witness to life under martial law, to the censuses and to the administrative apartheid against the Palestinians.

After the rupture of 1948, the Palestinians were faced with a multitude of legal situations, in particular concerning the rules that govern their residence in different parts of historical Palestine and in host countries.5 In a world regulated by nation states, they have been deprived of a Palestinian nationality which could have united and defined them. The stories of Umaima Al 'Alami and Tamam Al Ghul, who cannot go to their native Jerusalem without special authorization from Israel, are enlightening on this subject. This has lead to the very particular relationship that Palestinians have with their identity papers and especially with their passports. Feissal Darraj highlights this through his story, which is that of a refugee who has 'for seven decades been a man whose existence was confiscated'.

'The land, a perfect metaphor for permanence'

The land has a special place in many of the stories,6 because it represents a central stake in the conflict between the indigenous Palestinian population and the ambitions of the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Colonialist ideologies of settlement share the leitmotiv of an empty territory, and so the Zionist ideology has described Palestine as 'a land without people for a people without land'.7

Suleyman Hassan's story of life in the little West Bank village of Kafr Laqif reflects the steadfastness of a farmer, strongly attached to his land and his olive trees. He grasps every legal means available to assert his property rights in face of the settlers who arrived after the occupation in 1967. During the 1967 war, Suleyman - harking back to the experience of refugees arriving in his village in 1948 - managed to convince nearly all the villagers of Kafr Laqif, who had been chased away by the Israeli army, to return home as quickly as possible. We find that same attachment to the land in the story of the agronomic teacher, 'Abd Al Rahman Al Najjab, who has insisted on the...