This week, Palestinians around the world commemorated the Nakba, or "catastrophe," referring to the displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians at the time of Israel's founding in 1948. From the West Bank to the West Coast, protestors waved colorful flags and held signs demanding recognition for the plight and rights of the dispossessed.
Yet beneath the barrage of political symbols and slogans lies a human experience of heartache and loss, to which Americans of all backgrounds might possibly relate.
I was shielded from this experience as a child. In Amman, Jordan, where I grew up in the '80s, events across the ever-dwindling river were background noise. My friends at school mostly talked about last Thursday's party and the cute girls in class.
It was at an American summer arts camp, of all places, that I began to confront my family's ruptured past. At age 15, amid Michigan's woodlands and the sounds of Beethoven's Waldstein sonata, I made Jewish friends for the first time. At first, we mostly talked about music.
But before long, our discussions turned to what was apparently the elephant in the room. In the cafeteria, over macaroni and cheese and lemonade, I was told "the land belongs to us" and "we were there first." I felt something was not right, but I couldn't begin to articulate why. My parents -- two oceans away -- told me to keep practicing my piano scales.
Camp ended and I returned to Jordan, determined to connect the dots. Soon after my mother begrudgingly accepted my request to "take me there;" we were on the road westwards. Arriving in Jerusalem, we embarked on a whirlwind tour of the land. I saw Jews of many backgrounds in the malls of West Jerusalem and the alleys of Tel Aviv. I met Palestinian tour guides in Bethlehem, surrounded by military checkpoints and roadblocks, and shopkeepers in Jaffa, the city of my parents' birth and now a rundown suburb of Tel Aviv.
In Ramleh, a depressed town near Ben-Gurion International Airport, I posed in front of the city hall -- the blue and white flag fluttering high above it -- as my mother took photos of what was my great-grandfather's house. It was built several months before the family fled to Jordan, never to return.
I later learned from my grandparents, who refused to join us on that trip, that my family's story was not uncommon. In April 1948, they boarded a bus to Amman, hoping to wait out the violence. Their exile was made permanent after Israeli troops "liberated" Ramleh in July of that year and expelled most of the town's majority Arab population. The one relative who had stayed behind to look after the family properties, which subsequently passed into Israeli government ownership, had to walk to Ramallah, from where he made his way to Amman.
I begged my grandparents for tales of the old country, and their shattered world slowly came to life. I discovered that my family's Protestant roots lie in one great-grandfather's decision to abandon his Eastern Orthodox faith and become a pastor within tayfet al-shilling (literally the "shilling sect"), as Protestants were nicknamed in reference to the British missionaries that had converted them. I listened intently to my grandmother's description of her father, the enterprising Sido Abu Saliba, who had set up a currency exchange business and a bus company to transport him daily to his job. He traded in Gaza's gold market (despite a British ban on the activity) and on Tel Aviv's stock exchange with a Jewish partner. He insisted on sleeping on the rooftop on hot summer nights, only to wake up shrieking one time after being bitten by a 44-legged centipede.
My grandmother recalled less fondly her uncle Samaan, the family's self-appointed moral policeman who had convinced her father to end her schooling at age 11 after having found a love letter addressed to her from a fellow classmate.
I longed for these memories to become my own. My mother wanted nothing less. "I am like an ostrich with its head in the sand," she would say whenever someone mentioned the "P" word. For her and my grandparents, remembering was both painful and futile in the face of the countless wars and political failures. Self-enforced amnesia, combined with a focus on the material present, was the only viable option. Discussion of Palestine at home was so rare -- and abrupt when it did occur -- that I began to wonder whether my family was ever there. I had to rummage through black-and-white photos of Easter parties, frayed property deeds, and obscure Hebrew websites to allay my lingering doubts.
Since 1948, the new society that had risen on Palestine's remains seemed uninterested in what was there before. I had to roam the older parts of Amman, where many Palestinians had settled, to get a feel for the chipped limestone and arched windows of their original homes. I had to trek the Jordanian countryside to imagine more vividly the Palestinian villages that had been razed to make way for idyllic parks or converted into bohemian artist colonies.
I started to see Palestine in everything. In comparison to my ancestors, who had real experiences of their land, my existence felt transplanted and hollow. My mother implored me, "Get Palestine out of your system!"
I thought back to the flag above my great-grandfather's house. It did not seem to acknowledge what lay beneath it. It confidently claimed what was taken by force. It made me feel that celebrating my heritage was confrontational, politically charged. Remembering that 44-legged centipede felt like an act of defiance. I am waiting for the day when these memories are reduced to what they are: the story of a family on a land.
My grandparents' memories, like all that is forbidden, won't let me go. So I keep longing for a place that I never belonged to, yet seem unable to forget.
Wasim Salfiti is a writer living between Amman, Jordan and Washington, DC. He works in development finance.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/04/the_expulsion_libel_1948_arab.html
Or let me put it this way.....do Jews accept the right to exist of Palestinians ?
" April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun (headed by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. The village lay outside of the area to be assigned by the United Nations to the Jewish State; it had a peaceful reputation. But it was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Deir Yassin was slated for occupation under Plan Dalet and the mainstream Jewish defense force, the Haganah, authorized the irregular terrorist forces of the Irgun and the Stern Gang to perform the takeover.... over 100 men, women, and children were systematically murdered."
http://www.deiryassin.org/
Please post a link to where you " read accounts by survivors who confirm this".
If a 3rd party walked into your home and requested that you share one half of your house with another random family, would you accept the "Partition Plan" and pack up and move into the one half? Doubt it.
Yeah, just hoping to "wait out the violence" perpetrated by the surrounding Arab dictatorships and the Arabs in Israel seeking the destruction of the Israelis. Can we not just say the facts? A war was launched by the Arabs inside and outside of Israel with the intent to destroy all of them. The Arabs lost that war.
This calumny has been widely discredited by British and Ottoman records and demographic data.
The Ottoman census of 1878 put the Muslim population of Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre districts at 403,795.
"From analyses of rates of increase of the Muslim population of the three Palestinian sanjaks, one can say with certainty that Muslim immigration after the 1870s was small. Had there been a large group of Muslim immigrants their numbers would have caused an unusual increase in the population and this would have appeared in the calculated rate of increase from one registration list to another... Such an increase would have been easily noticed; it was not there."
- McCarthy, Justin (1990). The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate
"From abroad, we are accustomed to believe that Eretz Israel is presently almost totally desolate....But in truth it is not so. In the entire land, it is hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled... Many of our people who came to buy land have been in Eretz Israel for months, and have toured its length and width, without finding what they seek."
- Ahad Ha'am early Zionist writing in 1891
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=myvobIkwkNM
Hope all is well. I have read a few of your comments today. Try to keep it civil please. Thank you, D
On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine
http://www.istrue.net/2012/04/04/dont-forget-about-jewish-refugees-from-arab-countries/
(Ha'aretz, October 8, 2004)
"Any reasonable person, Zionist or non-Zionist, must acknowledge that the analogy drawn between Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews is unfounded. Palestinian refugees did not want to leave Palestine. Many Palestinian communities were destroyed in 1948, and some 700,000 Palestinians were expelled, or fled, from the borders of historic Palestine. Those who left
did not do so of their own volition. In contrast, Jews from Arab lands came to this country under the initiative of the State of Israel and Jewish organizations. Some came of their own free will; others arrived against their will." (Professor Yehouda Shenhav, Tel Aviv University)"
“What is the crime of the refugees in the eyes of the lords of Arabia who stand by and watch the misery of the refugees, and who suck the blood of the poor and needy-without shame before God and the world? Yes the poor refugees committed the crime of listening to those deceivers, they believed the liars, and went to the extreme foolishness of leaving their homes, counting on their deceitful leaders to bring them back! And because of what is happening to the Palestine refugees, Arab public opinion is changing little by little to support the Jews in Israel where not a single Arab dies from starvation and cold! And if there should be another war, it should be against the Arab leaders, the princes and kings who brought this catastrophe upon the poor people of Palestine.”
British officials on the scene at the time, hardly pro-Zionist, were convinced that Palestinian leaders were steadily abandoning their people. In December 1947 the High Commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham reported that “panic of (the) middle class persists and there is a steady exodus of those who can afford to leave the country." He added later in April 1948, “In all parts of the country the effendi class has been evacuating in large numbers over a considerable period and the tempo is increasing.”
I am not aware of any such petition ever being rejected.
"The unfounded, immoral analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi immigrants needlessly embroils members of these two groups in a dispute,,,.the campaign's proponents hope their efforts will prevent conferral of what is called a "right of return" on Palestinians.."
- Yehouda Shenhav head of advanced studies in the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, winner of the Association for Israeli Studies award for The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity.
"Iraqi Jews aren't refugees, saying that "nobody expelled us from Iraq, nobody told us that we were unwanted"
- Avi Shlaim, Iraqi born professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the British Academy.
http://middleeastfacts.com/Articles/history-of-jews-in-arab-countries.php
It's not nearly the same as the Palestinains who fled their homes out of fear of violence in 1948, or Jews who fled their communities in Iran shortly thereafter.
Facts totally ignored by the Palestinians.
According to Hitchens this confirmation "by an Israeli historian using the most scrupulous and authentic Zionist sources, at last allows us to write finis to a debate which has been going on for a quarter of a century."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaming_the_Victims#.22Broadcasts.22_.28Christopher_Hitchens.29
Further reading:
"I next decided to test the undocumented charge that the Arab evacuation orders were broadcast by Arab radio-which could be done thoroughly because the BBC monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948. The records, and companion ones by a U.S. monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum.
There was not a single order, or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put."
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~recross/israel-watch/ErskinChilders.html