Heavy Zionist shelling of Palestinian villages and towns from late 1947 and throughout 1948 and the terrorizing of the Palestinians was frequently recounted by those interviewed. Suad and Mary Andrawus from Tiberias, who both said they had a good relationship with their Jewish neighbours before “those who came from outside [i.e. Zionist settlers]” arrived, tell horrifying stories about how the Arabs in Tiberias were treated by the British and explaining how the real terror that forced them to leave the city was from those “Jews who came from outside”. Mary said:
My younger brother was with the thuwwar until the end … one day, a British soldier knocked our door with the butt of his gun. My mother opened the door, and she told him in English that he could come in and search the house. He wanted to go up into the siddeh [an attic used for storage], my mother went and brought him a ladder and told him to climb … he realized there was nothing there and left. The British terrified our neighbourhood. One day a man who was afraid of their raids carried his baby on his arm and tried to leave his house … when the soldier saw him, he shot and killed both of them.
Speaking of her own encounter, Mary recalled: “One day my brother saw the soldiers coming; he rushed to the house and said, ‘They are here’, and he asked me to hide the Sten [a British sub-machine gun]. I didn’t know we had weapons … I took the Sten, broke it into three parts … and hid it there … that day ended peacefully.” Urban middle-class women like Mary and Suad remember the terrifying attacks of the Zionists which led them, and others, to leave Tiberias:
The thuwwar defended the city until May 1948, when the Jews – not our neighbours, but those who came from outside – surrounded Tiberias on three sides. The city was shelled day and night; you could see the women, children, and the old running from house to house seeking shelter … a state of utter terror … this is how we left.
This is also how Najiyyeh Ahmad, her family and members of the village “left”. Referring to the Zionists, she said: “They shelled us with their artillery. They would fire on us early in the morning while we were still asleep. Some of the villagers who were protecting us were martyred … this is how we left. We left under fire and shells.”
The Palestinian Nakba/genocide was not an event or a moment, but rather a process which began before 1948 and which has continued from 1948 until the present. Further uprootedness, massacres, bombardments, destruction of homes and erasure of whole villages accompanied the Palestinians even during and after their tahjeer (forced expulsion) from their homes and villages. The terror of Zionist settler colonialism haunted the refugees until many had fled the country. This and the following voices and testimonies present a clear indication of the historically specific nature of the Palestinian Nakba: a step-by-step yet continuous genocide.
Initially, the movement of those who left was out of the home but not out of the Palestinian homeland, and each village and town had its own story of the process of forced displacement. Importantly, these expellees never thought they were leaving their homes for ever, let alone leaving their homeland altogether. Forced to leave their homes, most villagers took refuge among family and friends in nearby villages; they stayed there until those villages and cities were also attacked and they were all forced out of the land of Palestine. In other words, the path of almost all Palestinians was not a straight one to the outcome that the Israelis had planned for them: a total displacement from the whole of Palestine; again, leaving the homeland had not been the intention of the Palestinians. Instead, a temporary departure was what they imagined, hence the rush of most expellees and the terrorized, leaving their homes open, running barefoot and in their nightwear, leaving behind all of their personal belongings.
Ibrahim Saleh from al-Shajarah (Tiberias district), a refugee in Syria, described what happened in his village:
Ten days before May 1948, after hearing about the massacres in the neighbouring villages of Lubieh, Deir Yassin, Arab al-Safih, Ain al-Yassin and Ain al-Zaitoun, we sent the women and children, those who could walk, to Nazareth and Reineh, where we had friends and relatives. They took nothing with them … all properties and belongings were left in the homes. On May 1948, at three a.m., a large number of Zionists [the Hagana] raided the village. They used artillery and not tanks, as in the case of Lubieh, because our village was hilly. My father took his rifle, and I and my cousin ran out. They surrounded al-Shajarah from all sides, and started shelling … 28 martyrs fell. We thought it would be a matter of seven or eight days and then the attack would stop. We left for Kufur Kanna [a village near Nazareth] and stayed there for three months. During this period, the hasad [harvest] began; we used to infiltrate al-Shajarah to harvest the wheat and bring it to our families.
Ibrahim continued:
One night, while in Kufur Kanna, we were shocked to see women and children from Saffourieh passing through the village and heading towards Shafa-Amr, which was already occupied. It turned out their village [Saffourieh] was bombed by planes, and they escaped under the heavy bombardment. The next day they surrounded Nazareth with tanks. I took my mother out of Kufur Kanna and walked to Arraba [a village in the upper Galilee]; my father, who was injured, stayed in Kufur Kanna. We stayed in Arraba for ten days. While walking through the corn fields I saw many corpses. The next day in Kufur Kanna, the Jews surrounded the village and searched it for infiltrators. I was rescued by the village mukhtar who identified me as a member of the village. That night my mother and I left Kufur Kanna and reached al-Bieineh; I left my mother there and ran to Arraba, found a room and then brought my mother back with me. After one week the Jews occupied Sakhnin and continued on to Arraba … it is only then that we left Palestine for Bint Jbeil [in southern Lebanon].
This narrative, which turned into a pattern, was corroborated by many others, including Abu Raed from Beisan, Huda Hanna, Shahira Sadeq and Najiyye Ahmad.
Fidda Issa from Breij (Jerusalem district) related the tale of her village:
They were hailing bombs on us. The bombs fell on people’s sheep and between the houses. I am so sad for the fallaheen! We, the women and children, ran for our lives, while the men stayed in Breij, fighting. When we arrived in Zakariyya, we found its villagers running ahead of us … all of us were tired and exhausted … The people of Surif who were resisting the Jews also ended up shardeen [running with no end in sight]. We went crazy and couldn’t see anything in front of us. We stayed in the open for a long time… Wallahi [I swear by God] no one knew where her husband or family were.
A similar story was told by Mary and Suad:
Fear for our lives led us to leave Safad. The Arab quarter in Tiberias was attacked, day and night. They used bombs and artillery; we were terrified … we did not want to leave our home, but in the absence of our mother and father who had already died and my younger brother who was with the resistance, the two of us ran for safety to my aunt’s house. After a few days, I went to my house to bring some stuff only to find our house full of bullets. We left for Rameh, carrying with us only a few clothes and the key to the house … One night in Rameh there was shelling, and the whole village left their homes and took shelter, some in the church and others in the mosque. After this, the people of Safad started to arrive in Rameh under heavy rain and with their feet covered in mud.
Fatima al-Sayyed, from the village of Birya, again:
It never occurred to us that we would leave Birya, but shoo bti’emal el-ain quddam al-makhraz [what can the eye do when faced by the needle – an expression of powerlessness]? Birya was on the hill; we saw the bombs falling on Safad. They killed 25 people and I know each one of them by name. They came against us with tanks. Most of the Hagana were Hagganat [female members of the Hagana]. We ran; those who had flour carried some on their heads, and many were hungry. It was harvest time. I had to sell my bracelet in order to buy olive oil. People would come to us, begging for flour to eat. I wish we could have harvested more wheat … It was left for the Jews. My father left Birya barefoot and came to Safad crying. We left on 15 May; I ca
rried both my six-month-old baby and two-year-old. My mother-in-law was killed by one of the shells, and my brother-in-law was shot and killed by them. We left Safad with nothing, nothing whatsoever.
Fatima, although she had been smiling throughout the interview, started crying when asked about how her family left Birya: “We were forced to leave our homes, our belongings [crying and wiping her tears] what can I tell you? I am pained, my heart is bleeding.” Without any hesitation, almost all of the Palestinian women and men interviewed insisted that if they had known that they would never be returning to their homes, land and homeland, they would never have left and would have preferred to die there rather than become refugees.
Palestinian victims of the genocide also stated what they want, need and hope for. Shahira Sadeq: “If they refuse to give us our 1967 lands, surely they would not give us our 1948 lands? I wish we could return. I just want to see my home, our land.” Najiyyeh Ahmad: “Wallahi, Ain Ndoor is my life, my mother, grandfather and father. We will stay in a cave, but let us return. We constantly sit with our children and tell them, ‘If you don’t return, your children will’.” Aisha Khalil, who ended up in Ramalla, visited her village after the 1967 occupation and recalled: “All the houses were destroyed; the Jews did not leave a stone untouched. I cried for more than a whole week. I used to cry and say: ‘Allah Akbar [God is Great] and with His help, our rights will be regained’.”
Similar hopes and wishes were voiced by almost all those interviewed. The evidence in all of the oral stories of the Palestinians recorded by the Palestine Remembered project is that despite the passage of time, their memory of identity, belonging and history has never faded away. While historically specific, the Nakba, the Zionist settler-colonial project – Israeli terror – against the Palestinians was and remains a clear form of genocide. This is true both empirically, as demonstrated above in the voices and experiences of the Palestinians, as well as theoretically and conceptually, as will be shown shortly.
LAND AND GENOCIDE: THE ESSENCE FOR INDIGENOUSNESS AND SETTLER COLONIALISM
Land
Land for indigenous peoples is not simply a commodity, a piece of real estate, as so often is the case with settlers and immigrants; rather, for indigenous women (and men), it serves as the primary material source of life. It is also the major constituent of natives’ sense of community and peoplehood and the space where social organization happens, as well as their source of pride, honour and integrity as a nation or collectivity. The loss of land for indigenous Palestinians meant the loss of their lives as they had experienced them; it was and is the loss of their very history and existential being. More than any other identity (say gender, class, etc.), land constitutes the distinctive identity and belonging for the indigenous women (and men), the victims of settler colonialism. Therefore land, its meaning for the indigenous people and the implication of its loss to the settler-colonial states, must occupy a central place in any feminist theory. After all, the loss of land for these people means the loss of their identity as a people, as the victims of settler-colonial violence. It follows that a proper analysis of the “marginalized” – in this case, indigenous women – is not attainable unless special consideration is given to this force – land – in the lives of the indigenous and the meaning of its loss under settler colonialism.
Nakba as Genocide
For the last decade or so, the discourse on the Palestinian ordeal of Israeli atrocities between 1947 and 1948 has largely been discussed in the context of the Nakba. This term, when used in Arabic, indicates a major loss, the death of not only loved ones but also the death or end of life for the mankoub, the individual or the group upon which a Nakba has befallen. However, local and international academics engaged in the discourse on the Nakba have rarely, if ever, attempted to theorize the Nakba as a form of genocide. Studies on genocide have largely been centred around the Shoah (Holocaust), the Nazi atrocities against the Jews, and rightly so. Yet even the first Western genocide against the aboriginal/native peoples in North America has not been able to engender any significant attention until very recently (see Churchill 1998).
Determining whether or not Israel has been responsible for appropriating the term genocide, rendering it applicable only to Jews, is not the point of this discussion. Nor does this specific chapter deal with how or why Israel and the United States have been ignoring and silencing any discussion of the Nakba (on these issues, see Rosemary Sayigh’s chapter in this volume; and Finkelstein 2015). What is important is that more scholars, including Israeli and Jewish ones, have begun using terms that signify something close to the meaning of the term genocide in order to describe the Nakba. For example, the terms “ethnic cleansing” introduced by Ilan Pappé (2006) or “incremental genocide” used by, among others, Ilan Pappé (2015a), Martin Shaw (2010), and Philip Weiss (2017) have become part of the discourse on the Nakba. In fact, the term genocide itself has been used by international law professor Francis Boyle (2013) in referring to the Nakba. This is in addition to the recently growing body of literature describing Israel as a settler-colonial apartheid state (Pappé 2015b; Davis 1987; Abdo 2011, 2014).
Central in most studies on the genocidal processes of the Nakba has been the question of “erasure” as the primary marker of settler-colonial Israel; thus the concept “toponymicide”, used to describe the erasure of place names in Palestine and their replacement with Hebrew (Jewish) names; “cultural genocide”, used in reference to the erasure of about 500 Palestinian villages and towns; “memoricide”, used of the erasure of the Palestinian identity from Israeli (Jewish) memory; and “politicide”, referring to the erasure of Palestinian identity as a political collectivity (see Masalha 2012: 1, 4, 10; Abdo 2014: 78). Combined, these policies and acts of erasure conducted by the Zionist settler-colonial project during and immediately after the Nakba constitute a major part of the definition of a genocide; while accepting the concept of “incremental genocide”, I consider the Nakba itself to be an act of genocide. The concept of genocide was introduced in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin and adopted in 1948 through the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:
More often [the term genocide] refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight. The end may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feelings and their religion. It may be accomplished by wiping out all bases of personal security, liberty, health and dignity … Genocide is directed against a national group as an entity and the attack on individuals is only secondary to the annihilation of the national group to which they belong. (Lemkin 1945)
Lemkin’s definition of genocide as an act “directed against a national group as an entity and the attack on individuals is only secondary to the annihilation of the national group to which they belong” aptly describes the Palestinian Nakba and removes any ambiguity concerning it being an actual genocide.
The Zionist genocide in Palestine, reflected in the experiences of loss and erasure, has affected about 80% of the pre-Nakba Palestinians, forcing them off their land and out of their homes and homeland, turning them into refugees. Not unlike the experiences of other indigenous groups that faced the wrath of settler colonialism, understanding Palestinian women’s experiences must account for these two forces: the absence of land and genocide.
CONCLUSION: TOWARDS AN ANTI-COLONIAL FEMINISM OF INDIGENEITY
As indigenous Palestinians have testified, land constituted their way of life. It was and continues to be remembered by the uprooted ‒ the uprooted-cum-refugees ‒ as the source of their economic, social and cultural identity. Despite the passing of over seven decades in their shatat (dispersed existence), refugee women (and men) continue to reproduce their homes, land and homeland through their vivid memories. This memorialization of the indigenous Palestinian life experien
ces constitutes the basis of any theorization or framing of their history.
Consequently, feminist theorization of indigenousness in general, including Palestinian indigenousness, needs to historicize its conceptual bases, adopting historically and culturally specific concepts suitable to the time, history and context within which women are located. This means refraining from the imposition of concepts developed within the capitalist system onto pre-capitalist economies. It also means that gender, race and class must not be dealt with as independent and universal categories or concepts, but rather as historically and culturally specific forces moulded within a specific political economy, in this case the settler-colonial state. As such, feminist theorization of indigeneity would become centred on the interlock between indigenous women (and men) with the land; it would be entrusted with analysing the dynamics between women and land. Moreover, situating feminist analysis of the violence against the natives within the context of land furnishes the grounds for a more holistic theory, one that goes beyond the individual into the group/nation, recognizing, in the process, their existence as a cultural and historical collectivity.
Centring indigenousness as a collectivity and realizing women’s (and men’s) connection with the land enables us also to recognize the meaning and effect of the loss on the souls that inhabited it. The loss of land in this case constitutes the utmost violence inflicted on indigenous peoples as a group. This loss establishes the erasure of their very existence as an economic, cultural and national group. It also establishes the elimination of the body, the social fabric and the history of the indigenous. A feminism which fails to account for all such losses also fails to properly capture the actual experiences of indigenous women in general, including those of the Palestinians.
An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba Page 8