An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  ASYMMETRY AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF DISPOSSESSION

  In the narratives, told by Palestinians from very different locales and towns in 1948 Palestine, a pattern emerges of a population suddenly sensing an existential threat ‒ one that becomes highly visible and mutates into a living concern with the Partition Resolution of 1947. A number of accounts, moreover, reconstruct and project a new affective landscape that emerged explicitly after the Partition resolution: a contrast or disjuncture between Palestinian communities and the Jewish settlements often in close proximity. This is indexed in the narratives by the accounts of the dancing and singing that could be heard in the settlements after the resolution, as well as of increased and more audacious attacks by Jewish settlers on Arab villages. That these are noted in a number of accounts expresses their affective valency, both as then experienced and as now remembered.

  At this point, the efforts to obtain arms for self-defence and protection of the villages and towns of Palestine seem to have become pronounced. In interview after interview, Palestinians recount in detail the urgent but under-resourced attempts to secure arms for self-defence, and often to secure money for arms in the first place, the women on many occasions selling their gold jewellery so that rifles could be bought.11 Benny Morris (2004: 7) describes the conflict as being between Jewish militias and Arab militias. Yet there were perhaps only two forces that might properly be given the title of an Arab militia, and that was al-Jihad al-Muqaddas, the irregular defence force led by Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, and the irregular forces of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA, also known as the Arab Salvation Army) led by Fawzi al-Qawuqji. However, these irregular forces were often enmeshed in a competitive, non-cooperative relationship, and the ALA was repeatedly subject to the pulls and pushes of various Arab heads of state and their territorial ambitions which were not necessarily served by a vigorous defence of Palestinian towns and villages.12 Thus they were hardly poised or able to defend all the locales of Palestine. According to the accounts, defence committees were established in most villages and towns, composed of the local men, their job being to guard against attack, especially at night, and sometimes to procure arms. Account after account provides specific names of persons who were officially and unofficially entrusted with this latter mission: for example, Adnan al-Shami, Subhi Khadra, an uncle of Ahmad Ali Hajir and others. Some went to Lebanon for the purpose, some to Syria and some to Egypt. Yet the narrative that emerges, both singularly and collectively, is a narrative of asymmetry.13

  The attempts to procure arms were, for the most part, not very successful, except on the occasions where people were able to raid nearby army bases (as in the testimony of Ahmad Ali Hajir from Tirat Haifa). Either the arms they bought were old and often useless, or they were denied them. Ahmad al-Samad Abu Rashid, from Tirat Haifa, fifteen years old at the time, shakes his head as he recounts that the arms were often “no good”: “something to make one cry, they turned out no good”. Moreover, the arms obtained were for the most part relatively few and basic. Rajih Kayed ‘Uwais from al-Manshiyya (Acre region) recalls that six men from his town, he among them, went out to buy arms. He only had 110 pounds, and each rifle cost 45 pounds without its bullets. They nevertheless managed to obtain sixty-five rifles. Shahira Sadiq from Deir al-Qasi (Acre region) remembers many of her townsfolk going to Syria to get arms and being unable to. Omar Atallah from Saris (Jerusalem region) recalls that they had no more than ten rifles. Ahmad Ali Hajir from Tirat Haifa relates that his brother was given money by his mother and he went to Syria and came back with sixty pieces and 1,000 bullets. Tirat Haifa was able to resist far longer than other towns.14 Many narrators mention identificatory details on the arms, such as the date (1918), as an indication of the condition they were in and their inability to counter the Jewish attacks effectively. Compared to the mortars, cannons and planes that Jewish forces had, they could as well have been using “sticks” to confront machine guns, as in the case of some of the first skirmishes in Ijzim (Haifa region), recounted in an ironic manner by Ahmad Hassan: “When the Jews used to come to Ayn Ghazzal to attack before, some would go with sticks, with sticks, and the women behind them with water, ululating”.

  Khadir Dirbas from Tirat Haifa remembers that the men of the town stayed behind to resist after the women and children were evacuated. There were then multiple attacks for weeks, but they refused to surrender when given the choice by Jewish forces. However, the final attack was by air and with mortars. Dirbas says: “can a rifle resist a cannon? A machine gun?” It was then that most of the men who had remained to defend their homes withdrew. It was late at night, and they walked out through the mountains and made their way to nearby ‘Ayn Hawd. But ‘Ayn Hawd was also under attack, so they went to Ijzim, which was in a similar plight. They therefore left Ijzim, and walked off in the direction of Nablus.

  Qasim Darawsheh of Ijzim asks: “What do you want: a rifle to resist an airplane?” Hajja Halima from Saris, near Jerusalem, explains: “My dear, people were unable to resist … to resist tanks and to resist canons, and to resist … people would flee”. Shahira Sadiq from Deir al-Qasi remembers: “they came and hit us often with the planes, people knew there was no use”. Khazna al-Ghadban, originally from Kwaykat, recounts that she left Sheikh Dawud (Acre region), her husband’s village, with her children, while he stayed behind. They went to Mi‘aar, a mountain village (in the Acre region), and stayed there for three months. “[W]e stayed but the tanks and planes [hit?] us, we had not expected that.” When Mi’aar, already swollen with refugees from the Acre district, was attacked, many of them fled to al-Buqei‘a, a Druze village, where they stayed under the trees. Then they went to Kufur Sumei‘, another Druze village, but there were attacks on Tarshiha (Maalot today) and in Suhmata, nearby. After fighting broke out between two Druze villages, Khazna al-Ghadban left for Lebanon, desperate to protect her five children. Hajja Maliha Muhammad Husayn from Saris exclaims: “What, did we leave of our own accord?! We fled of our own accord?! The bullets were crackling around our heads”.

  NARRATIVES OF A MOVING TRAIL

  Already the accounts above reveal a reluctant and piecemeal departure. Collectively and singularly the narratives and testimonies index this within the particulars recounted, describing the circumstances under which people left and their affective state.

  Zarifa Jaber Wishah, Beit ‘Affa (Gaza district), relates how Jewish forces came into the village and entered their homes, forcing them to leave. They sat outside for a long time, unwilling to depart. Then:

  we left Beit ‘Affa for Karatiyya then to al-Majdal, and in al-Majdal we remained for three months and celebrated the Adha feast in al-Majdal, then they evicted us from al-Majdal and they were behind us and we arrived to Deir al-Balah [Gaza] walking on foot, and the planes were shooting at us.

  Ali al-Mughrabi from Mu‘thir, a village in the Tiberias area, recounts that the villagers took refuge first in Dishon (Safad region), until it was taken, then in al-Malkiyya, al-Harawi and finally Jerusalem.

  Omar Atalla, from Saris, ten years old at the time, remembers that when the Jewish attack came, “at night”, the “resistance men … said get the families out of the houses, or it will be Deir Yassin”.15 Atalla left the village with the women and children, and the men “stayed to fight”. They “fought till ammunition went”, then, “near dawn the fighters withdrew, ‘the town is gone’; they were saying and weeping”. The men followed their families. They spent one night in the caves, “and then to Kasla on foot”. The refugees then moved from Kasla to Beit Sassin, where they stayed for “1‒3 months”.

  He continues, “then the journey of torment began”. Beit Sassin became a target, and so they trekked to the north, carrying their empty rifles. They were at Jaljoul for 10‒15 days: “we would hunker down in people’s houses”. After that it was a village called Allar (Jerusalem area), where they stayed for three months, sheltering under the trees. Even the language used is affect-laden, communicating an experience and fate that was in various w
ays emotionally traumatic, already suffused with the terms of a radically altered and vitiated condition.

  Hajja Halima Hassan from Saris recounts a similarly long trek, punctuated by periods of staying in various villages, along an arc that was ever widening under the force of the attacks:

  We continued to be displaced in the mountains until we got fed up … under the olives, under the sky and open air we slept. And they did not get off our backs, chasing us ... the town that they would find, they demolished Beit Sassin, they demolished Beit Jiz.

  As she speaks these names, she “counts” on her fingers:

  they demolished near [Rafat?] … what town they came to they would demolish. And people forced to leave … fleeing, fleeing, fleeing until we settled, my girl, in a town called ‘Ishwa, ‘Ishwa is two or three towns away from us. We sat in it for about a week, then again they overtook it. Then we went and got to Deir ‘Aban, then to Beit Natif, in those mountains, wherever they get to they uproot a few villages that flee ahead of them.

  Saris fell in April 1948; but Hajja Halima explains:

  We fled from Saris … and we continued to walk and walk … we continued until, you might say, the end of November … and we arrived to Kufr Aqab … and the demolition behind us, wherever they would appear in villages they would demolish. Where are human beings to go?

  “Where are human beings to go?” The narratives talk of a widening arc of dispossession, a trek initially thought local, within an affective vicinity, becoming increasingly distanced from the point of origin, such that people became bereft of not only material sustenance but also affiliative sustenance and support, sending them on “the journey of torment”.

  When concerted attacks took place, or after nodal events like the massacres at Deir Yassin or Tantura, it was often the women and children who were evacuated to nearby areas ‒ a neighbouring village, or surrounding woods or mountains ‒ while the men stayed to defend the village or town. Even when the entire village fell, after a deadly and concerted assault, or because the Jewish forces had actually entered and instructed people to depart using acts or threats of extreme violence, they often went to nearby woods or caves, or to neighbouring villages. It was usually the nearest site that was chosen: some people from the same town went to different proximate locales (e.g. from Saris some people first went to Beit Mahsir, others first to Kasla). Narrators often mention the presence of relatives or acquaintances in these places, or relationships between the villages, that led to their choice of refuge. But as Hajja Halima says: “and they did not get off our backs, chasing us”.

  It was then a continually re-enforced departure, shaped and driven by attack, panic and fear, not one marked by a calculated decision to leave so that the Arab armies could prevail. The departures from the immediate site, the place of habitus, may have been relatively sudden, but they were cumulative and unfolded over time from the space of homeland: of habitus and habitual connection. Even in the language of the narratives and the descriptions, the recognition of some form of common space, of connectedness, emerges.

  One might here recall the descriptions of the German invasion of France during World War II, when France, with one of the most powerful armies in Europe at the time, capitulated within six weeks, during which it seemed as though half of France was at one point on the move ‒ people fleeing from the invading forces, also set upon by mortars and planes, and moving from one locale to another in search of safety and refuge, with French forces themselves also in retreat.16 Relatively few French found refuge in neighbouring countries, as the Palestinians were ultimately forced to do. The Germans were all over the adjoining countries anyway; and in any case they wanted a subject population, not an absent one. But there is another difference between the French experience as recounted in these records and that of the Palestinian villagers: numerous accounts of the fall of Paris describe Parisians leaving en masse, in anticipation of the German occupation. Though they left relatively hurriedly, many did by some accounts nevertheless attempt to take various valuables with them (china, crystal, jewellery). This has more parallels with the early flight of some of the Palestinian middle classes from the larger cities, though even this constituency did not all depart in advance. In the villages of Palestine, perhaps as in many French villages, most people did not leave in anticipation; they left under duress. There is clearly a class dimension at play in this.

  SMALL RETURNS

  It is in the very patterns of the search for safety and finally of flight, the movement from the home place to another, detected in listening to multiple oral narratives, that the attempt to maintain a relationship to land and home are evident. From these accounts, it is clear that the villagers oriented to a vicinity ‒ the vicinity of the home town ‒ a relational and affective “neighbourhood”, within which they attempted to remain. Moreover, while there were chains of attacks and thus departures that took people further and further afield, many still returned for various purposes. The multiple returns themselves evidence a particular structure of affect, expectation and connectedness, and index the fundamental resistance to dispossession.

  Routinely, when the women and children were evacuated for their safety (though many women also stayed with the fighting men to make food and so on) they would return during the day to work on land or crops, across periods of weeks, even months. This was the case for the women from al-Abbasiyya (Yafa/Jaffa region) who stayed in nearby Deir Tarif for about two months, according to Rayya Abu Himaid, returning regularly to harvest in their hometown, which was being defended by the men. Al-Abbasiyya was another town which did not fall quickly. Even when a town had fallen decisively, people made various returns or attempts to return, at least during the initial period before they were driven further away. Fayad al-Sheikh Yousif, from Umm al-Zaynat (Haifa), for example, recalls that “my father went by car, back to the town, he went back and died”. Arifa Musa Abd al-Rahman Sarhan from al-Kafrayn (Haifa) talks of going back and finding “a ruin”: “my brother and I would go and the Jews would shoot close to us”. She says:

  we walked, we walked we went to a khirba near our town they call it Buwayshat. We stayed in it nearly 2‒3 months, I mean this was close to our town and we would go and bring whatever we wanted from our house, I mean we want a bowl, we want some molasses, we want eggs from our chickens, we went to go check on our chickens, we would go check them and bring them.

  Only after that comes the fateful trek: “the Jews were behind us … khalas, there was no return”.

  Hussein Ahmad Rabi’, from Lifta (Jerusalem), also returned repeatedly to his village: “we would go back and steal in at night take a donkey, load it carrying a quilt, a mattress and come … I went back a lot, I used always to go back, I used to bring a lot of clothes”. Umm Tawfiq Abu Rahme from Shefa-‘Amr (Haifa area) had left for Lebanon with her six children.17 She decided to try to return, and loaded a donkey with a basket carrying her baby son, took her five small daughters with her, and stole back into the country and into her hometown. She was one of the lucky ones who was able to do this successfully. Muhammad Nawfal al-Azzeh, from Beit Jibrin (Hebron district), recalls that many disabled people had remained in the town after the townsfolk had been forced out by heavy aerial bombardment. “A number of our folks from Beit Jibrin returned to the town, to take revenge, to check on people, get things they needed; they found some of them still alive, some dead and they buried them.” No one had been killed before they left, “but after we left and they started to return a number of people from our family were martyred, and from the townsfolk also another larger number”.

  Perhaps one of the most poignant markers of affective attachment that embodied the resistance to final departure is al-Azzeh’s account of his own trips back to Beit Jibrin:

  I returned from Ithna three times a day … used to go from Ithna to Beit ‘lam north east to a wood I knew, it had some of the old trees, and I would try to walk so I could see our house which was in the northernmost part of the town. About 7km there were, I
would walk these 7km and then crouch during the day opposite our house and look to the southern window of our house which was blue ... I would just watch that spot, and if I got weary I would climb upward to see the police station of Beit Jibrin, or veer a little to see my school, the Beit Jibrin school.

  Later he recounts how he sold his brother’s cows in secret in Hebron in case his brother were to be killed, as the only pasture close by was in the occupied land, and the Jews always shot at him when he slipped in there. Here, in that existential landscape, we encounter the emergence of a new category that was deployed by the colonial power, that of “infiltrators”: this is the emergence of a practico-moral and epistemic space that re-writes the original attachment and rights of people to their homes and villages.

  These accounts then raise a double set of issues: on the one hand they tell us that the finalized absence (which led to formal “refugee” status) was due not simply to the “battle”, but to a policy (regardless of when it was initially formed or formulated) of chasing people continuously as far out as possible, and of not letting people return. On the other hand, they demonstrate the expectation of, and the desire and sense of entitlement to, return. The two sides of the issue emerge here: on the one side, the affective and resistant mode of action, and the strength of the attachment; and on the other side, the persistent attempt to alienate a population from its lands and home, the very policy that at the time ultimately enabled the emergence of a Jewish majority in Palestine, now named Israel.18

  THE AFFECTIVE ECONOMY OF DISPOSSESSION

  The affective rejection of loss is the underlying text of these narratives, and it is the fabric of connectedness, and the affective states that are embedded in it, that is displayed in the stories. The story of Muhammad al-‘Azza from Beit Jibrin above, recounting how he would trek daily from Ithna to his village, and sit for hours looking at his house, speaks of an immensity of emotion, a heavy affective load, that clearly united need and desire, sorrow and attachment. It is this very kind of affective action, disconnected from practical or instrumental considerations, and solely grounded in attachment, that is cited by Haim Hanegbi in his account of how he became an anti-Zionist. In the film Matzpen, by Eran Torbinol (2004),19 he talks of his encounter with the category of “infiltrators”: