An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  My grandmother realized there was no sign of any immediate solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. She therefore decided to return to Palestine, no matter the risks. She decided to split the family into two parts, one returning to Saffourieh and the other staying temporarily in Damascus until she had assessed the situation at home. She intended to give the others instructions to follow her later. Radeyah returned home with her three sons, two daughters, Amna and Yosra, and two grandsons. In Damascus she left her brother Muhamad Abu Alne’aj and his wife, her two other daughters, Amina and Huda, with their husbands and her other son in law, Muhammad Ali, Khadra’s husband.

  My grandmother repeatedly spoke about her damaging experience of walking unaided through the rough badlands and mountains with her family on their way home to Saffourieh. To her surprise she found her house and land occupied by a group of people from Saffourieh, led by Muhammad Abd Elhamid. Nothing was left of her cattle, sheep or livestock. My grandmother immediately asked those occupying to vacate the house. They refused, telling her the Israeli authorities had granted her house and land to Saleh Salim Sleiman, the former mayor of Saffourieh. My grandmother forced her way into the house, finding it entirely looted except for two large wardrobes, which were not easy to move. One of the wardrobes, called a Samandara, spanned from wall to wall and up to the ceiling. The Samandara was used for storing wool quilts and bed covers. The two wardrobes had been crafted by my great-grandfather Abdulhamid as a wedding present for my grandmother. Abdulhamid was a skilful and renowned carpenter specialized in making traditional olive oil presses. He had also made the doors for her house which had been dismantled by the occupiers and burnt in the house for heating and cooking. Despite their attempts, those occupying the house failed to drive out my grandmother and her children. Instead, she forced herself and her family back into their house, eventually sharing part of the house with the occupiers. Similarly with the land, my grandmother managed to share and cultivate part of her land despite the occupiers’ presence.

  The occupiers and their supervisor, Saleh Salim Sleiman, subjected my grandmother to repulsive treatment. As well as abusive language used towards her and her children, Radeyah was routinely threatened and, on occasions, physically pushed out of her house and off her land. My grandmother arranged a formal meeting with Saleh Salim Sleiman, demanding that he end the occupation of her house and land. She recounted Saleh Salim Sleiman’s insistence that he had been granted the house and the land by the Israeli authorities. He was shameless, and told her “Shut up woman! Go back to Damascus and eat Shami apples”. The Shami apples were and are famous across Arab countries for their beauty and fine taste.

  My grandmother realized that Saleh Salim Sleiman was collaborating with the Israelis in order to displace Saffourieh’s residents. It was known that Saleh Salim Sleiman had handed the Israelis all the files of the council and had helped convince Saffourieh’s residents to leave their homes for two weeks. Saleh Salim Sleiman said the Israelis had given him guarantees that they would allow the residents to return to their homes no later than two weeks after leaving Saffourieh. It was evident Saleh Salim Sleiman had helped the Israelis to cheat his fellow residents. Many of Saffourieh’s residents stayed in the town and refused the Israeli order, among them the Sheikh of Saffourieh, Muhammad Abdel Majid El Azhari, who was also known by the names of Al A’alem (a Muslim scholar) and Al Azhari (having been educated at Al Azhar university in Egypt). Eventually, these returning residents were forcibly removed and internally displaced. Saffourieh’s residents have been prevented from returning to their homes. To this day they remain scattered across the north of Palestine, mainly in Nazareth, Shefa-’Amr and Al Reineh.

  The Israelis subsequently used Saleh Salim Sleiman to convince large numbers of the Saffourieh residents who became refugees in Nazareth to sign documents giving up their houses and lands in Saffourieh to the Israelis in exchange for small pieces of land in Nazareth. Sheikh Al Azhari led many Saffourieh residents to refuse to sign any such documents. Sheikh Al Azhari also petitioned the Israeli government for many years, albeit in vain, to allow Saffourieh’s displaced residents to return to their homes. Due to his stance, Al Azhari was subjected to vindictive treatment and humiliation at the hands of the Israelis and their collaborators. They would leave rubbish on his doorstep and spit at him. My grandmother and her family always stood by Sheikh Al Azhari, aiding and supporting him.

  Some Saffourieh residents reluctantly agreed to the offer to sign the documents under heavy pressure from local compradors and Israeli forces. The land they received in exchange was on a large plot called Karm Aljammal in Nazareth, confiscated by the Israelis from the Aljammal family, whose own members were scattered across neighbouring Arab countries as refugees.

  The Saffourieh residents had in fact become refugees, both homeless and jobless. Saleh Salim Sleiman was the first to give up his house and land in order to encourage Saffourieh’s refugees to accept the transfer. This enabled the Israelis to demolish Palestinian houses in Saffourieh, first using dynamite and then by bringing Jewish settlers to live in the town. The Israelis later granted Saleh Salim Sleiman my family’s house and land as a reward. He was also made a member of the Israeli Parliament. Years later the Israelis removed the road sign leading to Saffourieh, which was written in three languages ‒ Hebrew, Arabic and English ‒ and instead put up a sign carrying the name Tsipori in Hebrew and English only.

  After her meeting and continued efforts to plead with Saleh Salim Sleiman, my grandmother was in disbelief at his stance and decided to continue her battle. She returned home and encouraged her children to resist the occupiers and help her cultivate the land. Later she sent two of her children to school. Muhammad Yasir attended school in Nazareth. He would return home terrified by the occupier’s efforts to prevent his attendance as well as general threats towards him. My grandmother became worried for his safety and eventually stopped sending him to school.

  Her youngest daughter, Yosra, was sent to school in the village of Al Reineh, which was still full of refugees. As the school was overcrowded, Yosra was forced to attend classes in the open air, held under the olive trees of Al Reineh. Yosra was subjected to harassment from the same group of occupiers. My grandmother recalled that one day she had given Yosra a lettuce to take to her teacher as a gift, but was prevented from doing so and insulted by the occupiers. They spat at her and snatched the lettuce from her. She returned home in tears. Also worried for her safety, my grandmother stopped sending Yosra to school.

  Muhammad Ali, who remained in Damascus after the death of his wife Khadra, sorely missed his children, Salim and Sami, and in 1949 returned to Saffourieh to see them. He was spotted by the occupiers, who informed the Israelis of his return. They ordered a guard to watch him until the Israelis arrived. Muhammad Ali sensed he was being watched and tried to escape. He was stopped by the occupiers, who wanted to hand him over to the Israelis. A physical fight broke out between them. He was fit and managed to escape, leaving his attackers with one of his shoes, which they managed to grab during the altercation. Muhammad Ali managed to reach Damascus and re-join his two sisters in law and their husbands, where they remained as refugees in the Al Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp.

  Muhammad Ali’s shoe was used by the Israelis as evidence to accuse my grandmother of harbouring an “infiltrator”, a term Israelis attributed to Palestinian refugees returning to their homes. An Israeli military force searched the house and interrogated my grandmother. She explained to them that Muhammad Ali was a citizen of Saffourieh and had returned to see his two children who were under her care. The Israelis ignored her and decided to detain the children. My grandmother refused to hand over the two boys to the Israelis and resisted attempts to arrest them by force. The Israelis abducted both of the young boys, Salim and Sami, handing them over to UN observation officers so they could be expelled to Damascus to join their father. That was the last time my grandmother saw Salim and Sami. The incident broke her heart and she said she w
ept like never before.

  After this incident the Israelis increased the pressure on my grandmother and her family to leave their house and land in Saffourieh. They surrounded the house with a large military force including armoured vehicles. The siege lasted for several months. The soldiers manning the siege restricted the family’s movement, making their daily lives miserable.

  My grandmother turned to a relative, Mahmoud Afifi, for help. Mahmoud Afifi was married to Radeyah’s aunt A’esha, the daughter of Mefleh Alamin, one of Saffourieh’s notables. Mahmoud moved from Saffourieh shortly before the 1948 Nakba and settled in Nazareth, where he and his brother Tawfiq Afifi ran a public transportation company. Mahmoud, like the rest of the internally dispossessed Palestinians at that time, was frustrated and demoralized as a result of the Nakba and subsequent events. He was worried for the safety of my grandmother and her children and was wary of the possibility that she could resist Israeli attempts to expel her family. Mahmoud told my grandmother that the Israelis had killed thousands of Palestinians, expelled hundreds of thousands of them and demolished more than 500 towns and villages. My grandmother recalled Mahmoud telling her “Who are you to resist them? We are a small nation while Israelis have the support of all of the world. They will kill you and kill your children”.

  Initially, Mahmoud advised my grandmother to leave her house and land and move to Nazareth, where he was prepared to help her and her family find a place to live and work. She rejected the idea outright, instead asking him to suggest a good lawyer to file a case before the courts. Seeing Radeyah’s determination to fight for her rights, Mahmoud arranged for Radeyah to instruct Palestinian lawyer Hanna Naqara. Naqara, from Haifa, was a communist who was recognized then as the most famous land lawyer in Palestine. He was dubbed “the Land Lawyer” due to his brave defence of Palestinian landowners against Israeli land confiscations, having continued to practise under the Israeli rule. Naqara submitted a complaint to the court in Nazareth against Saleh Salim Sleiman, requesting the eviction of him and his men from my grandmother’s house and land. After many sessions the court ordered Sleiman and his co-occupiers to leave my grandmother’s house and land. The court also decided that the cultivated land and the house built on it were administratively part of Al Reineh village and did not belong to the newly built Israeli settlement over Saffourieh.

  Until this day, further generations of the Qablawi family remain in Saffourieh but are prevented by the Israelis from building homes. They are therefore forced to live in caravans or temporary dwellings without proper roofs. Almost seventy years on from 1948, the Israelis still refuse to connect my family’s houses or, more aptly, their besieged compound, to public electricity, water and sewage networks. My family was obliged to purchase private generators for electricity. The adjacent Moshav Tsipori settlement received these facilities immediately after the settlement was built. This was part of a specific Israeli policy intended to inculcate the idea that my family were living temporarily on their land and did not belong there.

  With respect to Saffourieh’s water supply, my family would carry drinking water in gallon cans from Saffourieh’s headspring, having dug a well on our land to extract enough water to irrigate our fields. In the late 1960s the municipality of Nazareth discovered that prior to 1948 it had purchased the right to extract drinking water from the headspring of Saffourieh. The agreement was concluded in secret by Saleh Salim Sleiman, Saffourieh’s mayor, without the knowledge of the town residents. As the Nazareth municipality was obliged to lay the water pipes through my family’s land, my family was able to secure a fresh water supply.

  MY FATHER’S MURDER

  Gradually my grandmother began re-building her life by breeding cows, sheep and chickens and cultivating her land. This was to the dismay of the Israeli settlers who were brought to settle in Saffourieh.

  Meanwhile, my grandmother’s son Ahmad (my father), had turned eighteen and in 1951 had married Radeyah Mou’ed (my mother), also from Saffourieh, but whose family had become refugees in Nazareth. At my father’s wedding the best man was Saeed Barakeh from Saffourieh, who became a refugee in Shefa-’Amr, where he still lives with his family.

  My mother’s father, Hasan Shibli Mou’ed, was killed in 1948 in Saffourieh, after their family were deported to Nazareth. Hasan returned to Saffourieh and was shot dead by the Israelis on the doorstep of his house. He was hastily buried in his house, which was later demolished.

  In 1952 my mother gave birth to my eldest sister Khadra, named after my aunt who had died as a refugee in Damascus. On 6 March 1954 I was born and named Amina after another of my aunts who had become a refugee in Syria.

  As a result of the court’s decision, the Israelis escalated their attempts to expel my family by increasing restrictions on their movements and preventing them from cultivating their land. They brought in Jewish settlers to build houses over the ruins of Saffourieh, creating a new settlement, Moshav Tsipori, part of which was on land confiscated from my family in 1948. To create a pretext for further dispossession, the settlers would provoke my grandmother and her children, alleging that they were trespassing into Moshav Tsipori lands. Other land belonging to my family had been confiscated by the Israelis in 1948 and was granted to the settlers of Moshav Tsipori and Kibutz Hasolelim. Kibutz Hasolelim was also partially built on land confiscated from my family in 1949.

  The Moshav’s settlers ceaselessly provoked the family. These provocations included blocking the road leading to our house from the western side, forcing my family to open a new access route to their house. The old blocked road was then ploughed and cultivated by the settlers.

  To avoid clashes with the settlers, my grandmother and her children refrained from entering into the family’s nearby confiscated lands, including the foot of a mountain called Jablat Alnoss. The mountain had been granted by the Israeli authorities to the settlers and was left uncultivated. It was the job of my uncle, Muhammad-Yaser, to look after the family’s sheep. My grandmother would tell her children to herd the sheep on the other side of the land close to the main road. One day some of the sheep crossed the southern side of the road, to another piece of land called Wad Al A’ama, which had also been confiscated by the Israelis. One of the Jewish Moshav’s settlers suddenly appeared and captured my uncle Muhammad-Yaser, who was only fourteen years old. Becoming extremely frightened of the armed settler, Muhammad-Yaser began screaming loudly asking for help. My father Ahmad, who was at home, heard the screams and rushed to free his brother. Ahmad got into an argument with the settler. My father and the settler did not speak the same language. My father spoke some Hebrew but the settler did not understand Hebrew and spoke what my uncle described as a strange language which neither he nor my father understood. The settler then threatened to shoot my father. Bundling my father onto his horse and carriage, the settler freed my uncle, before riding away. Muhammad-Yaser rushed home to my grandmother to inform her that his brother had been abducted. My grandmother immediately dashed outside to find out what had happened to my father. She found he had been shot, with several bullet wounds to the head. The settler was trying to cover up his crime by dragging the body and throwing it into a nearby well. My grandmother stopped the settler from doing so. She retrieved her son’s body and rushed him to a hospital in Haifa, where he was later pronounced dead.

  The murder of my father shocked the Palestinians in the towns and villages close to Saffourieh, especially the internally displaced Saffourieh families who had become refugees and who knew my father. They all came to pay their respects and support my family. Others signed petitions which were handed to the Israeli authorities protesting against the murder of my father and requesting that the murderer be put on trial. A group of forty-seven notables from the village of Al Reina signed a petition addressed to the Israeli Government which read:

  We the undersigned ... strongly condemn the murderous crime of the late innocent citizen Ahmad Ibrahim Qablawi, who was assassinated at the hands of an evil culprit, while close by to h
is own land in Saffourieh. We demand to punish hard the evildoers in order to deter others not to commit such ugly crimes and protect the citizens’ lives. We demand from the Government to abandon its policy of land theft and dispossession which encourages those breaching security to commit crimes against the villagers seeking to return to and tend to their lands. (See appendix)

  Saeed Barakeh, who had been the best man at my father’s wedding, told me many good things about him. He said that when he heard that my father had been murdered, he rushed to our house in Saffourieh to pay his respects and support my family. When my grandmother saw Saeed entering her house she cried: “Dear Saeed, why you are coming on your own? Where is Ahmad? Why didn’t you bring him with you?”

  I was forty days old when my father was murdered. My grandmother told me she loved my father dearly. She, said he offered her great support and helped her during the difficult times. He accompanied her to all of the court sessions in Nazareth. She also told me that my father was a handsome, clever and loving young man known for his generosity and good heart. He was loyal to his family and was loved and respected by everyone knew him she said. He loved singing and danced the Dabka (a Palestinian folk dance) professionally. A photograph of him dancing the Dabka at a friends’ wedding was hung on the wall in our house. My grandmother would look at my father’s photograph and say to me “He never hurt anyone in his life, not even his enemies”. She used to say that the only comfort she had was that my father was martyred on his own land and not in a foreign country. Our family was prevented from burying my father in Saffourieh. He was eventually buried in Nazareth.

  I remember when I was young my grandmother would take my sister Khadra and me to visit our father’s grave, especially during our school holidays. We would read the Surat Al Fateha from the Quran, dedicating it to his soul, and my grandmother would distribute homemade sweets traditionally prepared for wakes. We would also visit his grave on the annual event traditionally called the Thursday of the Dead and my grandmother, Khadra and I would distribute coloured boiled eggs and homemade sweets to those less fortunate than ourselves.