An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

They [The Israelis] insisted on throwing us away and forced us to leave … they killed whoever stayed there. What they say about the Arab troops asking us to leave our homes has no truth, they forced us out of our homes.

  I remember after a few days, after we arrived at Deir Albalah , I decided to sneak back into our village to see how my dad was doing. I found your grandfather shot dead next to his plate with bread and eggs … I buried him under the vine tree, and returned to Deir Albalah empty handed.

  The following is my interview with Abdelhady Mohammed Zarook, born in 1932, originally from Yafa (Jaffa) and currently living in Gaza city. He worked as a mechanic at his father’s workshop until 1948. According to him:

  In Yafa, before 1948, the cultural, commercial and industrial life was so rich. Journalism, cinemas, sport clubs, theatres, and the port were so active, and life was prosperous. Yafa was at the centre of Palestine. It produced oranges but also received all kinds of crops, especially oranges, from the southern villages to be exported via its port. Yafa had a central train station that ran from Yafa to Jerusalem.

  I lived in Almanshiyya neighbourhood on whose land Tel Aviv has been built. The Zionist settler activities with the help of the British colonial rule were noticeable to the neighbours, even before the actual confrontations started between us and the Zionists. For example, our neighbourhood noticed that some settlers rented flats inside Yafa.

  Describing the day of their dispossession, Abdelhady says:

  It was 10am and all of a sudden there were successive bombings by airplanes and mortar shells … It was so intensive. Many people were killed, and we had no place to go. The attack continued for three hours or more. We closed the mechanics workshop and left for a safer place. Yafa was surrounded by the Zionist army … and the British secured a safe passage for civilians to leave in a convoy, accompanied by a jeep in the front and another one in the back of the convoy. We used a truck and left, thinking we will be back in a few days.

  “We left, thinking we will be back in a few days” was the common story I heard from all friends, family and refugees interviewed.

  Here is the testimony of Ismael Ibrahim Khaleel Al Faseeh (born 1931). Until 1948, Ismael lived in Yafa and worked as a fisherman. His tale is as affectionate and sad as those of other refugees:

  I worked with the family in Yafa port. The city and the port were very active, and commercial life there was flourishing. One day, at the port, as they were unloading the barrels, one barrel was broken, and the workers discovered it was full of weapons sent to the Zionists. All Arab workers at the port knew that the Zionists were receiving ships full of weapons from Europe.

  Speaking of his grandmother, Ismael continued, “my grandmother, Khadeeja, whose birthdate I do not know, contributed to the 1936 revolution. She used to hide al-Thuwwar [the revolutionaries] and find them safe places. It is not only she, but many other women did the same thing in other parts of Palestine at the time”.

  As for the day of expulsion, Ismael says:

  We left Yafa under heavy shooting and shelling. We left for safety, hoping to go back later when the war stops. Being close to the port, we left Yafa by boats and went to Gaza, where we lived in al-Shati refugee camp … and we are still there until now.

  After 1967 and the Israeli occupation of Gaza, Ismael continued:

  My mother returned to Yafa to see her house. When she recognized her place, she knocked on the door and found a Moroccan woman living there. My mother told her: “this is my house”, and both started arguing. The Moroccan settler asked my mother to prove to her that the house was hers. My mother started to describe in greater details the inside of the house and the water wells around it. After hearing my mother, the settler woman told her: “you are right, it is your house, and I hope there will be peace one day and you can come back to your house”. After all these years, we are still living in Alshati refugee camp in Gaza, awaiting our return to Yafa.

  MY PERSONAL TESTIMONY

  I was born in Khan Younis in 1954, just a few years after the Nakba.

  During my early childhood, my home town, Khan Younis, was subject to several military attacks. The severest one was the 1956 Suez Canal war against Gaza and Egypt.

  I was brought up in an atmosphere of stories of Israel’s continued attacks, the memories of the Nakba, and the foundation of Israel. These stories and memories played an important role in shaping my childhood, my conscience, the development of my personality, and contributed to who I am now. Like thousands of Palestinian children who were brought up in the same period, either as refugee children or citizens like myself, our lives were shattered and altered by the impact of the Nakba. To open your eyes to the fact that you have no country and you are stateless and refugee, to live with the constant threat of war, on the one hand, and an increasing national aspiration to free your lost or occupied land, on the other, has been my lot and the lot of many other Palestinians. To have such feelings as a young child is definitely not what any child should go through. Life in Gaza has been particularly unbearable, partly because of the actual wars and atrocities inflicted on the residents of this strip, but also in terms of the aftermath of all such attacks, especially since 1967 and the continuous restrictions and siege imposed on the Gaza Strip.

  Still, it was the Nakba which affected us most. Albeit it had different effects on my extended family, the Nakba has cast its shadow on all parts of my extended family, especially those who lived and settled in Yafa before 1948. My two uncles and their families lived in Yafa, while my parents stayed in Khan Younis. In the early years of their marriage, before 1948, my parents, Qasim and Laila, spent most of their time between Khan Younis and Yafa, partly visiting family and partly attending family and social and cultural occasions.

  I always heard stories about Yafa from my parents. In one, I heard about my uncle, Abed Salam, who was hit and injured during the 1936 revolution. He was shot by the British as he participated in a demonstration against the British and Zionist settlers.

  I have also heard stories about the coexistence between three religions in Palestine, and about my parents’ Palestinian Jewish friends in Haifa, the Moses. I also heard stories of the influx of the European and American Jewish settlers to Palestine.

  One heart-breaking incident I cannot forget is a trip I took with my father to 1948 Palestine (now Israel) after Israel’s 1967 occupation of Gaza. I still remember his tears when he took us to see Yafa. My father was able to identify the surrounding villages, the sites and the agricultural land with its famous Palestinian crops like figs, vineyards, pomegranates and prickly pears. He took us around Yafa city streets and its neighbourhoods, and was able to identify the family house of my uncle, who had lived in the Nuzha area.

  My mother showed us the famous Dajani house and hospital besides other sites of Yafa. We saw the harbour, the schools, the shops, the mosques, the cinema and the theatre where Umm Kolthum sang in 1937. Both my parents were able to recognize the old citrus groves and named the owners of each grove.

  Father showed us the harbour, and told us the painful story of how during the Nakba he boarded a boat to Yafa in order to bring his brother’s family to Gaza, after they were forced to leave Yafa under shooting and bombing.

  I was stunned to see such a beautiful coastal city. Although it was cleansed of its indigenous people, you could still sense the old prosperity and culture. Even as a child I sensed that.

  BUT THE NAKBA WAS NOT OVER FOR US

  The story of the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians did not end with the end of the 1948 Nakba. Israel continues its attacks against Palestinian people to this day.

  In fact, a major part of my childhood upbringing was based around stories and memories of the 1956 massacre in Khan Younis, where hundreds of civilians (an estimated 550 people) were killed by Israeli soldiers. I still imagine and remember the stories about those scores of people who were lined up against the town castle, the Barqook, and shot in cold blood.

  I was two years old t
hen, but I later heard many stories, from my older siblings, about their memories of the period and the trauma that accompanied them for years.

  The massacre was documented in the UN archives.

  As a child and later as an adult who lived through the 1967 occupation, I realized at an early age that Israel was a settler-colonial, racist occupying power, and that what had happened in 1948 was pre-planned, as it was mentioned in British mandate archives about Palestine pre-1948. I lived all my teenage years under Israeli occupation and have my own stories and memories to tell my children.

  MY MOTHER AND PALESTINIAN WOMEN’S RESISTANCE

  In my various conversations with my late mother, Laila Ishaq Dawood, I learnt a lot about Palestinian women’s anti-settler, anti-colonial resistance before and after the Nakba.

  One such conversation focused around women’s activism in the 1930s. According to my mother,

  during the 1930s, women designed a project called “The Qersh” (the penny) Project, where most schools in Palestine implemented a programme of “piggy bank”, where young male and female children would place a “qersh” (penny) every day. The money aimed at helping the Bedouins of Wadi al-Hawareth, many of whom faced eviction by the JNF [Jewish National Fund] in 1932. The JNF claimed to have bought the land from an absentee landlord living in France.

  I want to add here that the case of the eviction of Wadi al-Hawareth villagers received a lot of attention at the time, because of the fierce resistance the villagers put up against their eviction and displacement. For four years the tenants of Wadi al-Hawarith resisted British attempts to evict them (for more on this case, see, Khalidi 2006). Khalidi explained that the people of Wadi al-Hawarith insisted on remaining on their land, because they believed the land belonged to them, for they had been living on it for over 350 years. Like most Palestinian peasants, the term “private ownership” did not make any sense; they had possessed the land for hundreds of years and, as the tillers, they considered the land to be theirs. In March 1948, Wadi al-Hawarith was cleared of all of its Palestinian residents.

  As a young woman, then, my mother told me that most girls, her age (10‒15) were aware of the colonization from the older activist women.

  She told me several stories about the active participation of Palestinian women in the various demonstrations against the British and its support of the Zionist settlers in Palestine. My mother was well aware of the military training Zionist groups such as the Hagana, Stern Gang, and Irgun had received from the British.

  My mother also said that village women took a major part in helping the revolutionaries and fighters in different ways, such as securing water and food for men in the mountains. Also in every village, according to her, there were women who sold their modest jewellery to support resistance to the new colonial settlers.

  Another one of my conversations with my late mother focused on the role of the organization (Zahrat Al-Uqhowan, The Feverfew), founded in Yafa by Muheeba Khorsheed, one of the women involved in the struggle against British and Zionist colonialism. According to mother, Muheeba founded the organization after she witnessed the killing of a Palestinian child in Yafa by a British soldier. She also told me various things about the Palestinian Women’s Union, itself established in 1916. The Women’s Union, I understood from my mother, operated on traditional grounds, teaching young girls embroidery, providing literacy for young girls, and providing a space for women to meet and discuss social and political issues, including participation in demonstrations against the British.

  CONCLUSION

  My own memory of tales from parents and various other family and friends, along with the stories and oral histories collected for this chapter, all corroborate one theme: most, if not all Palestinians who “left” their homes, lands and villages did it suddenly and under the threat of being killed. They all left due to the shooting and the bombardment. All Palestinians in Gaza, especially the refugees, but also the citizens, had stories of dislocation, dispossession and uprooting from their indigenous villages in pre-1948 Palestine.

  As mentioned earlier, I am a citizen and not a refugee, but the 1948 Nakba has affected my wider family and sent family members (brothers, sisters, parents) to live all over the place.

  The feeling among the people interviewed is that suddenly, and without any prior knowledge, they found themselves refugees, displaced and living in a strange place, carrying on their shoulders the burden of being refugees, and starting a new life away from their villages and land. They all talked about the cruelty of their uprooting in the process of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine 1948. They all spoke with bitterness about how Israel was founded on their ruins.

  Roughly seventy years have passed since the 1948 Nakba. However, as Gazans, our experience of Israeli destruction, atrocities and the unending process of displacement has never stopped. My memory, and the memory of my family and friends, of the Israeli war against Gaza in 1956, and Israel’s latest savage attack on the Gaza Strip, have shaped my consciousness and identity, and I will pass it to my children.

  Let me finally say, I want to help people understand more about the largest ethnic cleansing operation in the modern world. Millions of Palestinian people are waiting for justice; and peace cannot be granted without justice for Palestinian refugees according to UN Resolution 194 and other resolutions regarding Palestine.

  REFERENCE

  Ben Gurion, D. (2002) Quoted in “The Old Will Die And The Young Will Forget: David Ben Gurion”, Arab News, 25 April 2002, http://www.arabnews.com/node/220313.

  Khalidi, W. (2006) All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies.

  Maier, G. (2002) Quoted in “The Old Will Die And The Young Will Forget: David Ben Gurion”, Arab News, 25 April 2002, http://www.arabnews.com/node/220313.

  13

  Gaza remembers: narratives of displacement in Gaza’s oral history

  MALAKA MOHAMMAD SHWAIKH

  Oral history is a critically important record; it serves to oppose the historical erasure imposed by the colonizers. It also archives real experience and history where other records are absent, and, for those reasons, it has become a burgeoning area of study. This research aims to explore and analyse oral history projects in the Gaza Strip.

  Since the 1970s, many attempts have been made to examine history across the Middle East using several methodologies. Examples of such methods include, but are not limited to, oral history, which is yet to be fully developed as a context for investigation and research. Whilst work on Palestinian oral history started decades ago, having a long precedent in the culture itself, stemming from a broader oral traditon of the hakawati (storyteller) that was used after the Nakba of 1948, with the aim to create a defence line against ereasure of memory and culture among the Palestinian people, it is currently experiencing a resurgence. Historian Beshara Doumani dubbed it a “Palestinian archive fever” (in Muhanna 2016). Since the early 1990s, more local Palestinian organizations, especially educational institutions, with Birzeit University in Ramallah and then the Islamic University of Gaza as pioneers, have been involved in the process of collecting testimonies, especially from the older generation which experienced the Nakba. This chapter examines oral history efforts in Gaza,1 analysing the roles it has played, its achievements, challenges and future. Two examples have been extensively studied: the Islamic University of Gaza’s Oral History Centre (OHC), based in the university’s history department, and the work of the Tamer Institute for Community Education. Both projects aim to document the living history of life among Gaza refugees, with the former being academically focused, led by students and academics, and the latter being activist focused, led by young people and monitored by writers, in an attempt to advocate and defend their communities against displacement and to serve as a counter-narrative within the active Israeli settler-colonial context in Palestine. As the research shows, both projects entail a collection of recorded and archived voices of people’s
memories and experiences, “living history” of their distinct life experiences, and new insights with the potential to define how life and its events are perceived, bringing members of society together and maintaining the inheritance of knowledge for the coming generations.

  In the Gaza Strip, recording such events and experiences is not only important for the sake of archiving, but is also part and parcel of the liberation project. It is an act of resistance that asserts Palestinian visibility, and which can defy historically constructed identities, especially in the Gaza Strip, where attempts to break the people’s willpower and steadfastness through continuous siege, assaults and occupation persist. For this, the Palestinians in Gaza have devoted much of their time and effort to preserve community history to establish a continuous, active narrative.

  This research is an attempt to explore the Oral History Project in Gaza, highlighting the project’s significance in the case of Gaza in facing Israel’s continuous attempts at erasure. The chapter will do so by examining the situation in Gaza since 1948, exploring the failures and successes in the ways used to preserve Palestinian oral history, and considering oral history’s future in Gaza, before delving further into the emergence of a new narrative on Palestine’s past. The chapter concludes with a discussion on other attempts by Israel to erase Palestinian history, arguing that these have been unsuccessful in displacing Palestinian memory. It becomes clear by the end that the importance of oral history cannot be underestimated; it archives real experience and history where other records are absent; and, for those reasons, it has become a growing field of research.

  GAZA AFTER 1948: MEMORIES OF PALESTINE

  As the introduction shows, this research aims to look into oral history efforts in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian-occupied territory to the south-west of Palestine. To put things in historical context, prior to 1948 the Strip was not the 365 square kilometres that one can see today. As stated in a lecture given by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe at New York University in March 2016 (Weiss 2016), Israel created the Gaza Strip as it sought to create a space in the south-west of Palestine that could contain the hundreds of thousands of refugees that it was about to expel from different parts of Palestine to the newly established refugee camp zone. Previously, Gaza was a small town with fishing villages around it. Israel did not hope to take control of or occupy it. After 1967, Egypt did not want it back either, although Israel thought that it would. As a result, Israel occupied it, withdrawing its military and settlements in 2005 but remaining the dominant power, controlling the Gaza sky, sea and land borders. The status quo in Gaza is just another outcome of the Nakba. As George Bisharat once said: “Palestinians live the consequences of the past every day – whether as exiles from their homeland, or as members of an oppressed minority within Israel, or as subjects of a brutal and violent military occupation” (Bisharat 2007; Abdo 2014: 101).