Abla Awad, an 85-year-old Palestinian grandmother, is among residents of the Gaza Strip who has been pushed to the south of the enclave. She had to flee her home in the north during the Israeli war on Gaza that has been underway since 7 October. She is currently sharing a tent with other displaced Palestinians in the south of the Strip, her thoughts dominated by uncertainty.
However, this is not the first time that Awad has experienced displacement. At the age of 10 in 1948, she was among the 750,000 Palestinians displaced during the 1948 Nakba. She had to leave the joy of a rural childhood spent in a village near Jaffa to become a refugee in Khan Younis.
The traumatic experience of displacement soon turned into a source of power, however, as Awad saw the determination of her parents and fellow refugees to rebuild Gaza. They lived in a close-knit community of fellow refugees, where the memories of lost homes were kept alive through stories and shared dreams of return.
Abla’s life in Khan Younis bore witness to her resilience. She married, raised children, and became an anchor of her community, often sharing her experiences of the Nakba with the younger generations. Her home was a hub of warmth and tradition, where the flavours of her ancestral village were lovingly recreated in her kitchen.
Today, Abla is reliving the same trauma, though it is even more difficult for her now as an elderly woman with little prospect of going back home. Her story also perhaps epitomises the suffering of a nation that has been fighting occupation for many decades and refuses to leave their land.
“I was a little girl then, and now I am reliving the same thing” as an old woman, Awad told Reuters. “Ever since I can remember, since I was five years old, I have been witnessing wars.”
Fears of a second Nakba are looming now that thousands of Gazans have been forced to flee their homes and are crammed into camps without basic needs amid uncertainty as to how and when their plight could end.
It is a plight that conjures up similar images from 1948. Many books and documentaries have told the story of the Palestinian Nakba, documenting the Israeli crimes and the forced eviction of the Palestinians from their land.
According to researcher Bassem Al-Janoubi, “it is over 75 years since the the greatest collective and historical injustice in Palestine.” It is also more than 145 years since the beginning of the Palestinian people’s displacement from their land with the establishment of the first Jewish settlements in Palestine in 1878.
“Seven million Palestinians have been displaced, exiled, and scattered, constituting about 70 per cent of the Palestinian people worldwide,” Al-Janoubi said. “Over decades, generations from grandparents to grandchildren have endured all kinds of sorrow and bitterness regarding their identity — who they are, where they are from, and why they can’t return.”
The Palestinian refugee problem, the longest and largest humanitarian refugee crisis in human history, originated before 1948. The British Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised a home for the Jewish people in Palestine during the British Mandate over the territory, and this was followed by the establishment of the state of Israel after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
The crisis worsened with the increase in the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, supported by Zionist paramilitary groups, like the Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah, the latter being the most ruthless and organised. Haganah started its operations in Palestine in 1879 during the Ottoman era, initially focusing on protecting the Jewish colony of Petah Tikva. Among its active members was a Polish immigrant in the Al-Shajara village in Galilee named David Ben-Gurion.
The group became more heavily armed in 1947, expanding its operations to protect Jews from Palestinian protests during the occupation of Palestinian land where these Jewish colonies were established. In 1947, it already had more than 10,000 rifles, 702 light machine guns, 2,666 automatic machine guns, 186 medium machine guns, 672 2-inch mortars, and 92 3-inch mortars, along with a massive amount of ammunition purchased or stolen from the withdrawing British forces in Palestine.
“The Haganah established its own weapons factory after incorporating 35,000 trained members, turning it into a regular army with a military uniform. In April 1948, it transformed itself into the Israeli Defence Forces [IDF] after uniting with the Irgun and Lehi groups despite ideological differences,” Al-Janoubi said.
“The new entity comprised 12 brigades armed with artillery, armoured and naval forces, and an air force in the development stage, outnumbering the combined forces of the Arab armies that participated in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War by 5,000 to 10,000.”
He added that the Israeli army began to mobilise one out of every 10 Jews in Palestine, making it the last colonial power on earth with funding and support from the US that now took over Britain’s former role in supporting the Israeli state. Israel did not enter the 1967 War against Egypt and other Arab countries without first receiving the explicit approval of the US, which wanted to eliminate the regime of former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser.
This was part of a pattern in which Israel cannot wage war or embark on any military adventure without the approval of the US, which provides it with weapons, support, and security cover. This remains the case today, as the US has supported Israel in its current aggression against the Gaza Strip, sending large military reinforcements to assist it including a massive aircraft carrier to bomb civilians. The US has also supported Israel’s decision to cut off water, electricity, and gas to the Gaza Strip and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s use of internationally banned weapons in Gaza and Lebanon, violating international and humanitarian laws.
Since its inception, the Israeli army has unilaterally shaped Israel’s security policy to protect only Jewish settlers, neglecting any parallel responsibility for the protection of the indigenous Palestinian population. This has been clearly seen over recent months in the killing of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem by settlers armed personally by the Israeli minister of security, with the Israeli army showing indifference to what was happening.
By tracing the increase in the Jewish population in Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians, one can realise the true extent of the crimes of occupation. In 1800, there were no more than 5,000 Jews in Palestine. In 1876, there were 14,000, and in 1882, Jewish immigration from Europe began due to the persecution of the Jews across the continent and the emergence of the Zionist movement, which made Jewish immigration to Palestine take on an organised form. By 1918, the number of Jews in Palestine had increased to over 55,000 or eight per cent of the population.
Over the past eight weeks of the Israeli war on Gaza, Israel has killed more than 18,000 Palestinians, more than 8,000 of whom have been children. For the Palestinians in Gaza, the trauma of the Nakba is thus not just a historical event but a continuing reality that is shaped by displacement, loss, and the ongoing struggle for self-determination.
PRIOR TO 1948
The term Nakba, “Catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the displacement of the Palestinians during the 1948 War and the establishment of the state of Israel. However, not long before that date, different schemes had already been set up to achieve that very goal.
Palestine was far from being empty land before 1948. On the contrary, generations of Palestinians lived, loved, and learned on it. Bountiful harvests were a testament to its richness. Train stations and later airports welcomed the world. Doctors and nurses nurtured life in every heartbeat. Theatres and concerts echoed the land’s cultural richness. Schools and colleges were hubs of aspiration and hope. Hopes and dreams flourished in every corner. The people had a wealth of stories, whether told or untold.
The Nakba was not only about occupying the land and taking it from its owners. Instead, taking the land was only part of the Israeli plan for Palestine, taking from the Palestinians not only their land but also their language, history, and even cuisine.
All the institutions founded and built by the Palestinians before 1948 were studied by the Zionist movement. It wanted to benefit from these institutions, once it had forced the Palestinians out. Between 1948-1949, thousands of Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine from various parts of the world, and they were accommodated in Palestinian houses.
“They occupied entire schools and buildings in Palestinian cities. They took everything they could get their hands on, including farms, homes, cars, furniture, gardens, documents, theatres and banks,” Al-Janoubi commented.
Tarek Al-Bakri, a Palestinian researcher based in Jerusalem, was moved by the nostalgia still held by many displaced Palestinians for their former homes and developed the idea of documenting stories about displaced Palestinian families.
One such story is that of Palestinian writer Khalil Al-Sakakini, a leading intellectual and a progressive literary figure in Palestine and the Arab world. In her book Jerusalem and I, his daughter Hala recalled that her father built his house in the Qatamon neighbourhood in Jerusalem in 1937 and called it Al-Jazeera, or the island, and named the rooms Damascus, Baghdad, Sanaa, and Cordoba after the historic Arab capitals.
One morning in April 1948, Al-Sakakini was expelled from his house. He was 70 years old and was forced to leave behind his precious library and all his belongings to die in Cairo in 1953. His house had been an important venue for all Arab writers. Today, it is the headquarters for the World Zionist Organisation for Women.
According to former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, “there was no such thing as the Palestinians. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” Al-Bakri’s efforts at documentation, as well as those of many others, have shown, if this needed to be shown, the full extent of such mendacity.
He documents the story of the house where Meir herself later lived in the Talbiyeh neighbourhood in Jerusalem after she had arrived in the country from the US. The house originally belonged to the Palestinian Hanna Bisharat who was expelled in 1948.
“Since the launch of the documentary project, dozens of stories about Palestinian refugees have been collected to document their former homes. Some stories were happy; others were sad; but without a doubt the story of the Dakkak family house, built in 1890 in Jerusalem, had the biggest impact on my heart,” Al-Bakri said.
Al-Bakri met Nasser Dakkak in Kuwait after giving a lecture at the Kuwaitis for Jerusalem Association. The latter discovered as a result of the lecture that his grandfather Shakib Dakkak had owned a house in Baqaa in Jerusalem. Nasser even had an old photograph of the house, but he had not known anything about it.
Later, Nasser Dakkak visited Jerusalem with his children and Al-Bakri to look for his grandfather’s house. “We finally found it, and I was mesmerised by its beauty. Hidden behind 100-year-old trees on a side street it was exactly as the family had left it before they were driven out by the Jews,” Al-Bakri said.
In 1948, the Jewish militias massacred thousands of Palestinians, violently forcing over 75 per cent of them to flee in order to establish the state of Israel. In the decades that followed, Israel continued to steal more and more land and to displace more and more Palestinians. From 1948 until today, over 85 per cent of Palestinian land has been stolen by Israel.
Besides, subjecting the Palestinians that remained in historic Palestine to a brutal apartheid system, Israel has forced them into crowded, walled-off neighbourhoods so that Jewish settlers can illegally take over the rest of the land.
In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explains that “Israeli troops poisoned the water in the city of Akaa [Acre], in order to make the city surrender, and the Red Cross reported this to the United Nations. One of the reasons it got known was because there were still some British doctors working in the hospitals who themselves got typhus as a result. This happened before May 1948.”
“Akaa’s water supply comes from a Roman aqueduct, which is still there. The water went into the old city in the open, so they could easily poison it… Some years after I wrote my book, two former militiamen gave an interview to the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth and admitted they put poison in it. It did not shock anyone in Israel, nobody denied it,” Pappe said in a later interview.
“They didn’t think there was anything terribly wrong with poisoning the water of a city. For me, it is a horrific crime.”
LOSING THE HOMELAND
Such cases of forced displacement are not different from those of many Palestinians, as described by Al-Janoubi.
“Palestinians who were forced to flee and live in exile after the Nakba in 1948 or the June 1967 War struggled to obtain identification documents or to get a passport from another country. Because they are considered to be stateless, they are forced to undergo Kafkaesque investigations before being granted a visa to any place in the world, even the Arab countries. A Palestinian is forbidden from entering his own country by land, sea, or air, even if he is already in a coffin,” Al-Janoubi said.
Today, Israel is attempting another ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, this time from Gaza as a result of its war on the Gaza Strip. In an interview, late Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak said that Israel’s plans to force the Palestinians out were “not new”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Netanyahu bluntly suggested taking a part of Egypt’s Sinai for the Gazans, displacing them as part of resolving the Palestinian-Israeli issue and maintaining peace,” said Mubarak, who strongly rejected the plan.
Two-thirds of Gaza’s population has now been displaced, and more than one million people have thus far been forced to flee their homes during the current Israeli war. The occupier did not spare them, but it has continued to bomb them, killing tens of thousands. Its war crimes include the bombing of the Baptist Hospital in Gaza, where a large number of displaced people who could not find shelter were taking shelter and leading to the deaths of more than 500 people.
Refugees in countries very close to Palestine, like Egypt, cannot dream of returning to their land, even to Gaza which has been free of Zionists since 2005, because going through border crossings requires Israeli permission. This has left a lump in the throat of every Palestinian in the diaspora who has not forgotten his right to his homeland.
More and more people in Gaza are being displaced to Rafah on the border with Egypt. But they will never forget their land or their identity. “Palestinians still carry the keys to their former homes to this day. Even today, these keys have not rusted and continue to shine in the sun. The important thing is not to forget,” Al-Janoubi concluded.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 21 December, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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