June 21, 2010
"We swear by Allah the Great... We swear by Allah the Great... We swear by Allah the Great / We commit ourselves to be faithful to our religion, to our home and to our holy places / We pledge to maintain our right to return to all our cities and villages, sparing no efforts to achieve this aim, and letting no one relinquish, renounce or negotiate it / We do pledge to Allah, our People and our Nation to do that through our life. And Allah will be the witness." Pledge of Return, the High Committee for the Commemoration of the 62nd Anniversary of the Nakba
In Et-Tuffah neighborhood in Gaza City there is a cemetery with a number of graves. Here are buried Arab fighters who fall during the 1948 Zionist conquest of historic Palestine, called by the Palestinian the Nakba. Following the 1967 war, when the Israeli forces also captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip they entirely covered all the graves with casts cement... and they remain so till the present day.
The word Nakba and the word Awda are the first two words of the Palestinian dictionary. Nakba and Return are Siamese words.
Nakba means catastrophe, disaster. Every 15 May the Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, that is the eradication from historic Palestine of most of its original inhabitants because "Palestine was given by God to the chosen people." But as said once Mustafa En-Natche, a former mayor of Hebron, nobody has never seen the receipt. Awda means return, return to their former houses, lands, shops, factories, mosques, churches, in brief to their normal lives which were shattered in 1948.
In Gaza at that time the population numbered 80,000 people. The fleeing refugees who arrived in Gaza only were approximately 200,000 out of 700,000. At present over three quarters of the Gazan population of 1.5 million are registered refugees with UNRWA. Hence the Gaza Strip has the particularity to be one of the most overcrowded place on earth.
Another particularity of the Gaza Strip is that here not only the dispossessed are refugees, but in addition they are occupied and besieged and considered "hostile elements" - like the rest if the population - following a decision of the Israeli security cabinet which declared Gaza a "hostile entity" on 19 September 2007.
The camps of the Gaza Strip number eight and most of the refugees are enclosed there like chicken in cage with their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. The international community keeps them alive with food rations.
In Gaza, like everywhere in the region, a Palestinian refugee camp is another world. As soon as one enters a camp he is caught by a different atmosphere. First of all there is the silence... a certain silence... like the silence of a grand mosque or a cathedral... Entering a camp is entering a sanctuary. Difficult to explain what one feels in a refugee camp...
In the camps of the region was born the Palestinian Revolution. The camps are the crib of the Resistance against the occupation. The camps gave many martyrs for the sake of Palestine. The women played an important role and countless of them were jailed as well as men and youth. The refugee camps are the standard of the Palestinian people.
The camp is a bubble. The camp is 1948 Palestine. The Palestinians who were uprooted from their ancestral land couldn't take anything with them... but they carried with them their Palestine. In a camp you are in 1948 Palestine. Everything is sacred here: the elderly, the babies, the people at large... their memories and their hopes... Themselves are 1948 Palestine, alive and vibrant. They are the guardians of their indestructible historic Palestine and a thorn in the foot of the world.
In the Khan Yunes refugee camp for instance the streets are named after the 1948 towns and cities of Safad, Haifa, Akka (Acre), El-Led (Lod), Yafa (Jaffa), En-Nasra (Nazareth), Er-Ramla, Bisan (Bet Shean). We hear about the village of Barbara famous for its grapes; Hamama for its fish; Beit Daras for its maftoul (couscous); El-Majdal-Askakan for its expert weavers, its weaving industry, the dying of cloth and we see women wearing its particular thob (traditional dress). Jaffa, which was called the Bride of the Sea, was well-known for its cultural and intellectual life. The village of Jura is now famous because of some Hamas leaders like the Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, the late Said Siam and others.
A refugee gave me to read the chapter of a book about the uprooting of the inhabitants of El-Majdal-Askalan. He told me: "We remained in our town till 1950 and then we were expelled to Hebron in the West Bank. I was ten-year old at that time."
The chapter I read is written from a Zionist perspective. After 1948 the remaining Palestinians from El-Majdal and other areas were expelled in the course of several military operations to Gaza and the town was bombed and shelled. Others who were still there were gathered in a place called the "Arab Ghetto". Two big campaigns of rumors, called "black propaganda", were orchestrated by the highest echelons to terrorize them and force them to flee.
The "Arab Ghetto" was surrounded by barbed wire. With the passing of time the water was cut and the food rations were not distributed anymore. Finally, on 4 November 1950 no one single Palestinian was still in town. The description of the "Arab Ghetto" of El-Majdal is the copy carbon of today's Gaza Ghetto.
This year the 62nd anniversary of Nakba Day fell on Saturday. That day took place the final of the Gaza World Cup 2010 in the Yarmouk stadium of Gaza City. In the morning the Division of Refugee Affairs opened a three-day exhibition on the Nakba. In the afternoon the Palestinian Artists´ League organized a celebration entitled "The Return" in the Unknown Soldier Square. Four days later a tent was erected on the same location and a committee held a two-day exhibition.
The 3-day celebration in the Shawwa Center ended by a ceremony organized by the High Committee for the Commemoration of the 62nd Anniversary of the Nakba, with the participation of the Minister of Culture: a few speeches, a superb dabka (the traditional dance) and a show entitled "Returning" directed by the young filmmaker Sameh El-Madhoun, a refugee from El-Majdal-Askalan. At the end all the audience stood up and recited the Pledge of Return.
That day I took with me a British friend living in Gaza since several months and an Australian visitor. When we left the Shawwa Center the British friend was delighted and the Australian lady was ecstatic. She commented: "This show ´Returning` is called in English musical theatre, not operetta like in Arabic. It was so beautiful, so well organized... the organization was smooth... the technical organization was very smooth, very professional. In Australia there are sound cuts! I´m a theatre director... for that I enjoyed so much their songs, their dances and the setting on the stage. It was so beautiful! In Australia it´s not like this! Here, they are civilized!"
Many Palestinians believe the Return is a phantasm and will never come. Nevertheless my friend Raed like the vast majority relentlessly repeats that they will return even after 100 or 150 years and their children and grandchildren will continue fighting the immane injustice. One day Raed came to visit me with the evidence: he was with a ten-year boy who spoke about the Return. The boy was his son and Raed added: "Israel is like a heart transplant which has failed. The body rejects it. Hence the entire Zionist colonial enterprise is sinking."
Following the takeover of Gaza by Hamas, I came across a very rare Fatah man who had digested the political and military debacle of his faction. In the past he was an aide-de-camp to Yasser Arafat and travelled all over the world with the Palestinian leader. He said: "Fatah has failed. The Palestinian left has failed. Maybe Hamas will succeed to liberate Palestine."
Tareq, 40, is a successful entrepreneur and lives in a handsome villa in Gaza City. On his office desk he had two stones he took with him in Mecca and Medina when he performed his pilgrimage. Recently he returned to Gaza after spending several months in the States and since then he has added two more brownish stones on his desk.
"Before I was sure we will return. Now I am sure more than ever that we will return and we will return soon...
"I came back on Thursday evening to Gaza and that day I was in Israel. My family is originally from Beit Mahseer, 13 km West of Jerusalem. I went to my village on Thursday after the prayer. I have never been there before... it was the first time. I was alone. The taxi driver was a Palestinian citizen of Israel. Here I saw my history... I saw my past and I saw my future...
"In my village remain two damaged houses and the well... a part of it... and a part of the olive press and some trees.
"My parents died and my grandparents died... I searched for the location of my village on maps, but my village is not mentioned anywhere. I search on Google Earth too, but is is not mentioned. I knew the Jewish name they use now because it is mentioned on the maps and also on the Internet. They call it Bet Mai´er.
"Incidentally, it is worth noting that since two years we are battling with Google to keep at least the Arabic names for the localities of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza and the Hebrew names for Israel. It´s an ongoing battle. However, the Palestinians have produced many maps with the original names.
"On Thursday, I asked the taxi driver to go till we will reach a junction, then to turn on the left and after that I didn´t know the direction... I only followed my heart... I followed what I remember my grandfather and my grandmother were telling us: there is a high mountain... you´ll see... and there is a tree like this... there is a house that...
"The Israelis have established an army base on part of the village´s land and the settlers have taken another track of land and created a colony, Bet Mai´er. I took many pictures and collected these two stones... I stayed only half an hour there... but it was like one year time for me... it was indeed a very long time for me... I wanted to conserve everything in my memory. I said to myself: this land will return back to us and I fell this will happen very soon... This land still speaks the language we speak...
"My aunt, who is also my mother-in-law, at the age of 6 or 8 was carrying food for the resistance fighters in that area, in 1948, in all the caches where they were hiding. So she knew everything... all the stones there... My aunt used to tell me that she ran from a place to another place to give food to them. Everyday she walked perhaps for two hours to provide food and water for the resistance fighters. She belonged to a group of women and girls who were helping the Palestinian Resistance. In that area there were 300 fighters.
"In the region of Latrun the destroyed vehicles you can see on the road were destroyed by the Palestinian Resistance of our village and the villages around Latrun. They were fighting with Abdel Qader El-Husseini. My aunt was jumping from a rock to another rock, going to the top of the mountains to the bottom of the valleys.
"Today she is 72. Now she lives in America. Since three years she has been in America for medical treatment. She still remembers every detail about this period.
"My feelings... my emotions... when I was there... How to tell you? I feel that us the Palestinians are now mature enough to take back our rights. Our position improves day after day, minute after minute. I see the Israeli side becoming weaker day after day. Just look at the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip since four years and Operation Cast Lead. The Israelis have miserably failed! The time has come for us... for that I feel we will return.
"When we were living in our home, we were living in harmony with the nature, with the land, with the environment... but the settlers should have the army protecting them from the environment! Can you imagine that the colony of Bet Mai´er has at the entrance a roadblock and a security check! Every settler should pass through the roadblock and the security check before entering. There is a security check because they don´t belong to this place and they feel they are aliens on this land. But us we belong to this land, we are the land!
"When my little daughters take these two stones, which are after all only two small stones, and say there are holy stones, I feel that we will return very soon. My little daughters too know what we will return and they know that their father has seen for the first time ever their village last Thursday. I did not feel I was an alien there... I consider that all this land belong to us and one day we will be back!"
- Flora Nicoletta is an independent French journalist who lives in Gaza. She is currently working on her fourth book on the Palestinian question.
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