We came and turned the native Arabs into tragic refugees. And still we dare to slander and malign them, to besmirch their name. Instead of being deeply ashamed of what we did and trying to undo some of the evil we committed . . . we justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them. Nathan Chofshi
(Childers, Erskine. "The Other Exodus." From The Spectator, May 12, 1961, pp. 672-75 in Khalidi, Walid, From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948. Washington: The Institute for Palestine Studies, 1987)
In the preface to Before Their Diaspora, Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi writes that Zionism presented Palestinians "with the deadliest threat, short of physical annihilation, to which a people can be subjected--the denial of their birthright in their ancestral home, Palestine (13).
The year of the catastrophe, 1948, at least 750,000 Palestinians were made homeless. Palestine Remembered has conducted 230 interviews in Arabic with refugees in Jordan, which includes 750 hours of recording and encompasses 140 of the towns from which the participants fled or were expelled.
Al Majdal Magazine's Winter, 2006 edition contains several scholarly articles on current and past Oral History projects, including a very interesting story on historian Jamil Farhat's innovative ways to record oral histories of destroyed Palestinian villages when Israel went to lengths to prevent Palestinians within Israel from learning and telling about their history. Walid Khalidi recorded 418 Palestinian villages "wiped off the face of the earth," (All That Remains xxxi), although subsequent research by Salman Abu Sitta cites 531 villages demolished.
Dr. Salman Abu Sitta recalls in The Geography of Occupation that he was ten when the headmaster of his boarding school, which was about forty-sixty kilometers (24-36 miles) from Abu Sitta's house, told the students, six weeks before the end of the term, that he could no longer protect them and that they would have to return home.
Dr. Abu Sitta relates how he and an older cousin began the trek home through a path frequented by Zionists in jeeps outfitted with machine guns in the front and in the back. They terrorized the local farmers and shot anyone on the road. Dr. Abu Sitta and his cousin agreed that they would hide in the wheat fields when they heard a jeep.
Once he reached home he slept for two days. Six weeks to the day the Zionists in twenty-four tanks assaulted his house and destroyed the school which his father built in 1920.
"What did we do to them?" he asks. "I'd never seen a Jew before in my life."
The artist Tamam Aref Al-Akhal was born in Jaffa in 1935. She currently lives in Amman, Jordan. Her works along with her late husband Ismail Shamout's are beautifully reproduced in Palestine: The Exodus and the Odyssey, and according to Abdul Qader Daher in his preface, relate "once again the Palestinian drama, from exodus and destitution to reconstruction, struggle and reassertion of right" (107).
Tamam writes a caption for an oil painting of her beloved Jaffa:
At dawn on 28 April, 1948, armed Zionists over-ran Jaffa, and forced the townspeople out of their homes at gunpoint. The terrorized citizens were forced into boats and driven out to sea pursued by a hail of Israeli bombs and bullets (Shammout 83).
Her late husband, Isamil, from Lydda, captioned his 1998 oil painting, The Road to Nowhere,
Encircled by violent, abusive gangs, we were forced to march towards the east through rough, arid, dusty mountainous terrain, until we reached Arab controlled territory. The heat and thirst were an agony. Many old people and children died from exhaustion and thirst, and in the confusion and panic many children were lost and separated from their families (27).
A woman currently teaching in Pennsylvania wrote the following to a National Education Association listserve:
There are many Anne Franks of Palestinian descent whose story has never been told nor heard. It gets really tiring having to prove to 'well intentioned' people as yourself, the fact that Palestinians are as human as you are. Their ties, relationship, dependence, interdependence, and love to their homeland is as profound as yours.
My mother still remembers in detail their home in Jaffa and the gardenia planter where she hid sun glasses because the innocent child thought she would be able to fetch them once they returned back after the danger was over. My father's college education was interrupted for 27 years as a result of the occupation, not to mention that when the 19 year old returned to Acca, every single member of his immediate and extended family had hurriedly left in boats to Lebanon fearing the atrocities that were being committed by the Zionist armies in the Galillee villages. And besides being rounded up with all the young men of Acca and imprisoned, they all lost titles to the homes in which they were born and raised - and guess how? A Jewish Land Angecy Law defined a present Palestinian as Absent in many situations depending on the circumstances in order to usurp the land of those who remained. So many land laws and rulings were and still are being coined to usurp lands of Palestinians even inside 1948 Israel.
You know, they would not have fled if it wasn't for the fact that the whole Palestinian population was unarmed.
In 1961, Erskine Childers wrote:
The Arabs of Palestine now enter their fourteenth year of exile. If you go among them in the hills of Judea, they will take you by the arm to a crest of land and point downwards, across the rusty skeins of barbed wire. 'Can you see it--over there beside those trees? That is my home.'
It is shaming beyond all brief descriptions to move among these million people, as a Westerner.
Khalidi, Walid. Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876-1948. Washington: The Institute For Palestine Studies, 1991.
Shamout, Ismail and Tamam Al-Akhal. Palestine: The Exodus and the Odyssey. National Press. 2001.