GAZA: evacuation, and memories of 1948
A car passes ruined buildings and Israeli fortifications near Khan Younis, August 2002 © James Rodgers
From 2002 to 2004, I was the BBC’s correspondent in Gaza: at the time, the only international journalist based in the territory. This post is an extract from my book ‘No Road Home: fighting for land and faith in Gaza’, published in 2013. The scene is a school within the Jabaliya refugee camp, one of the areas in the north of Gaza which on Friday 13th October the Israeli Army warned residents to leave. I am posting it now to help to explain why being ordered to move has such frightening historical echoes for Palestinians–and also to illustrate the mythological status that the idea of a Palestinian home on land that is now Israel has among refugees: something that will have to be addressed if there is ever to be peace. As the news reporting of the last 24 hours has shown, some Gazans will not heed the warning because they cannot: because they are too old or ill to move. Others will not go because their history tells them that to leave is to lose forever.
THE BOYS APPLAUDED as the song came to an end, and the singer took his place back among his classmates. Fourteen-year-old Mohammed Saleh was the school’s star pupil. He conducted the ceremony, introducing singers, speakers, and prayers. Mohammed spoke of the intifada. It was, he said, on every child’s tongue, part of a history of Palestine perfumed with blood and tears. Mohammed had grown up in Jabalya, in its suffocatingly overcrowded streets and alleys. He had seven brothers, and four sisters. Jabalya was the only home they had ever known. Away from the crowd, Mohammed was quietly spoken. His dream of return, his vision of a homeland he had never seen, was just as strong as that of Fadi, the pupil in the song seeking to know the story of his people’s exile. Mohammed had been born more than 40 years after his family had fled from the war which created the State of Israel. The time that had passed was not important. The sense of injustice was still vivid. It had not faded during four decades when new generations had been born away from the land. The story was told and retold, a story which everyone knew, but had to hear again and again so that it could not possibly, ever, be forgotten. In any case, the story was unfinished. The noise of battle could still be heard from time to time in the narrow alleys of the shantytown. During the prize giving, a group of boys had prepared to perform the “dabka” a traditional Palestinian dance. Just before they started, the headmaster had told them to stand down. Three days earlier, the Israeli Army had moved into a neighbouring district. Some of the men of Jabalya had raced across the city to join the fight against the invading force, and been killed. It was not appropriate to dance while the “martyrs” were still being mourned.
Mohammed excelled at most subjects. He hated his education being interrupted by the conflict.
“When the Israeli soldiers go in the camp and shoot fires and rockets I can’t learn. Sometimes I feel scared…yes scared,” he replied, when I asked him about life at school.
Very few of the Gaza Strip’s 800,000 or so officially registered refugees will say they are from the territory. It is not “home”; it’s just a place where they happen to be living at the moment. Mohammed was no exception. His home was not in Gaza, but in Brer, a village in pre-Israel Palestine which was now little more than a few ruins. It no longer existed, except in the past, and, in the dreams of the refugees, in the future.
A wall in Gaza City, August 2002 © James Rodgers.
“My family come from Brer” he explained. “The Israeli occupation get out them in 1948. And they come here, to Jabalya.”
“The Israeli occupation”. For Mohammed, and the hundred thousand or so other refugees who lived in Jabalya, 1948 was not the founding of the State of Israel, but “the occupation”. The 1967 war, when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza, was just another stage. What followed was what most of the world knew as “the occupation.” To Mohammed, it was all the same. The existence of a Jewish State on part of historical Palestine was all an “occupation”, whether or not international lawyers called it that, or Israel. “Now I want to get back to Brer,” Mohammed said softly. “It has farms and it will be beautiful,” he said, recounting faithfully the bedtime story he had heard all his life.
“Why do you think about Brer as your home? You have lived in Jabalya all your life.”
“Brer is my country. My grandfather and grandmother was living there. And my father and my mother tell me that Brer is a very nice country. Yes I live in Jabalya, but I hope I will return to Brer. I hope we will get out the Israeli soldiers and return to Brer.”
Ahmed Abdullah, the school’s headmaster, listened, not interrupting to correct Mohammed when his English faltered. Mr Abdullah, a short, balding man with the smile of a good schoolmaster, and bright eyes, embodied the history of the Palestinian refugees. He came to Gaza aged just eight months. 57 when we spoke then, he was as old as the exile. His story read like the plot of an opera. It would probably be dismissed as unbelievable were it to be submitted as a proposal for a HollywoodiHis H movie. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and around the world, would recognise their own story in parts of Mr Abdullah’s. I often spoke to Mr Abdullah during my stay in Gaza. We usually met at his school, after morning lessons. Once, during the summer holidays, I went to see him at his home in the refugee camp. The room where we sat was sparsely furnished. The only decoration on the wall was a portrait of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former Egyptian president, and ardent Arab nationalist. When the school’s prize-giving ceremony was over, Mr. Abdullah and I retired to his office. The winter wind howled round the corners of the school building, muffling of the call to prayer from the many mosques in the refugee camp.
In 1948, Mr Abdullah’s family left A-Lighat, just twelve miles from Jabalya, heading for anywhere they thought they might escape the fighting, until it was safe to return. More than half a century later, that time has not come. For his siblings, it never will.
“On the way, Israeli fighters threw a bomb at us and killed all my family,” he says bluntly. “We were five daughters, and three sons, beside my mother. All of them were killed. My mother and I were the only survivors. We lived from place to place until we came to live in Gaza. We were separate. My mother was injured severely. She was transferred to a military hospital for the Egyptian Army. It was in Ashkelon at that time. My uncles thought I was dead and they took me to bury me with my bothers and sisters.”
Mr Abdullah tells his story frankly. Over the years he has pieced it together, and now wants as many people as possible to hear his account of Al-Nakba, the catastrophe, as Palestinians call their journey into exile.
“They dig two graves: one for the girls and one for the boys. They buried the girls first, and when they come to bury me and my brothers they thought whether to start with the youngest or the oldest. Then they decide to bury my eldest brother first then the second one and I will be on the top. After they buried my two brothers and they came to bury me, some of them touched me from a place I was injured and I cried. They discovered I was alive and they put me aside. Through this time they were being attacked by Israeli troops. They left me and ran away.”
The injured infant was abandoned, and only saved by a neighbour who had been late to flee.
All text © James Rodgers
Near Gaza’s southern border, with Egypt. August 2002. © James Rodgers
The author reporting for the BBC, northern Gaza Strip, 16 May 2003. © Ali Willis