Said Shamia was eight years old when Egyptian troops hastily withdrew from the Palestinian town they were defending, Hamama, in the face of the Israeli advance. “They told us they were leaving and that we should too. The adults thought: if they leave, how are we going to stay?” he recalls today at his home in the capital Gaza, on the 75th anniversary of the Nakba (catastrophe), as the fate for which he and another almost six million Palestinians are now refugees and only the ruins of more than 400 Arab towns in Israel remain, including Hamama.
Shamia can’t remember the month, but it was October 1948, halfway through the first Arab-Israeli war. Hamama, with 6,000 inhabitants, had been filling up with displaced people from nearby towns. And Yigal Alón – who had left no Palestinian population behind in his previous offensives and would end up becoming a prominent Labor minister – took it over in the Yoav operation.
Like so many other families, Shamia’s thought that the return would be a matter of days. For this reason, she loaded on a camel “all the food that could fit”, but no goods, and headed with hundreds of neighbors to nearby Al Majdal, today the city of Ashkelon. The aerial bombardments convinced them to continue south, to another town that also does not appear on maps today, Hiribya, and from there to Gaza. “We rested a couple of days at each site in the hope that the Arab armies would return and we would return to our town. Some men went to Hamama to get more food and never returned. It is not like now, that there is television. We did not know what was happening, ”she recounts.
Said Shamia, at his home in Gaza City, this Tuesday. Antonio Pita
“What was happening” is that the Israeli forces—better organized and fighting with an existential spirit of battle three years after the Holocaust in Europe—continued to rack up victories. In 1949, they signed armistices with the Arab countries and Shamia remained as a refugee in Gaza, then in Egyptian hands.
Some 750,000 Palestinians – two-thirds of those living in the territory that had just become Israel – suffered the same fate. They ended up in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank. The UN General Assembly declared in 1948 in its resolution 194 that “refugees who wish to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbors must be allowed to do so as soon as possible”. Hundreds were killed when they clandestinely crossed the border and Israel destroyed -partially or totally- the more than 400 towns in which they lived, on which national parks, agricultural cooperatives or towns now stand. In cities like Haifa, Yaffa, Jerusalem or Ramle, their houses were nationalized and were used to house the Jews who arrived -forced, in many cases- from North Africa and the Middle East to the fledgling State of Israel. The largest and most elegant are now being sold as luxury residences.
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Those 750,000 Palestinian refugees are close to six million today, with their descendants. And the word Awda (Return) appears at the entrance of their camps next to a key, another symbol of the lost homes that many keep.
But one thing is collective desire and another is political reality. His return has only been raised in the peace negotiations for a symbolic number. Mahmud Abbas, the Palestinian president who assured last week at the UN that he has the right to return to his hometown, Safed, defended the opposite a decade ago and saw it as “illogical” to ask for the reception of even a million. Israel considers that the return of the refugees would mean its suicide as a Jewish State, by losing its demographic majority. Also that the Nakba is nothing but the consequence of the Arab world’s rejection of the UN partition plan for Palestine under the British Protectorate, in November 1947. Between that month, in which the hostilities between Jewish and Arab militias went to another level, and the formal start of the war, in May 1948, up to 300,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled.
Shamia recounts that she harbored hopes of returning to Hamama until Israel’s overwhelming victory in the Six-Day War (1967), when her father burned the ownership documents in a rage. She then was able to visit the ruins of her town several times, at a time when thousands of Israelis and Palestinians crossed daily from one side of Gaza to the other. She wanted to “feel the smell again” and show it to her children. “I remember picking up a fig and feeling like I had stolen it. Can you imagine?” she says.
Intisar Muhna also lived through the Nakba (he is 95 years old) and symbolizes a more recent and political concept called Al Nakba Al mustamirra (The Nakba continues), according to which it has not ended. “The same thing is repeated. They bombed the school in my town, they killed my brother and now they persecute us wherever we go, ”he laments in front of the rubble of his house in the Yarmouk neighborhood of the capital Gaza. It has just been destroyed in an Israeli bombardment, in the latest escalation of violence with Islamic Jihad. She lives because the Israeli army warned her earlier on the phone to abandon her.
As often happens with the elderly, he talks more about the past than the present. He remembers every once in a while that his father was the mayor of his hometown, Al Masmiya Al Kabira, who had money and hid militiamen during the war. “We heard so many attacks so close that he came to the conclusion that we had to leave,” he recalls. As they were a wealthy family, they did not escape by donkey or on foot, but in a car that they used to keep “for weddings or special occasions”. “We were so naive to think that we would return soon…”, he sentences.
Identity
The Nakba is the most defining episode in Palestinian identity, as a dispossessed people, buttressed by the fact that refugees cannot return to their homes, but anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent has an almost automatic right to settle in Israel and obtain nationality. For this reason, it is also still alive among those young people who can only see the lost homes of their elders online and are aware of the Israeli military strength 75 years later.
This is the case of Shahd Raed Al Wahidi, 17 years old and author of videos on social networks about “the beautiful side of Gaza”. As she has grown up in a Strip under blockade, she has never been able to visit Ramle, the city in Israel where her grandfather comes from, who keeps the house key “in a special box”. “It is true that I was born here, but I know that originally I am not from here. And when someone pronounces the word Nakba, it reminds you of where you come from”. Even so, she believes that the elderly “think more about the past” and the young, like her, are “more concerned about the current situation.”
Shahd Raed Al Wahidi, this Tuesday in Gaza City. Antonio Pita
Also Wassim Abu Nada, Rami Algaramar and Firas Al Khatib have refugee status. They are in their twenties, drinking coffee in a park in front of the Islamic University and the word return sounds in their mouths like the conquest of a lost paradise in the face of an inhospitable reality like that of Gaza, a territory overcrowded, impoverished and blocked for almost two decades. and in which two thirds of its 2.1 million inhabitants are refugees.
They assume that one day Israel will be defeated, it will disappear from the face of the earth and they will return to the towns of their grandparents, even if there is only a handful of stones left. An irredentism that Israel uses as an example of the Palestinian refusal to see the Jewish State as a reality that has come to stay, and not as a mere parenthesis in the history of the Middle East.
“Since we were little, we have grown up knowing that we are refugees, we have lost our land and we will return one day,” says Abu Nada, whose grandmother keeps the key to her house in Dimra in a box of chocolates. Kibbutz Erez rises above that village today, barely a kilometer from the ultra-protected border crossing that makes what is close inaccessible.
Firas Al Khatib, Wassim Abu Nada and Rami Algaramar, this Tuesday in a park in Gaza City. Antonio Pita
The stories are passed from generation to generation. Al Khatib recounts that, when he was a teenager, he would listen to his grandfather talk about Arab Suqrir, a small village that existed on the shores of the Mediterranean, and he would think: “he is back with his little wars”. “He told me everything: that if such a neighbor lived there and the other one a house away… Now I record it, as a personal and historical file”, he affirms.
Algaramar is the most political and least personal. He wears the typical red and white kufiya, which identifies militant Marxists and quotes George Habash, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. “From Israel, I don’t want money or apologies. I want my land and move as I please: have breakfast in Jerusalem and dinner in Acre. Someday we will be stronger than them.”
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