Abu Arab shares about his village of Saffuri, which was destroyed during the Nakba
Photos by Sarah Sills
GABRIELLE SPEAR
When I was 11 years old, I read The Diary of a Young Girl and became absolutely enthralled with Anne Frank. In her writings, I found empathy for a Jewish people I had little to no interaction with, having grown up Catholic in the Bible Belt. And then, during my sophomore year at Goucher College, I took a class called Oral Histories of Holocaust Survivors in which people who’d lived through that time came to speak with us. All my efforts to imagine the Nazi holocaust through children’s books and through the life of Anne Frank became real and alive during the months I spent interviewing Rivka.
When my teacher prepared us to meet Rivka and others for our project, he said, “Remember, you are speaking to survivors, not victims.” Still, I know now that the Nazi holocaust as we know it today is no longer about survivorship. Through Zionism, it has been morphed and twisted into a narrative about victimhood, specifically and exclusively, the victimhood of white Jews. And as real and valid as the trauma of the Nazi holocaust is, it does not mean Jews get a free pass. It does not mean Jews get to wage another genocide in the name of memory.
A few years after I met Rivka, I studied abroad with my Arabic professor in his hometown of Nazareth. At that point, I still did not quite understand the full nature of Israeli apartheid and its impact on Palestinians. I was still unable to fathom the complete scope of Zionism’s violent imprint on Palestine and the ways in which it used the Nazi holocaust to justify Israel’s violence. In Nazareth, my classmates and I met with Abu Arab, a survivor of the Nakba, the Palestinian holocaust. He took us on a tour of his home village of Saffuri, a destroyed Palestinian village outside Nazareth in the Galilee. “I know how it feels when you enter into a cemetery,” he said to my classmates and me. “And I’m so sorry this is the first place we will visit today.” His words struck me, for they were Rivka’s words: “Sorry,” she had said to us. “Sorry you have to hear my story.”
Unable to watch the scene in Saffuri unfold before me, I gripped the iPad I had brought, and focused my eyes on the screen. I remembered my first interview with Rivka. Assigned the task of filming, I had sat behind the camera and quietly cried, grateful that Rivka could not see my tears. Behind the gaze of the lens, I felt protected. Now, as with Rivka, I had come to Saffuri to record Abu Arab’s history.
On the evening of July 15, 1948, Saffuri was attacked by Israeli Defense Force (IDF) bombs. Nearly the entire village of about four thousand people fled their homes that night. They thought they would come back soon. By the following morning, though, Saffuri no longer existed. A year later, a cooperative agricultural town called Zippori was built on its ruins. But I did not hear Abu Arab’s words at that moment. Instead, I thought of Rivka’s: “There were bombs falling from the sky,” she said to us as she sat at her kitchen table, pictures of her family, exterminated by the German forces, hanging on her wall. She said that she ran so fast from the bombs, she felt like she was on wings.
She told us how she grew up in Zhurmuny, the Polish village mostly made up of her family, and how she often spent time in the city of Lida. Sometimes she said her house was in Russia; other times Belarus or Germany. My note taking never seemed to be accurate enough. I wanted to believe it was her faulty, eighty-nine-year-old memory. I couldn’t comprehend how several military occupations seemed to rise and fall in the span of a three-hour interview.
As I stood in Saffuri, I suddenly realized that I had stepped into Abu Arab’s Zhurmuny. “They planted pine trees to make the Eastern European immigrants feel at home,” Sally, our Palestinian tour guide, said to us pointing out the scattered trees. Lida, a city that Rivka loved so much, happens to mean, “A place cleared of forest.” I remembered reading this when I searched for Zhurmuny on the internet. There is nearly no record of Zhurmuny anymore, so I settled for learning about Lida. I pictured the forest of her nearby city of Lida cut down and hastily replanted in Saffuri. Lida’s name is a coincidence, of course, but the way Israelis have literally planted forgetfulness astounded me.
In 1948, Rivka and Abu Arab were both refugees. Rivka lived in a displaced persons camp—a euphemism for a refugee camp—in U.S.-occupied Germany. She never returned to Zhurmuny because her family, and therefore her village, no longer existed. Abu Arab fled Israeli-occupied Saffuri and escaped to southern Lebanon, eventually returning to the new state of Israel because his family yearned for their home. Seventy-three years later, however, he remains a refugee in his own land, the land Rivka now calls Israel, her homeland, her heaven.
A week after I met Abu Arab, I spoke with Ziad, a third-generation Saffuri refugee living in Nazareth, and Abu Arab’s nephew. “I’m a physical therapist. I know that each person has pain,” Ziad explained. “I treat Holocaust survivors. I know these humans’ stories. I want to bring them to my story.”
He told us of his confrontations with Israelis in Saffuri: “I say to them, ‘You are afraid of the story. The story is frightening for you, I know.’”
I am continually frightened by how easy it is to wipe a people off a map. I have sat with this story for so long. I want to separate Rivka’s story from Palestine. And yet, the damage is done. Zionism wove Rivka’s story into the fabric of Palestine forever. What was most frightening to me about Palestine was that in the chaos of apartheid, occupation, displacement, and grief, I found Rivka there too.