Palestinians in Asira al-Qibliya harvest their olives, an ancient and vital crop that is constantly threatened by attacks from Israeli settlers
Photo by David Bragin
ABDULLAH ALJAMMAL’S STORY
as told and translated by his daughter, Shurouq Aljammal
I am Palestinian but grew up in Jordan. Unfortunately, I don’t have any experience in Palestine because I’m not even allowed to visit. My family is one of the thousands of Palestinian families who lost their homes and farms and have been stripped of their citizenship, after they lived in their country of Palestine for hundreds of years. They went from being prosperous farmers and merchants to being homeless, stateless, refugees in UN camps. My family tried to stay in their country, moving from place to place. Every time the Zionists bombed a city, my family moved to another city; they moved to and from six cities in three years. In 1951, the United Nations rented camps in Jordan for the Palestinian refugees for ninety-nine years. There are thirty years left. The Zionists didn’t just kill people and steal lands; they killed dreams for young kids and they left hidden wounds in their hearts.
After sixty-nine years, my father decided to tell his story because his wounded heart started to bleed. His nightmares disclose his suffering when he screams and wakes up terrified every night, his dreams returning like a flashback scene to 1948 when he was eight years old. Here is what he told me:
Before 1948, my family owned a thriving farm. We lived in Ramla, a city in central Palestine, now Israel, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. We lived in peace, and Muslims, Jews, and Christians worked together and celebrated one another’s holidays. After the Nakba, everything changed. Palestine was partitioned and, although the Zionists got almost sixty percent of the land, they wanted more. In July 1948, the Zionists occupied Lod, or Lydda. People in Lod got ready for the war because they knew that the Zionists would attack them. But the surprise was that the Zionist army was disguised in Jordanian army uniforms and the Jordanian flags were on their tanks. The people thought they were getting help from Jordan, but it was Israel that made this plan to kill them.
The people from Ramla were afraid they would be massacred, as happened in Deir Yassin. This massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when around 120 fighters from the Zionist paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi attacked Deir Yassin, a Palestinian-Arab village of roughly six hundred people, near Jerusalem. The assault occurred as the Jewish militia sought to relieve the blockade of Jerusalem during the civil war that preceded the end of British rule in Palestine.
Deir Yassin fell after fierce, house-to-house fighting. During and after the battle for the village, at least 107 Palestinians were killed, including women and children. Some were shot, while others died when hand grenades were thrown into their homes. Apart from bodies left lying in the streets, there were an additional 150 corpses found in one cistern alone, among them people who had been either decapitated or disemboweled. Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote that there were also cases of mutilation and rape. Several villagers were taken prisoner and may have been killed after being paraded through the streets of West Jerusalem.
The people in Lod chose four people to negotiate with the Zionist army in Lod; they agreed to give the Zionists everything they wanted from the village, in return for an end to the massacre and killing. The Zionists broke the agreement. I remember a Yemeni Zionist who came to a supermarket in Soq Al Nassara and asked the owner if he could leave his bag for thirty minutes. After the Yemeni guy left, his bag exploded; there was a bomb inside and many people at the supermarket were killed that day.
After what happened in Lod, my family left Ramla. We moved to a small town nearby called Deir Ammar. We left everything: our farms, houses, our businesses.
One of my brothers refused to go. He said he would rather sleep under the trees, and he took our grandmother and two others, deciding to go back to Ramla by cart. On our way to Ramla, they passed through Lod, which was occupied by the Israeli 89th Commando Battalion, led by Moshe Dayan. Shortly after this occupation, several hundred civilians were killed by Israeli troops, including eighty who were machine-gunned inside the Dahmash Mosque. My brother was shot in his leg and his head.
Someone saw his jacket beside a dead body and thought my brother had been killed. We went back sadly to Deir Ammar and mourned his death. Then we heard rumors, and after nine months my grandmother asked my grandfather to look for my brother. My grandfather went secretly to Ramla because he was considered a Palestinian militant and the Zionists had threatened to kill him. He discovered that my brother was still alive in Ramla. That day we had a party, we were so happy.
After this, my family moved from Deir Ammar to a camp in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, and from Rafah to Bani Suheleh [Bani Suheleh is a town in the southern Gaza Strip, part of the Khan Yunis Governorate]. Subsequently, we moved to a camp in Krameh City, Jordan.
I kept attending school in each UN refugee camp we moved to. I always registered myself, as my parents were sick and too busy surviving. When we were in Rafah, my dad got really sick. We had no more money and could not go back to Ramla. My older brother was fourteen years old and decided to go to work doing construction in Jordan to bring money for us.
At that time, traveling from Gaza to Jordan was very dangerous, due to the occupation. Only the spies or Zionists could travel, but somehow my brother came every few months to bring us money. One time, the Egyptian army arrested him and held him for three months because they thought he was spying for the Zionists, but then they released him when they realized he was just traveling to work in Jordan.
I remember the one day my brother went to work and he and some friends stopped in a cave to take a nap, leaving their donkeys outside. The Zionists saw the donkeys from a helicopter and shot the animals and my brother’s friends. It was written in the Gaza News that my brother was killed. For a week we were devastated. It turned out that his friends were murdered but somehow my brother survived. He was only fourteen.
The UN gave every family two bags of cement and a supply of adobe, a kind of clay used as a building material, typically in the form of sun-dried bricks. For the ceiling, they gave us asbestos, knowing that asbestos is internationally banned because it has health risks and causes cancer. Each family built their own shelter without infrastructure.
In the refugee camps, the UN gave all us students iron cups that we hung on our waists like prisoners. Each day we drank British milk and fish oil and were sprayed with DDT, a substance that is internationally prohibited for the severe damage caused to the human nervous system. One day the UN gave all the kids in my school red shoes. Except for me, because my feet were too big, so I kept going to school without shoes.
My family moved from camp to camp in the Gaza Strip until we landed finally in Jordan, where we still are.
It is not only genes that are transmitted to offspring. There are many things the human being inherits that are not physical. The world can fabricate a lie and it inhabits you forever. Because the world is scared of the truth, and Palestinian Arabs have no hope.