Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 1998, Pages 63-64, 69

Northwest News

Oral Histories and Testimonials of Palestinians Living in Portland Mark 50 Years of Al Nakba

By Elaine Kelley

The Palestine Arab-American Association of Portland and the Portland chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee co-sponsored an evening of “Oral Histories and Testimonials” by local Palestinians on May 15 at Portland State University. The event was in part a response to well-publicized local activities commemorating the 50-year anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, which included a gathering of the Portland-area Jewish community at the downtown Pioneer Square outdoor amphitheater on May 3 that drew hundreds, including a number of pro-Palestinian demonstrators (see story below).

Palestinians offering a variety of testimonials on 50 years of al-nakba (“the catastrophe” in Arabic) included Mazen Malik, a refugee from Jerusalem; Dr. Dirgham Sbait, professor of Semitic languages and literatures at Portland State University; Mohammad Bader, a former resident of East Jerusalem who lost his residency rights; Wahde Sofan of Nablus, who was permanently disabled in the intifada; Bishara Costandi, who is originally from Jaffa; and Diane Abu Jaber, whose family is from Bethlehem, author of Arabian Jazz.

Summarizing historical events leading up to the 1948 war, Mazen Malik said Zionist leaders in Europe knew Palestine was not a “land without people,” despite the Zionist slogan. “They were really saying Palestine was a country without European people, and from that perspective Great Britain started using the Zionist movement to advance its own programs,” he charged.

Dr. Dirgham Sbait presented the unique story of his native village of Iqrit in Galilee. Originally a Christian Lebanese village, Iqrit became a Palestinian village in 1923 when the British Mandate drew new borders.

Dr. Sbait said that the residents of Iqrit were illegally evicted in 1948 when the village was occupied by the Israeli army. Troops warned residents of impending hostilities on the Lebanese border and told them to move out of their village for two weeks. Village elders believed the warning to be a lie but recommended cooperation, fearing forced evacuation by the troops if the people resisted.

“We said we needed official, written documentation stating we will be back in two weeks,” Dr. Sbait recalled, but were later presented with a document written in Hebrew which no one except a single priest could read, and he did not understand it. “A document of surrender is what is was,” Sbait recalled. Only one person from each household was allowed to remain in the village. The rest were loaded onto army trucks and taken 40 miles away to another Arab village, Rahme, where people scrambled to find housing, many ending up in tents or under olive trees.

Iqrit was declared a closed military zone. The villagers decided to take their case to the military governor, who issued an order that residents of Iqrith would remain in Rahme forever. A legal battle followed, and three years later, on July 31, 1951, Israel’s Supreme Court issued a famous decision based on the international law of domicile allowing the entire population to return.

Following the decision, an Israeli military officer invited the mukhtar (mayor) to a meeting to discuss details of the return, promising the mukhtar he would receive “a Christmas gift.” Upon arriving for the meeting with military officers, the mukhtar discovered that the entire village, with the exception of a church, had been destroyed by explosives earlier in the day.

The residents of Iqrit have subsequently gained tremendous local and international support for their cause over the years, but are still waiting for Israeli authorities to allow them to return to their village.

Dr. Sbait concluded that he still hopes justice will prevail in the cases of Iqrit anZd another Galilee village, Biram, whose similar fate is documented in We Belong to the Land, a book by Palestinian Melkite priest Elias Chacour.

“I want to talk to you about losing my residency status in East Jerusalem,” Mohammed Bader began. “This is not just my story. It is the story of 170,000 Palestinians who hold residency status in East Jerusalem.” After the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, Bader was issued an identity card allowing him to live and work in Israel and to travel back and forth across the Green Line.

“In 1986 I graduated from Bethlehem University and received an educational scholarship and an opportunity to further my education in Portland, Oregon,” he said. In 1997, when he and his wife, a U.S. citizen, returned to Jerusalem to visit his family, Bader presented his U.S. passport to Israeli airport security officials.

Upon their return to the airport for the flight back to Oregon, however, a passport control officer refused to allow the Baders to leave Israel. “He told me that I could not leave Israel until I write an official letter relinquishing my residency in East Jerusalem,” Bader recounted.

The Baders sought the help of three lawyers, all of whom said a legal argument was futile because the Israeli Interior Ministry had absolute power to do what it wants. The Baders were advised to go to the U.S. consulate, where officials said that the Israeli action violates both international law and the Oslo agreement, but that there was nothing that the consulate could do but take the information and have the Baders sign a form authorizing the consulate to act on their behalf. “They took my phone number and said they would call me,” Bader said, adding that a whole year has passed without a phone call.

With no practical reason for staying in Jerusalem, and with no home or jobs there, the Baders decided to write the letter relinquishing their Jerusalem residency rights. They know there have been many cases like this taken to court, but Mohammad Bader added, “Thus far I am told none of them won.”

Speaking from his wheelchair, Wahde Sofan said that in 1989 when he was 17, he was living in Nablus on the West Bank, where he was active in the intifada. One night Israeli soldiers entered his home by force, beat him in the presence of his screaming mother, and then took him to the Ansar III concentration camp in Israel’s Negev desert, a political prison whose very existence violates international law which requires that prisoners from an occupied population be incarcerated only within the area occupied. After three months Sofan was released and returned to Nablus, where he resumed his intifada activities. One night while he was walking in the streets with a group of masked shabab (“young men,” in Arabic) the group was ambushed by an Israeli plainclothes undercover unit. One of Sofan’s friends was killed and he was shot in the spine and taken to a hospital, where he lay unconscious for five days. When he regained consciousness, Sofan was told that he would never walk again. He was accepted into a program sponsored by Good Samaritan Ministries and was brought for medical treatment and rehabilitation to Oregon, where he has married an American woman and made a new life.

Bishara Costandi of Jaffa said that his mother and father were resisters in their own way. They never carried guns but they refused to leave their home in 1948. When he was three years old a Jewish family took over their family home, partitioning it and taking the larger part of the house for themselves.

Speaking of world reactions Costandi said that “every day there is something to commemorate the Holocaust, but there is nothing in that experience that justifies what Israel is doing to the Palestinians.” Costandi spoke of the need for more broad-based, grassroots collaboration between Arab-American organizations and other U.S. groups working on diverse issues of justice and racial equality and criticized the tendency to rely on upper-level government to act in the interests of Arab-Americans or Palestinians in their homeland.

“We have not stood up on our [own] feet,” Costandi said, urging his Palestinian listeners to “look inward and change our attitude.” Palestinians and Arab Americans “have to start facing up to our governments and asking ‘Where is democracy?’ We cannot go on like this.”

Arabian Jazz author Diane Abu Jaber is a writer-in-residence at Portland State University, where she teaches classes in English and creative writing, modern Arabic literatures and cultures and novel writing. She spoke of her grandmother Anisa who was born in Bethlehem in 1923 and of her extended family who “had lived there for many, many generations.” She said her grandmother “knew Palestine was holy” but didn’t realize that foreigners were buying up the land as part of a future plan.

Abu Jaber, whose first novel was about an Arab-American family in New York, is working on a second novel entitled Memories of Birth.

Jewish groups celebrate, Arab groups demonstrate at 50-year celebration in downtown Portland

Hundreds of members of area Jewish congregations and organizations gathered in Portland’s Pioneer Square on May 3 to celebrate the 1948 creation of the state of Israel while over 150 Palestinians and their supporters marched on the sidewalks around the square carrying signs protesting 50 years of dispossession of the Palestinians. The Palestine Arab-American Association, sponsor of the demonstration, was joined by the local chapter of ADC and representatives from other groups. Over 1,000 leaflets were distributed to onlookers explaining the consequences of the creation of the state of Israel for more than 2 million Palestinians, and the suffering caused by thousands of deaths, destruction of over 400 villages, including mosques and churches, the movement into refugee camps, loss of land, imprisonment, torture, collective punishment and the diaspora of four million Palestinians.

Guest speaker at the 50-year celebration of Israeli statehood was Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who described Israel as a strategically important U.S. ally in the Mideast. Of 147 1998 congressional candidiates who received campaign contributions from pro-Israel political action committees (PACs) contributions in 1997, Wyden received the third largest amount, $39,310, following Barbara Boxer (D-CA) at $58,282 and Tom Daschle (D-SD) at $45,505.

Portland ADC Chapter and Palestine Arab-American Association call for boycott of Al-Amir Restaurant

Two weeks before the May 3 celebration of the 50th anniversary of the state of Israel in Portland, the area Arab community was informed that owners of Portland’s Lebanese Al-Amir Restaurant had signed a contract with the 50 Year Commemoration committee to provide a food concession at the Pioneer Square event. According to board member Imad Sousou of the local ADC chapter, the Arab community acted immediately by sending a delegation representing several Arab groups to speak with the Al-Amir owners, Joseph and Lydia Massaad, threatening to boycott an April 24 concert co-sponsored by Al-Amir featuring the famous Lebanese singer Assi Hillani.

Joseph Massaad later informed the Arab-American groups that he had met with his lawyer and had taken legal steps to cancel his contract with the Israel commemoration committee. In return the Arab community called off plans to boycott the concert.

However, Palestinians participating in the counter-demonstration at Pioneer Square were surprised to find that Al-Amir had gone ahead with the food concession at the May 3 Israeli commemoration event without prior explanation or apology to the Arab community. A boycott of Al-Amir Restaurant was immediately announced by PAAA and ADC and remains in effect. The restaurant owners have not made a statement explaining their actions.