Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1998, page 76

Memories of the Palestinian Dispossession

When Israelis Resumed the 1948 War in 1967, My Palestinian Grandmother Refused to Flee Again

By Michel Shehadeh

“Secure the children first. I want you all to know where to hide when the bombs fall,” my grandmother instructed us. It was June 1967, during the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arabs. An early sunny afternoon. The word had it that the victorious Israeli army was advancing our way. Soldiers from the fleeing Palestine Liberation Army filled our street. Running in circles, they were trying to figure out what to do, and how to get back to their families. I was 11 years old. My family and neighbors, about 30 of us, mostly children, huddled in the building’s floor-level apartment hiding from the war. The occasional shadows of people running in the open backyard were cast on the tightly closed curtains. The noise of their footsteps crushing dry leaves filtered through the room, replacing the usual singing birds. Hush, hush, everyone obeyed my grandmother’s instructions without questions.

My grandmother earned this leadership position from experience. She was one of the victims of the 1948 war, the war Palestinians call al-Nakba, the catastrophe. “They made me leave Haifa,” she said, her eyes flashing with determination, “and I am not leaving this time!” slapping her fist to her palm. She stayed in Birzeit on the West Bank raising my two sisters, my brother and me until she died in 1974. I left for America in 1975.

This year, as Israel celebrated its 50th anniversary, I commemorated my grandmother’s expulsion from Haifa. Her experiences—the painful uncertainty before the 1948 war, her subsequent uprooting by Israel and the tremendous hardship that followed—are all vivid in my mind. I can remember the intimate details of her stories, her silent grief and resigned helplessness at losing her home. Even her physical injuries—the scar left by shell fragments on her left thigh—flash through my mind as I write this.

As Americans are barraged with the romanticized story of Israel’s establishment, they are getting only the Israeli version, the victor’s version. What is missing are accounts like my grandmother’s. Many cold winter nights, sitting around a glowing fire, or at bedtime, she would pour out her memories, embedding them in mine. Observing the Mideast peace process, I feel much as my grandmother felt in 1948. Another Palestinian generation, mine, is in danger of being dispossessed.

All her life, my grandmother watched Palestine slipping away. “They are not going to stop until they have all the land,” her infuriated father would tell her. What Palestinians fear today is precisely this, that Israel’s expansion through its settlement network and the Jews-only bypass roads will not stop until all of the West Bank, Gaza, and Arab East Jerusalem are gone as well. The Palestine I knew is looking more like Swiss cheese.

My grandmother believed that negotiating with Israel “would be a trap.” Nor did she believe that the United States could be an honest broker between Israel and the Arabs. “America will always back up Israel no matter what,” she would say. Oslo and its aftermath have sadly proven her right.

When the peace process started in 1992, I tried to believe that, maybe, my grandmother was wrong about Israel. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that even as it pretends to negotiate, Israel continues to apply to the West Bank and Gaza the very policies that dispossessed my grandmother and much of her generation.

“Israel wants it all,” she had lamented many years ago. Israel’s approach to Jerusalem best exemplifies this goal. Not only does Israel deny the significance of the city to Muslims and Christians; it expropriates their land, demolishes their homes, and confiscates their identity cards, making it impossible for them to remain in the city. “We would have no problem living with them if only they would share the land,” was my grandmother’s formula for peace. It still holds today.

As in 1948 and 1967, America again in 1998 has ignored the aspirations of the Palestinian people. President Clinton’s failure to stand up to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has bogged down the peace process, reducing it to a discussion of percentages. Meanwhile, the occupation, land confiscation, and Palestinian suffering continue unabated.

My grandmother’s instinctive reaction to the 1967 war was not to leave Birzeit as she had Haifa. She did not want us to become homeless refugees, as she had. “Secure the children first,” I can hear her still. I wish the Israelis could hear her, too.