As Israelis celebrate, Palestinians mourn
Posted: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 8:35 AM
Filed Under:
Tel Aviv, Israel
By Lawahez Jabari, NBC News Producer
JERUSALEM – Women screaming and children trying to escape a village on fire.
These are just two of the images that two Palestinian sisters, Fatima and Zeinab Jaber, 65 and 71, live with from an event they witnessed 60 years ago.
They are haunted, too, by the memory of their mother, Nuzah, who they recall crying as she rushed members of their family to safety.
And they are their last recollections of their home, the village of Deir Yassin, as it was being overrun and destroyed by armed Jewish militant groups.
The attack on Deir Yassin in April 1948 is one of the most well-documented in a series of expulsions the former British Mandate of Palestine that led up to the foundation of Israel – an episode that Palestinian recall bitterly as "Nakba" ("the Catastrophe").
So while Israelis are celebrating 60 years of independence on May 14, many Palestinians will be commemorating what they call "Catastrophe Day" on May 15 – an annual day of remembrance for the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who were displaced as Israel was being born.
‘I still hear my brother's voice screaming’
As a result of fighting leading up to Israel’s declaration of independence and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, approximately 700,000 Palestinians were forced off their land. They were either expelled by the Haganah, a military force which later became the core of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and other paramilitary groups, or they fled under the threat of more violence.
Up to 418 Arab villages in Palestine were taken over by Israelis during the period, and the massacre at Deir Yassin is remembered as one of the most brutal episodes of the time.
"I still hear my brother's voice screaming before they killed him, my grandmother was begging them to leave him alone," said Fatima Jaber, while her sister nodded in silent agreement during a recent interview. (Fatima married, but kept her family name). They now live in a tiny house in Beit Hanina, a predominantly Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
"We lost all our family. The Jews killed my father, grandmother and my brother before we ran away with my mother that day. After a while we knew that 47 relatives were killed," said Zeinab, as she started crying like a child. "My brother was about to get married the same week. He was 22 years old. [Now] we are living alone without any family."
The Deir Yassin village was located in the hills next to the Jewish neighborhood of Givat Shaul, on the outskirts of what is now West Jerusalem. There are various accounts of what happened in Deir Yassin, but there is agreement on the essentials – that two underground Jewish paramilitary groups, the Lehi and the Irgun – the latter by headed by Menachem Begin, a future Israeli prime minister – attacked the village on April 9, 1948.
According to most reliable reports, a force of 132 men from these units killed between 107-120 villagers – including men, women and children. (For years the death toll was cited as 254, but Bir Zeit University, a prominent Arab university on the West Bank, published a comprehensive study in 1987 and found that the death toll did not exceed 120).
Palestinian relatives of residents of the Arab village of Deir Yassin stand over plaques listing the names of more than 100 people killed by pre-state Israeli paramilitary groups as they mark the 60th anniversary of the attack on April 10, 2008.
Campaign of terror
The massacre is considered by many historians to be part of a strategy to terrify the Palestinian populations enough so that they would leave their homes and land, thus enabling them to be occupied by Jews.
Benny Morris, an Israeli historian who has written extensively about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his books "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49," first published in 1988, and this year’s "1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War," has documented at least 24 massacres, including Deir Hassin, committed by Israeli forces against Palestinians between 1947-49.
Fatima and Zeinab say that Deir Yassin left their mother a broken woman. "She kept crying until she died. She was only 45 years old," said Fatima. "I will never forget it. She was missing my father and brother all the time. The memories killed her."
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding father, noted that the Deir Yassin massacre was a trigger for other evacuations of Palestinians, without which the Israeli state could not have been born. "I support compulsory transfer," he insisted at the time. "I don't see in it anything immoral," Ben-Gurion is quoted as saying in Morris' book "Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001." In the Arab world, though, the perception hardened that the birth of Israel came at the expense of the Palestinian refugee problem.
Refugee problem persists
Today, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), at least 5 million Palestinians and their descendants are registered as refugees. The figure includes hundreds of thousands who became refugees as a result of the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. As refugees, those living in other countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, are not recognized as citizens and have few rights, despite living there for decades. In effect they are stateless unless and until a Palestinian state is created.
The fate of the Jaber family is typical of many Palestinians. They lived in Jordan for two years, then moved to Jericho and after five years moved to Jerusalem, when the sisters’ mother wanted to be close to what was once their home.
Many have given up hope of returning to the homes they lost in 1948; instead, they watch with bitterness and sadness the celebrations for Israel's 60 years of statehood, which they feel came at their expense.
"I feel ashamed to be a refugee," said Zeinab. "Three months ago we went to Deir Yassin; our house is used as a storage place for hospital workers. I want my family house back," she said.
And as the U.S. struggles to keep Israel and the Palestinian Authority committed to making an arrangement that will lead to the creation of a two-nation state, it is the plight of the refugees – most particularly, whether they should be allowed to return to their original homes or what is sufficient compensation – that still proves to be one of the biggest obstacles for a lasting peace.
"How can Israel celebrate when we still have this refugee problem?" said Fatima, who is the mother of 11 children.
"They created it, and now it's worse. This is the question my children are now asking."
Lawahez Jabiri is an NBC News Producer based in the Tel Aviv bureau.
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