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A time to remember
May. 14th, 2018 09:59 pmTomorrow is the day we remember the Nakba. It's especially poignant this year, with the massacres that have been taking place for the last 5 weeks at the Great Return March.
My father was ten when a Jewish fascist gang called the Irgun massacred over 100 people, mutilating their bodies and raping some of the women, in a village just over the hills. We were next. My father was left behind in the chaos and saw people gunned down- including a man trying to run in vain with a small mattress pressed against his back. Eventually, a neighbour woman found him and demanded to know what he was doing. He had been playing soccer, and was just standing there with his soccer ball, against a wall while this was going on. She took him to Bethlehem where the survivors were gathering. I read an American eye-witness's rather creepy and romantic account of how it was all "looked like a re-enactment of the Biblical Exodus."
My family go back when they can. It's a strange pilgrimage, but they seek out the very house and get as near as they can to it for a photograph. Israel refused to let me enter the country- on a whim. Also refused my dad, who, again, was born there. But he was the wrong religion, if the right race. We're as native as it gets, when it comes to the Holy Land. UNESCO recently said our village shows an unbroken tradition of--- well, unbroken until 1948, that is. I've read dozens of old ethnographic that are all "the peasants of Palestine are Biblical fossils! They should be studied so we can know more about life in Biblical civilizations!" that just stopped being written as soon as Israel is founded because we were suddenly inconvenient.
The rest is better said by Edward Said, who spent much of his life dealing with accusations that he was lying about his ethnicity because Palestinians are an inconvenient people. (I've also experienced this... people argue with me about where my dad is from, as if they know my family history better than I do):
My father was ten when a Jewish fascist gang called the Irgun massacred over 100 people, mutilating their bodies and raping some of the women, in a village just over the hills. We were next. My father was left behind in the chaos and saw people gunned down- including a man trying to run in vain with a small mattress pressed against his back. Eventually, a neighbour woman found him and demanded to know what he was doing. He had been playing soccer, and was just standing there with his soccer ball, against a wall while this was going on. She took him to Bethlehem where the survivors were gathering. I read an American eye-witness's rather creepy and romantic account of how it was all "looked like a re-enactment of the Biblical Exodus."
My family go back when they can. It's a strange pilgrimage, but they seek out the very house and get as near as they can to it for a photograph. Israel refused to let me enter the country- on a whim. Also refused my dad, who, again, was born there. But he was the wrong religion, if the right race. We're as native as it gets, when it comes to the Holy Land. UNESCO recently said our village shows an unbroken tradition of--- well, unbroken until 1948, that is. I've read dozens of old ethnographic that are all "the peasants of Palestine are Biblical fossils! They should be studied so we can know more about life in Biblical civilizations!" that just stopped being written as soon as Israel is founded because we were suddenly inconvenient.
The rest is better said by Edward Said, who spent much of his life dealing with accusations that he was lying about his ethnicity because Palestinians are an inconvenient people. (I've also experienced this... people argue with me about where my dad is from, as if they know my family history better than I do):
