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A Palestinian waving a flag during a demonstration commemorating the Nakba, in Jaffa, south of Beit-ul Moqaddas, May 15, 2007.
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Half of the Hamduni family lives in a village in northern Beit-ul Moqaddas, and the other half is in the besieged Gaza Strip. Sixty years after the war waged by Israel they are more divided than ever.
In the Beach Refugee Camp, a Gaza slum on a sewage-poisoned stretch of the Mediterranean coast, Safaa, 70, holds the keys to her family home in Jaffa, now an upscale suburb of Beit-ul Moqaddas, from which her family fled in 1948. Just a few hundred kilometers north, Mahmud, 55, an Arab Israeli citizen who owns a tractor company, reclines in his spacious and well-furnished house in the quiet village of Tamra where he has lived most of his life, AFP reported.
As they approach the 60th anniversary of the Israel occupation of their lands, Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, the expulsion of some 700,000 people during the 1948 war, an event that for them is the core of the decades-old Middle East conflict. For Safaa’s family, confined to the Gaza Strip, and for some 4.5 million Palestinian refugees scattered across the occupied territories, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, the war that followed Israel’s Illegal birth never really ended.
“We teach our children that we will return one day to our homeland, we will return to Jaffa and to Tamra,“ Safaa says. “We’ve kept the keys to the old house in Jaffa and the documents that prove we own it.“
The Hamdunis’ story begins in the 1940s with Mohammed, Safah’s deceased uncle, and Suleiman, Mahmud’s late father, two orphaned brothers from a Bedouin family living near the northern town of Akka in British-ruled Palestine.
“Mohammed went to Jaffa in the 1940s. He was a young man and he needed work. He met a city woman there but in order to marry her he had to lie about his origins,“ Mahmud says over a lavish meal of grilled meats and fresh salads.
“So he told her he was a member of the wealthy Al-Najami family in Akka. It was a lie! He had merely worked at a shop they owned,“ he laughs.
The ruse worked, however, and the two were married in 1945 and moved into her family home in Jaffa, a house Safaa remembers from her childhood.
“I remember the days before the expulsion like a dream. They were beautiful days. My father used to take us to the beach every Friday and to Beit-ul Moqaddas also,“ she says.
Suleiman, true to his Bedouin roots, remained in the north, living in a tent and guarding the fish ponds of a local kibbutz, but when the war broke out in May 1948 he was allowed to stay.
“My father used to say that those who didn’t fight were left alone. But in the villages where there was resistance, where there was shooting, the Israelis destroyed them completely,“ Mahmud says.
Historians differ over whether the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled what is today known as the “forged regime of Israel“ because of a deliberate expulsion campaign by Jewish militias or because of an artificial panic fanned by Arab radio broadcasts.
But from the time they arrived in the tent cities of Gaza until today Safaa’s family, like the other refugees, have never been allowed to return.
From the time Israel occupied Gaza in 1967 until the outbreak of the latest Palestinian uprising in 2000 the two sides of the family visited each other on holidays and talked often on the telephone, even as their lives diverged.
Safaa and her children, like many refugees, take a long view of their troubled history.“God willing, we will return, either we or our children,“ says Safaa’s daughter Sabah, 49, who was born in Gaza’s refugee camps. “We want peace, not war, but it is our destiny to return to Palestine.
“We are sure that the occupation will not last for ever.“
