 |
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May-June 2008, pages 23-24 Voices of the Nakba Fleeing Jaffa
I AM A member of a long traditional ancestry of Palestinian Arabs from the renowned City of Ramallah. My parents and two brothers and three sisters lived in Jerusalem and belonged to the Anglican Evangelical Arabic Church with headquarters in Jerusalem. One brother was a dentist, the second a judge. Two sisters were secretaries and the youngest was a teacher at the Teachers Training College in Jerusalem. From 1941 to April 26, 1948 I lived in Jaffa, where I had a very promising law practice. I married my wife from Jerusalem in 1943 and set up my new family home in Jaffa. My wife, who was eight months pregnant with our second daughter, was scheduled to fly to New York with our 2-year-old daughter on Sunday, April 25, 1948. There they would be met by her parents, who had not seen their daugher since 1939, when they left their stone villa in Jerusalem’s Upper Baq’a Quarter. They had planned to liquidate their business in Honduras and return to live permanently in Jerusalem, but the outbreak of World War II, followed by Jewish terrorism in advance of the U.N. Partition Resolution, was enough to prevent them from returning. At about 4 a.m. that morning there was the sound of distant bomb explosions from various parts of Jaffa. As daylight broke, the sound became louder. My younger clerk had ventured downtown to explore, but soon returned with a shrapnel wound in his right thigh. It was not too deep, and we administered first aid. He told us that mortar bombs were falling on the center of town, including in some residential areas. The bombs were coming from Tel Aviv and the Agro Bank and Bat Yam Jewish settlements. I contacted our travel agent, who had made flight reservations for us from Lydda airport to Cairo. His wife was also scheduled to fly with us. He told us all flights were suspended indefinitely. Then I decided to leave the city in my car. Our target was Amman, Transjordan, where my brother had moved his family temporarily. I drove to the house of Edmond Rock, the honorary consul of Transjordan, to obtain visas to enter the Hashemite Kingdom. He readily stamped our passports. I then made two attempts to drive out of the city, but both times mortar bombs exploded on the highway in front of us, compelling me to turn around and head back home. I drove to the safer area around the sea harbor and found a couple of hundred people gathered there with suitcases and bundles of clothes. They were in a state of panic, hoping that some boat would sail into the harbor and take them out. Among them were a few friends who approached our car and asked if we wanted to be included in lists they were preparing. My wife, who feared the sea, adamantly refused. I drove back home and later joined a couple of prominent figures in calling Mr. Crosby, the British district commissioner, to ask if the British had already decided to surrender Jaffa, as they seemed to have done in Haifa some two weeks earlier. He denied any such intention and promised to detail army tanks to roll through the streets of Jaffa and restore confidence to the population. Shortly afterward three British tanks passed through the main streets, headed by a tank with a standing army officer holding a map of the city. Gradually the thumping sound of mortar explosions became more distant. In the evening there was complete silence, but the day’s experience had planted a sense of fear and despair in the hearts of everyone. We hardly slept that night, and early the next morning I drove out of the city with my wife and baby daughter along the only highway that led to Yazur, Sarafand and Ramle. This was the main route to Jerusalem. As we passed in front of the Neter Jewish Agricultural Settlement we saw a large group at the entrance gazing at all the fleeing cars and trucks and laughing. We had to take a detour via Ramallah to Transjordan, where we arrived in the late afternoon but could find no place to stay. After one night at the Philadelphia Hotel, we flew in an Egyptian Beech craft to Cairo. There I met an old friend who told me that my clerk and his entire family were in a refugee camp in Cairo. I could not believe that, and we took the trolley to the camp. There they were, and explained that when they saw everyone else leaving they panicked and took a bus to Cairo. At that moment it suddenly dawned on me that the tragedy was far worse than I had anticipated. Given my wife’s condition, and after consulting with doctors in Cairo, I had no alternative but to accompany her and our older daughter on their flight to the U.S. The above is a factual version of a human tragedy—I shall not go into its political aspects. However, we were among more than 750,000 Palestinians who escaped and/or were driven out under similar circumstances. My dentist brother’s three-story building was blown up in Haifa, and he and his wife had to escape in a fishing boat to Lebanon. He only had 5.00 Palestinian pounds on him. My eldest sister’s apartment came under Jewish fire in the Qatamon Quarter of Jerusalem and she escaped with her husband to Jordan. My sister in Jerusalem’s Musrara Quarter escaped with her husband and two daughters to Amman, Jordan, with only the clothes they were wearing. Worst of all, my elderly mother, who was staying with my brother’s family in Ramle, was stranded alone because my brother could not return to pick her up. He asked some neighbors to take care of her and it took a year before he was able to get her out through the Red Cross. By that time she had completely lost her mind and he had to place her in a women’s shelter in Bethlehem, where she died soon after that. We were fortunate to have good educations, which helped a great deal. However, the lives of the majority of Palestinian refugees became a series of catastrophes in refugee camps outside their homeland. By Shukri Salameh, Jacksonville, FL (posted Nov. 29, 2000 on PalestineRemembered.com).
|
||||||
