Today I figure there will be the weekly demonstration in Ni'lin against the separation wall that is confiscating Palestinian land east of the old green line. Israel has opened an investigation into the army's lethal firing of teargas shells during these demonstrations. One of the victims, Tristan Anderson of California, was savagely injured in March when he joined a demonstration in Ni'lin.
I'm always the last to know, but the other day I discovered that Ni'lin has resonance for Palestinians. Here, from the book, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory is part of an essay by the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, whose father Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, the Palestinian scholar, was driven out of Jaffa as a boy in 1948.
The context for her essay is that in July 1948, about 50,000 Palestinian villagers were forced out of the Lydda-Ramle area, the crucial coastal plain between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Abu-Lughod:
Lydda had not been within the borders of the area allocated to the Zionists under the UN Partition Plan. It was attacked and its inhabitants driven out in the second of the two short wars with Arab forces that the newly declared Israeli state fought. [Reja-e] Busailah describes their expulsion in the summer and their long march into the unknown in Biblical terms–into the wilderness. At the end of that march on the terrible day turned out to be an Arab village called Ni'lin, fifteen miles away including the detours to avoid hostile areas. His recollections include moments of intense fear before the departure, as when he hid, shaking, behind a rolled up mat as the Jewish forces burst into houses, their shots accompanied by women's screams. They are haunted too by incidents of his own hard-hearted denial of others, as when after he had made it to Ni'lin, he pushed his way back through the stragglers to bring a little water to a close friend and his mother, hiding it from all those pitifully begging….
"His memoir describes the sun beating down, the clawing for water at muddy wells, the talk of grandfathers left behind because they could not go on, of 'bodies that might have been without life,' and of babies abandoned in ditches… Finally he writes, 'Someone talked later–I think when we reached Ni'lin–of having seen a baby still alive on the bosom of a dead woman, apparently the mother…'"
