“Secure the children first. I want you all to know where to hide when the bombs fall,” my grandmother instructed us. It was June 1967, and I was 11, during the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arabs. The victorious Israeli army was advancing. Soldiers from the fleeing Palestine Liberation Army filled our street. Vanquished, they were trying to figure out what to do, and how to get back to their families.
My grandmother earned her family leadership position from experience. She was one of the victims of the 1948 war, the war Palestinians call al-Nakba, the catastrophe. “They made me leave Haifa,” she said, eyes flashing determination, “and I am not leaving this time!” She stayed in Birzeit on the West Bank raising my two sisters, my brother and me until she died in 1974. I left for America in 1975 at 19.
In May, as Israel celebrates its 62nd anniversary, I commemorate my grandmother’s expulsion from Haifa. In June, I remember her determination to stay resolutely in place in the West Bank despite the danger of 1967. Her experiences—the painful uncertainty before the 1948 war, her subsequent uprooting by Israel and the tremendous hardship that followed—are all vivid in my mind. I can remember the intimate details of her stories, her silent grief and resigned helplessness at losing her home. Even her physical injuries—the scar left by shell fragments on her left thigh—still come immediately to mind.
As Americans are barraged with the romanticized story of Israel’s establishment, they are getting only the Israeli version, the victor’s version — much as they are today with the deadly Israeli attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. What is missing are first-hand accounts from participants and indigenous accounts like my grandmother’s. Many cold winter nights, sitting around a glowing fire, she would pour out her memories, embedding them in mine.
Observing the Mideast peace process and its proponents’ determination to strip away the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands, I feel much as my grandmother felt in 1948. Another Palestinian generation, mine, is in danger of being dispossessed.
All her life, my grandmother watched Palestine slipping away. “They are not going to stop until they have all the land,” her infuriated father would tell her. Palestinians today fear that Israel’s expansion through its settlement network and roads dedicated to Jewish settlers, on which Palestinian drivers living under occupation are prohibited, will not stop until all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is gone. The Palestine I knew looks like Swiss cheese.
My grandmother believed that negotiating with Israel “would be a trap.” And she believed that the United States was incapable of being an honest broker. “America will always back up Israel no matter what,” she would say. Even President Obama has sadly proven her right.
When the peace process started in 1992, I tried to believe that, maybe, my grandmother was wrong about Israel. It is clear, however, that even as it pretends to want to negotiate, Israel continues to apply to the Palestinians the very policies that dispossessed my grandmother and much of her generation in 1948.
“Israel wants it all,” she lamented. Israel’s Jerusalem policies best exemplify this goal. Not only does Israel malign the city’s significance to Muslims and Christians, but it expropriates Palestinian land, demolishes Palestinian homes, and confiscates Palestinian identity cards, forcing many Palestinians out in a relentless attempt at ethnic cleansing. “We would have no problem living with them if only they would share the land,” was my grandmother’s formula for peace. It still holds today.
As in 1948 and 1967, America again today has ignored the aspirations of the Palestinian people. President Obama’s failure to stand up to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has bogged down the peace process, endangered humanitarian aid to Gazans, and reduced the conflict to a discussion of freezing the settlements in East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the occupation, land confiscation, and Palestinian suffering continue unabated.
My grandmother’s instinctive reaction to the 1967 war was not to leave Birzeit as she had Haifa. She did not want us to become homeless refugees, as she had. “Secure the children first,” I can hear her still. I wish President Obama could hear her, too.
Michel Shehadeh is the Executive Director of the Arab Film Festival. He is the former West Coast regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and a member of the landmark Los Angeles Eight Case, the Palestinian Deportation Case. He holds a BA in Journalism and a Master’s degree in Public Policy Administration from California State University, Long Beach (CSULB).
