By Sameeha Elwan
In Memory of Nakba
He closed his eyes when the smell of the thyme found its way to the deepest memory his mind is still tirelessly clinging to. He opened them with a persistence to inhale as much of the smell as he can. Something that would help him live on the memory a bit longer. Something that would compensate the years of wait. They didn’t give him a chance to preserve that smell deep in his heart sixty two years ago; but it has been in his memory locked, never been forgotten since. He, now, couldn’t believe his eyes when the smell was combined with the real vision of the field. His field. He wished “Um Salem” would be there to pinch him as she always did when he was trapped between a vision and a reality. She was not there to share him the vision. “It’s not the time for mourning”, he thought. He was there, at last. For sixty two years, the scene of the olive tree he and his grandfather once planted and he watched growing up never escaped his memory along with the hymn his grandmother used to sing him while baking bread on “Taboun”. He remembers some of its lyrics. They were always so patriotic. “The land, the gun, the olive tree”.
His sons and grandsons have always mocked him for keeping the key of a house that most probably has turned into a military barrack, a prison maybe, or might have been simply inhabited by other people who if were willing to steal the house could never steal the memories the house arouse in him. They never believed him when he said he will return one day. They should see him right now, approaching that olive tree to shelter from the burning rays of the sun. He was burnt out. His old boy was covered with sweat, but he never stopped walking towards it. Towards his olive tree with his voice murmuring the hymn his grand mother was singing to him, “The land, the gun, the olive tree.”
“Grandpa, it’s raining, grandpa. You have to get back into the tent”. “Yebna. Yebna. The gun. The Olive tree”
“We’re not in Yebna, grandpa. Don’t you get tired of having the same dream every single day?”
It took him a minute as usual to go back to where he really was. It was Not Yebna; he realized when he opened his eyes. It was his little granddaughter who was clinging into his clothes, trying to find shelter from the drops of rain which have now turned the camp into a swamp.
“Never. It is that dream of return that keeps us alive. Lobna” he bitterly answered.
Elwan posted this story first last August, on her site, "Here, I was born."
Sameeha Elwan,
Thank you for this sharing this moving experience. Is that an actual photo of you and your grandfather? When was the photo taken?
It’s amazing how much historical, cultural and intellectual property was destroyed by Israel and lost due to the Nakbah. I presume some of it must still exist somewhere.
Avi..This photo is part of a rather large photographic documentation of the Nakbah..Not discarding the possibility of a connection with Sameeha but the photo is also available on Palestine Remembered..BTW, I have a huge file of such photographic documentation, if any one here is interested just let me know..
Thoughts like these are the ones Israel wants to ban. But Nakba obviously will not be forgotten.
this is a moving, simple, poignant essay. thank you
and i’m sorry.
thank you Sameeha Elwan
thank you Grandfather for passing on your dream of a loving past and a better future to your granddaughter.
Ultimately, what keeps hope alive is our dreams.
Yebna or Yibna – some interesting background:
The town, which was 15 km sw of Ramleh, had existed in some form or another since Biblical times. On June 4, 1948, it was completely ethnically cleansed and largely destroyed. Many of the more than 6,000 villagers fled south through the sole pathway made available by the invading forces. They ended up in Rafah, in the Yibna refugee camp which still exists today, and in other camps in Gaza and elsewhere. Some testimonies of those expelled from Yibna can be viewed at the links below:
Voices of Nakba – 1 of 3
Voices of Nakba – 2 of 3
Voices of Nakba – 3 of 3
You see? When you watch these videos, you come to understand that they were real people who were driven out and they still survive today, although the world has chosen to forget them.
Some other noteworthy facts:
link to displacedpalestinians.files.wordpress.com
rel=”nofollow”>Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi, co-founder of Hamas, was born in Yibna. When he was 6 months old, the town was cleansed, and his parents were forced to flee to Gaza. They landed in Khan Younis refugee camp. He was assassinated by israel in April 2004 when a missile was fired at his car from the air.
Thomas Hurndall, the British journalist who was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper Gaza when he tried to move two little girls out of the firing line, was in Yibna refugee camp at the time.
A tour of what is left of Yebna today can be viewed in this video.
An organization called “Islington Friends of Yibna” was established in the UK in 2007. This past summer, “Friends of Yibna” hosted an exhibition of art works by artists from the camp. You can see a small sampling here.
The wonders of google….
How many of these interwoven threads of history, memory, heritage, and collective experience have been ripped asunder by the events of the past 60 or 70 years? When and how will this incalculable cost ever be at least recognized, let alone quantified or compensated for? Needless to say, there is no possible compensation for these human losses.
those are really good videos, i just watched all 4 of them. something like 360 wells. or 380. figs and grapes and oranges. the old man at the end of the last video when he gets asked if he would like to go back he says to him, you should ask forgiveness of asking that. he says if you hand him the papers for all the arab lands he would not trade it for one acre of his farm.
And here is some more fascinating info about Yibna/Yebna.
thank bijou.
i just came back here to linger over sameeha’s incredible story again.
The collective pain of this expulsion — the sum of each individual agony — is a crushing weight on the world. I’ve never been anywhere in the world where expulsion would be so painful. There’s something about Palestine, something about the land. The pain of its theft and destruction — every time I saw a giant Wall or Fence with all its accoutrements hacking up this ancient landscape in a frenzy of masochistic hatred and psychotic greed — it was like a rip in the very fabric of all that is worthwhile in the world. And that’s what Israel is doing in the age of mass media. Before, in 1948, it was so much worse. It can’t go on like this. It can’t.
Palestine doesn’t belong to anyone. But the Palestinians belong to Palestine. Usurpers, motivated by possessive lust for dreams and ideals they betray every day and a Sure Thing in this world defined by chaos, can never find solace there. But those who come in peace, with an open heart, will always be welcome.
It is a place like no other, and to see it so desecrated is unbearable.
Pamela you’re from Oklahoma and would people there feel similarly were they expelled from their land?
My family and I living in Israel is a “crushing weight on the world” while Pamela’s family living in Oklahoma is, ah yes I remember, “manifest destiny”.
Yes, we get it, eee. You hate us even though we lavish you with billions of dollars in free money and billions more in military hardware.
what a pity for you the zionist agenda of ethnic cleansing in palestine isn’t just so last last last century (19th as i recall re “manifest destiny”). meanwhile the world has moved on..to the internet, cell phone, human rights etc….it is only israel trying to segue modernity in w/ethnic cleansing, so last century, something tells me it will not be gathering a following. what do you plan to do about it other than spew ancient history at us?
you need to adapt dude… the world is going global/multi cultural.
You live in New York and you’ve got family in Israel, right? Ain’t that a double hit for you, Phil?
i dont have family in israel
my moms good friend moved there 40 years ago, but no family
I suppose that’s a blessing, but you’re still rather being the pot that’s calling the kettle black here when you go after Ms. Olsen like that.
If anyone tried to expel people from their land in Oklahoma, well, let’s just say that with the amount of firearms we have, and the ability we have to use them, and the intolerance we have for trespassers, they would need a great deal of luck to succeed.
Still, it’s nothing like the ties Palestinians have to their land. First of all, it’s not ancient. Even most of the Native Americans who are here were driven here from the East Coast in the 18th century. Second, we have that Protestant/capitalist ethos that sees everything as a means to an end, and land as a commodity to be bought and sold. We’re not taught to treasure nature or beauty. We’re taught to plow it and mow it and drill it and kill it, and even if we do feel a love for a certain oak tree in the middle of a pasture, or bend in a creek that’s full of memories, we’re supposed to suck it up when it makes financial sense to sell it. Losing land to foreign invaders (or the demands of capitalism), especially if it’s been in a family for several decades, would be hard. But it’s not like the ties Palestinians have. They taught me what it means to truly have an enduring love of place.
For the record, my family were Irish immigrants who participated in the Land Run. They were part of the process that dispossessed Native Americans who had already been run out of the East Coast and deposited in “Indian Territory.” One of them was my great-great-grandmother, a Cherokee. When I first heard of “Manifest Destiny,” I was first skeptical, then horrified. It was a terrible wrong done in earlier times, and I would give almost anything to have it reversed.
That does not mean that something similar done today, with my tax dollars no less, is somehow OK.
eee’s lack of empathy or logic continues to amaze. His posts should be in a museum of brainwashing some day.
My grandparents were refugees from Europe. I wish they would have been given an uncontested piece of land to establish a country. But they weren’t. They had only one choice. Those in the family who did not make this choice all died just proving how right the choice was.
And if the situation in Israel is reversible, why is the situation in Oklahoma not reversible? Can you explain the difference?
So you’re saying you had no choice but to kill Palestinians and take their land?
I don’t know your grandparents’ full story, but I’m willing to assume they, personally, had no choice. But the Zionist leaders had many choices, and many chances, to do other than expelling three quarters of a million people, refusing to let them return to their homes, and becoming an increasingly cruel settler-colonial presence rather than integrating with the neighborhood.
The difference between Israel and Oklahoma is that Israel chose the wrong time in history to be a settler-colonial state that expels and kills most natives and sticks the rest in ghettoes. The world has woken up, and such horrors are now out of fashion. Too bad you didn’t live in the days before Nuremburg and the Geneva Conventions, when genocide was a casual affair and powerful countries freely colonized and expelled and massacred when it suited their whim, their “security,” their “national interest” (however they chose to define it). It seems you would have preferred that.
As long as you were on the powerful side, of course.
The other difference, of course, is that Israel’s killing and dispossession of Palestinians is happening ACTIVELY, RIGHT NOW. It’s ongoing. Ironically, if Israel had behaved with decency after the 1967 war, it probably could have gotten away with it’s “original sin” of 1948. But it wasn’t satisfied with that. It wanted more, and more, and more, and it behaved so greedily for so long that now they’ve set the stage for unraveling the “victory” of 1948.
I’m just the messenger here. Zionism has dug its own grave. But the people of Israel still have a chance to integrate into the neighborhood, if they learn to behave with decency right now. Tick tock.
If refugee camps were good enough for the Palestinians, why weren’t they good enough for your grandparents?
How many people has EEE killed Chaos? Your dishonesty is getting so stale. He was talking about his grandparents and he didn’t mention anything about killing Palestinians.
it is spelled eee yonira and chaos did accuse him of personally killing anyone. you “the pronoun of the second person singular or plural”/ “one; anyone; people in general: a tiny animal you can’t even see. “. obviously he was talking about israelis, nothing dishonest about it, it is a valid question.
eee said “They had only one choice” and it is fair to interpret that as meaning ” no choice but to kill Palestinians and take their land”.
so it was a fair question.
How many people did eee’s grandparents kill, then? How many people died so that eee’s grandparents could settle on their land?
In the US today there are thousands of people out of work who have lost their homes. They have nowhere to go but shelters, and often the shelters are full. Yet if one of these homeless people with nowhere to go were to come to my house, break open the door and move in, they will be arrested. If they come with a gun and tell me to move out, that they are taking over the house, they will be sent to prison. If they kill me to take over the house and move in, they will be convicted of murder and possibly executed.
If they tell the judge, “I had no choice,” the judge will reply, “that is no excuse for committing a crime.”
I want to take on eee’s impudent comment. The hasbarists just love to use the fate of the Native American Indian as an excuse for the injustice against Palestinians in the present and their dispossession. They ask the rhetorical question: What if the Indians starting making claims on their land? ISN’T THAT WAS THE JEWS FROM THE EASTERN BLOC DID EXACTLY???
These Eastern Europeans have as much of a claim on Palestinian land as I do!! And I’m not even Palestinian, Muslim OR Jewish!
Just because the Jews, rather Israelites, of 2000 years ago had the misfortune to run up against the Romans and find themselves in exile doesn’t mean that some Eastern Europeans who just happen to be of the same faith as those Israelites can come along and stake a claim 2000 years later and dispossess people who have been living there all this time and throw them off their land. Only BARBARIANS behave this way in this day and age!