Mapping My Return Mapping My Return A Palestinian Memoir SALMAN ABU SITTA The American University in Cairo Press Cairo New York This edition published in 2016 by The American University in Cairo Press 113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt 420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018 www.aucpress.com Copyright © 2016 by Salman Abu Sitta All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Exclusive distribution outside Egypt and North America by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd., 6 Salem Road, London, W2 4BU Dar el Kutub No. 26166/14 ISBN 978 977 416 730 0 Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abu Sitta, Salman Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir / Salman Abu Sitta.—Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2016 p. cm ISBN 978 977 416 730 0 1. Beersheba (Palestine)—History—1914–1948 956.9405 1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 Designed by Amy Sidhom Printed in the United States of America To my parents, Sheikh Hussein and Nasra, the first generation to die in exile To my daughters, Maysoun and Rania, the first generation to be born in exile Contents Preface ix 1. The Source (al-Ma‘in) 1 2. Seeds of Knowledge 13 3. The Talk of the Hearth 23 4. Europe Returns to the Holy Land 35 5. The Conquest 61 6. The Rupture 73 7. The Carnage 83 8. Life as a Refugee 95 9. Crossing the Line to Return 109 10. Egyptian Days 121 11. The Funeral Town 135 12. The Long Desert Walk 149 13. My Battlefield 157 14. Britannia Rules the Waves 173 15. Building the Country 201 16. The Naksa and Eskimo Land 213 17. Working with the Facts on the Ground 233 18. On the Political Front 243 19. The Invisible Face of the Enemy Takes Shape 255 20. Charting the Land 269 21. Wake-up Call 297 22. The Last Mile 311 Notes 321 vii Preface It is customary in the preface to a memoir to describe the book as the military exploits of a general or the achievements of a retired politician. These memoirs are neither. They are the experiences of an ordinary Palestinian refugee. Even at that, they do not chart the most tragic, painful, or traumatic fates of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians made refugees in 1948. There are Palestinians who saw loved ones machine-gunned down before their eyes, others who fled into the darkness under the thud of bombs from tanks and planes, families who were decimated by explosions while having dinner, mothers who left in a hurry carrying with them a pillow instead of an infant, and children who were lost in the long marches of people seeking safety, crying for their mothers. I have been spared much of the intensity of these experiences but I share with my fellow Palestinians the great pain of being uprooted, the loss of identity, and the struggle to reverse this nightmare. I became a refugee at the age of ten. What stands clearly in my child’s mind was the identity of the invisible enemy who destroyed my life. What did he look like? Was he a human or a beast? Why did he make me a refugee? What did I do to him? Where did he come from? What language does he speak? I vaguely heard adults talk about Jews, brought by a British man called Balfour. They started to attack villages near Jaffa, far away in the north. I had never seen a Jew before, let alone a Jewish soldier with a gun. This strange situation took hold of me. My life’s mission became to try to put a face to this invisible enemy, in particular, ix x Preface the Zionist soldiers who attacked and burned down my home. I wanted to find their names, photographs of them, their origins from all over the globe, and their military formations. I wanted to understand their hatred for us, their desire to make us refugees and destroy our country, Palestine. This led me on an endless quest: to discover how they destroyed my homeland, what became of our landscape that they left in ruins, its villages and towns, its people’s lives, their folklore, their geography and history. My ultimate ambition has been to pick up the pieces of the debris and painstakingly reconstruct the destroyed landscape. If that could be done, would it then be possible to return to our homes? Using the planning and engineering experience I gained in later years, was it possible to recover the elements of this stolen patrimony? Could we shake off this terrible nightmare and be normal again, living in our country like the rest of the world? Becoming a refugee coincided with two momentous dates in the history of the Nakba. The first was when news came from the north of Jewish massacres and the headmaster of my boarding school in Beersheba instructed us to go home and be safe with our families. That was in early April 1948 when Plan Dalet to conquer Palestine was implemented. The second made me a lifelong refugee, when Zionist soldiers attacked my own home and burned and destroyed everything they found on 14 to 15 May 1948. That was the day the disastrous British Mandate formally ended, the day when Ben- Gurion declared his state on Palestine’s soil and the day when Arab regular forces came to save us, but failed. Hence started my journey. This journey took me to Egypt, Kuwait, England, Canada, and a multitude of other places. None of them was my destination; they were stations on the route of return. The final destination, my home, remains my only target. Unlike the birds that would fly out of their nests in our well and hover in the skies before landing back down again, I have made nine flights, from one exile to another, without landing back in my home. There are still three more flights to make before I reach my home to settle down forever. It is not easy to put this experience into meaningful prose. It is as painful to write as it is to remember. The first attempt was a letter to my daughter Maysoun, studying in Canada in 1988 and heading Preface xi a university group to explain Palestine, to tell her who she was and where she came from. She is the twelfth generation of my family, but the first not to be born in al-Ma‘in, my birthplace. A second attempt was when my daughter Rania convinced me in 2010 to accompany her new family on a vacation in the Mediterranean. Here the solitude broke the mental barrier I had put up for myself and I started to write. This tells the story of the long journey of a refugee trying to return home. There were no guns or tanks. There were no secret missions. It was simply a quest for a right to be restored, a truth to be unveiled, and a patrimony, lost in a moment of historical aberration, to be regained. That is the fuel which sustains all Palestinians in their long struggle. It is now close to a century of struggle since the First World War, through three or four generations, with no sign of them giving up. It is my firm belief that Zionism’s ill deeds in Palestine will come to an end. Regrettably these deeds have indelibly marked the history of the Jews forever, more than any other event in their history. Every chapter in history tells us that injustice is short lived. In Palestine, this is no exception. Our task therefore, in fact the task of every human being with a conscience, is to bring about the day when justice prevails and rights are restored, as soon as possible and without killing, suffering, and dispossession. These pages describe the work done which could serve as a road map to the return to our homeland, if not in my lifetime, then by the young generation who did not see their patrimony with their own eyes but have kept it well preserved in their minds and hearts. There are expressions in the book which may not be familiar to the young generation; I have tried to explain them as they come. For the same reason I introduced footnotes to explain some historical events or references for those who wish to learn more. The Arabic transliteration of names follows the simplest in current use. The words ‘Jews,’ ‘Arabs,’ ‘Palestinians,’ ‘Zionists,’ ‘Israelis’ follow the contemporary use of these words. During the British Mandate, the words ‘Arabs’ and ‘Jews’ were in use, in official documents and the press. The word ‘Zionism’ refers to the ideology of the settlers. From the 1950s, the words ‘Palestinians’ and ‘Israelis’ gained currency, although the phrase ‘Arabs of Palestine’ was common. xii Preface The maps in this book are a product of the long-standing work of mapping Palestine. The photos are all dated after 1948, except one, which is on page 14. This single picture, dated around 1944, is cherished because it is the only one that survived the Nakba, as all our homes and property were destroyed and burned. This is not a research book drawing on many archives and libraries. Nevertheless, there are people who helped a great deal in writing this book, to whom I am immensely grateful. Yazan al-Saadi, a promising writer and a journalist, typed the whole manuscript and in doing so was my first critical reader.