– I remember what happened when we were driven away the first time, Shaheen told Reuters. With “the first time”, the grandmother refers to what she experienced in 1948. She then lived in Al-Majdal, a Palestinian village by the Sea of Galilee in what is today Israel. Together with her family, she was driven from her home, and ended up in the Khan Younis camp in the Gaza Strip. She has lived there ever since, today with her children and grandchildren. And she is determined not to move this time. – No matter what happens, we will not be driven away. They attack us, but we will not leave our homes and we will not be displaced, she says. Over 700,000 fled The vast majority of those who fled in 1948 are gone today. 86-year-old Mohammad Harb is one of the survivors. He lives in a refugee camp in the West Bank and still has the key to the family’s house in Israel. Whether the house still exists is unclear. Photo: Reuters For the Palestinians, Nakba – Arabic for catastrophe – is the great trauma that underlies the conflict in the Middle East. During and after the war that followed the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, over 700,000 Palestinians left their homes. More than half of the Palestinians lived in the area that became the state of Israel, AP writes. Some were forcibly displaced by the Israelis, others left more or less voluntarily. They loaded their belongings onto cars, carts and donkeys and left their homes. Everyone assumed it was temporary and that they would return home soon. Many took their house keys with them so they could lock themselves in when they returned. It didn’t work out that way. 75 years later, some villages have disappeared, others have been taken over by Israelis and given new names. First Decision – The Nakba is very important in the Palestinian consciousness today. It has been kept alive by the Palestinians, both those who remain in occupied areas and all the Palestinians who live in refugee camps, including in the Gaza Strip, says Hilde Henriksen Waage. – The first and most important decision that the Israeli government made in June 1948 was that no Palestinians should return as long as the war continues, says professor of history at the University of Oslo and senior researcher at Prio, Hilde Henriksen Waage. She says that policy has been reinforced and maintained by Israeli governments since. – So it’s not just a notion that if you flee, you won’t come back, it’s a real historical experience, says Waage. Palestinian refugees in the Khan Younis camp on the Gaza Strip in 1948. Photo: Ap Fleeing to Khan Younis One of the places the Palestinian refugees that Shaheen ended up was at Khan Younis on the Gaza Strip. Back then it was a sleepy little town with a few thousand inhabitants. Right next to the city, a camp was set up by the UN aid organization for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). UNRWA was itself newly established to take care of the many Palestinian refugees. 75 years later, according to UNRWA, 88,854 people live in the camp. A few are survivors of the 1958 escape, people who were then five, ten and twelve years old. The vast majority are children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren – people who have lived their whole lives in the camp. An Israeli militia member with a Stengun stands guard over blindfolded Arab prisoners. The picture from 25 July 1948 was taken on a bus in Jerusalem. Photo: AFP Fears history repeating itself Now many Israelis fear that the most painful moment in their history is about to repeat itself. – You see the pictures of people without cars, on donkeys, hungry and barefoot, trying in every possible way to get south, says the political analyst Talal Awkal to AP: He himself is in Gaza City and has decided to stay. – It is a disaster for the Palestinians, it is the Nakba. They are expelling an entire population from their homeland, says Akwal. UN support – Israel has previously carried out ethnic cleansing on a large scale in the fog of war, says Francesca Albanese. Photo: AP The UN’s special rapporteur for the human rights situation in occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, also fears a new Nakba. – There is a serious danger that what we are witnessing could be a repeat of the nakba in 1948 and the naksa in 1967, but on a larger scale, she said on Saturday. According to Albanese, Israeli public officials have openly advocated a new “nakba”. Israel has rejected criticism of the war and says it conducts all its operations in the Gaza Strip in accordance with the rules of war. For Hilde Henriksen Waage, there is no doubt that the traumas of 1948 govern the actions of many Palestinians in Gaza today. – That explains why the Palestinians today refuse to move on. They have experienced that then the borders are closed and they will never return, says Waage.
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The Palestinians refer to 75-year-old trauma when they do not want to flee from the bombs – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries
