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| The testimony of Emad Moussa's grandmother Ghefreh is living proof of Palestinian sumud [photo credit: Lucie Wimetz/TNA/Getty Images] |
Karl Marx coined the phrase to denote the cyclical nature of history. When tragedies reoccur in the same context they become a farcical spectacle, pointing not only to the cynical human nature but also the poor imitation of past events.
My 94-year-old Palestinian grandmother, Ghefreh, does not know Karl Marx, and I doubt she cares about philosophy. But she understands that tragedies do recur and that history can “often rhyme" — to quote Mark Twain.
"The tent turned into a house in a refugee camp. The refugee camp turned into a community, and that community into a whole society"
As a young Palestinian woman in 1948, my grandmother was expelled from her village and ended up as a refugee in Gaza. 75 years later, Ghefreh was displaced again to Rafah and then Nuseirat, only a few kilometres from her home in Gaza City.
The resemblance between two worlds separated by seven decades has blurred and confused her timeline. Her perception of reality has changed tragically, farcically even.
The loss of a home(land)
Ghefreh was born in a village called al-Sawafir in the early 1930s. The village was based on the ancient Roman name Shaffir, and it was located only a few kilometres from Ashdod, a Palestinian city built upon the ancient Canaanite urban settlement with the same name.
Al-Sawafir was ethnically cleansed early in 1948 during Operation Barak, a Haganah-led onslaught and part of Ben-Gurion’s Plan Dalet, the Zionist master plan to conquer all of Palestine
In her memories, the hardships of being a villager were irrelevant, what resonated was al-Sawafir’s olive trees, the affluent citrus orchards, and the “coherent community that made it into a paradise.”
“A time of peaceful existence, until the European Jews came”, she would say with a sigh.
“We had no guns to defend ourselves. The British — before leaving Palestine — made sure of that while pouring weapons into the Jewish militias’ lap.”
I heard this from my grandfather, on the other side of the family, and every one of his generation in our refugee camp. It was not a sense of loss alone, but also betrayal.
My grandmother would add, “My father had a rusty Ottoman pistol that he fired at wedding celebrations. Mother would hide it in her clothes when the Brits came from the nearby camp in the village of Julis.”
From the direction of Julis — a village allegedly named after Julius Caesar — the Haganah attacked al-Sawafir. Ghefreh and her family ran from one village to another, joining the masses of refugees in their search for safety. Behind them, the advancing Jewish militias ran amok, destroying, ransacking, and massacring Palestinian communities in the region.
She arrived at al-Majdal — the ancient Canaanite town, Asqalan, Hebrewised to Ashkelon — a few days later, holding but the key to her house and some food.
The Haganah besieged and bombed al-Majdal for six months, forcing the ill-equipped and outnumbered Egyptian troops who fortified there to retreat to the Gaza District. The masses of refugees from nearby villages, alongside al-Majdal’s 11,000 residents, ended up in Gaza as refugees.
“The Zionists tried to starve us in al-Majdal like they do today in Gaza,” she says.... READ MORE https://www.newarab.com/opinion/nakba-yesterday-nakba-today-my-grandmothers-two-keys
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