Photo by AP/Mohammed Zaatari
A Palestinian man stands at the border fence as he looks to the Israeli settlement of Metulla, during a rally to mark the 58th anniversary of "al-Nakba," or "the catastrophe," at the Fatima Gate in the village of Kfar Kila on the Lebanon-Israel border, on Sunday May 14, 2006.
The catastrophe that never ends
As 1.5 million Gazans suffer for one Israeli, Palestinians remember five July days in 1948 when they lost everything -- and the world didn't care.
By Sandy Tolan
July 11, 2006 | Under the pretext of forcing the release of a single soldier "kidnapped by terrorists" (or, if you prefer, "captured by the resistance"), Israel has done the following: seized members of a democratically elected government; bombed its interior ministry, the prime minister's offices, and a school; threatened another sovereign state (Syria) with a menacing overflight; dropped leaflets from the air, warning of harm to the civilian population if it does not "follow all orders of the IDF" (Israel Defense Forces); loosed nocturnal "sound bombs" under orders from the Israeli prime minister to "make sure no one sleeps at night in Gaza"; fired missiles into residential areas, killing children; and demolished a power station that was the sole generator of electricity and running water for hundreds of thousands of Gazans.
Besieged Palestinian families, trapped in a locked-up Gaza, are in many cases down to one meal a day, eaten in candlelight. Yet their desperate conditions go largely ignored by a world accustomed to extreme Israeli measures in the name of security: nearly 10,000 Palestinians locked in Israeli jails, many without charge; 4,000 Gaza and West Bank homes demolished since 2000 and hundreds of acres of olive groves plowed under; three times as many civilians killed as in Israel, many due to "collateral damage" in operations involving the assassination of suspected militants.
"Wake up!" shouted the young Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer from Gaza on San Francisco's "Arab Talk" radio in late June. "The Gaza people are starving. There is a real humanitarian crisis. Our children are born to live. Don't these people have any heart? No feelings at all? The world is silent!"
For the Palestinians, Omer's cry speaks to a collective understanding: That the world sees the life of an Arab as infinitely less valuable than that of an Israeli; that no amount of suffering by innocent Palestinians is too much to justify the return of a single Jewish soldier. This understanding, and the rage and humiliation it fuels, has been driven home again and again through decades of shellings, wars and uprisings past. Indeed Omer's plaintive words form a mantra, echoing all the way back to the first war between the Arabs and the Jews, and especially to five searing mid-July days 58 years ago.
"The Catastrophe"
The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, known in Israel as the War of Independence, is called al-Nakba or the Catastrophe by Palestinians. For generations of Americans raised on the heroic story of Israel's birth, especially as written by Leon Uris in "Exodus," there is no place for al-Nakba. Yet this fundamental Palestinian wound, and the power of its memory today, cannot simply be wished away.
The obscure anniversary in question, July 11-15, is little known outside of Palestinian memory. Yet it helped forge the fury, militancy and Palestinian longing for land in exile that helps drive the conflict today. In fact, it's not possible to understand today's firefights without first understanding the Nakba, and especially what transpired under the brutal sun just east of Tel Aviv in the midsummer of 1948.
On July 11, 1948, a convoy of halftracks and jeeps from Israeli Commando Battalion 89 approached the Arab city of Lydda on the coastal plain of Palestine. The 150 soldiers were part of a large fighting force made up of Holocaust survivors, literally just off the boats and themselves the dispossessed of a European catastrophe, as well as Jews born in Palestine who had sharpened their fighting skills in World War II with the British army. Their jeeps were mounted with Czech- and German-made machine guns, each capable of firing at least 800 rounds per minute. The battalion leader, a young colonel named Moshe Dayan, had passed along orders for a lightning assault that relied on firepower and total surprise.
The war had officially begun in May, following months of hostilities between Arabs and Jews. In November 1947, the United Nations had voted to partition Palestine into two states, one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. For the Zionist movement, as for many people around the world, this represented a guarantee of a safe haven for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. The Arab majority in Palestine, however, wondered why they should be the solution to the Jewish tragedy in Europe. They owned the vast majority of the land, including 80 percent of its citrus groves and grain fields, and the Arab population that fell on the Jewish side of the partition had no desire to become a minority on their own land. They wanted an Arab-majority state for all the people of Palestine, and they appealed for help from neighboring Arab states to prevent the Jews from establishing the state of Israel.
Fighting intensified in the early months of 1948. In April, a massacre by the Jewish militia Irgun in the Arab village of Deir Yassin shot waves of fear through Arab Palestine; this provoked a reprisal massacre by Arabs of Jewish doctors and nurses on the road to Hadassah hospital near Jerusalem. In the meantime, in the wake of Deir Yassin many thousands of Arab villagers fled for safe haven, intending to come back once the hostilities ceased.
On May 13, the Arab coastal town of Jaffa fell, and refugees began filling the streets of Lydda and the neighboring town, al-Ramla. The next day, in a speech to the Jewish provisional council, David Ben-Gurion declared Israel's independence, and on May 15, Arab armies crossed the borders to launch attacks on the new Jewish state. The Arab and Jewish fighting forces on the ground, contrary to subsequent narratives much-repeated in the West, were relatively equal as the war began. For a time the Arabs appeared to have a slight edge, but during a four-week truce that began on June 11, Israel was able to break a U.N. arms embargo, and as the war resumed in early July, Israel had a decided advantage.
