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An Arab veteran of 1948 recalls Palestinian 'catastrophe'

While Israelis are celebrate on Thursday their Independence Day, Palestinians prepare to mark what they call the 'nakba.'

from the May 9, 2008 edition

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But he also blames the surrounding Arab countries for not providing enough aid. His strongest memories are of "irregulars" from places as far off as Yemen, and a contingent from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

"We were shocked to see that the British withdrawal did not equal our ascendancy. They gave all of their sites and locations and equipment to the Jews," Jadallah says. "Our capacity was very weak. We didn't have the same weaponry they did. We only had some simple rifles and ammunition. "

Sur Baher wasn't a particularly wealthy area, and Jadallah remembers people scrambling for enough money to buy weapons. "We were 105 men in this village and we relied on our own personal resources," he says. "Anyone who had a wife who had a bracelet or necklace asked her to sell it so we could buy guns. We armed ourselves from our own personal resources. But we were starting to see that the British withdrawal was facilitating the coming of the Jewish state."

In retrospect, he says he regrets that the Partition Plan for Palestine, passed by the fledgling United Nations on Nov. 29, 1947, was a failure. Palestinian Arabs felt they had no choice to but to fight it, he says, because they didn't feel the division of land was fair. Israel agreed to the partition plan and Arab states rejected it, which led to the outbreak of the war and Israel's declaration of statehood less than six months later.

"We liked the concept of partition, but we felt it was not done correctly," Jadallah sighs. "We reached a moment where partition was an opportunity, and we missed it. Our only option was to protect the land on which we were living, because we saw that the Jews were taking much more than the partition called for." Israel's portion of the land in the partition plan was indeed designated to be smaller than what it became by mid-1948; Zionist leaders believed the partition's narrow borders to be indefensible.

Jadallah says he wishes that Arabs would have been more united in their stance and strategy. He looks at the splits then – those who favored a cease-fire and those who didn't – and can't help but look with dismay at the schism in Palestinian society now, following Hamas's takeover of Gaza last summer. Gaza, where many Palestinian refugees fled to in 1948, is now cut off from the Palestine Liberation Organization-run Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

"We weren't united then and we're not now," he says, sitting in the reception room, in which he has pictures of Jerusalem and a photograph of him embracing Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader whom he outlived. In Jadallah's eyes, no one will again be able to bring together Palestinians the way Arafat did. At the same time, he adds, "Arafat was never satisfied with what he was being given, so he got nothing.

"Had all Arabs been united in 1948, we would really have created an impact. Israel was so tiny then and we were big," he says. "Today, it's essentially the same. We are as disunited now as we were in 1948."

A village transformed

Sur Baher remained part of Jordan until the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank. Israel later annexed Sur Baher and other Arab neighborhoods and villages to Jerusalem, expanding the city boundaries several times, and thousands of East Jerusalemites like Jadallah were given Israeli IDs with the status of "permanent resident."

Sixty years on, they're still not citizens of any country. They can, however, get rights afforded to Israeli citizens, such as education and healthcare, and travel on Jordanian or Palestinian passports.

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