Nakba #23 - Khalid Jameel Saed Mosmar

1948 “Men, women, children, and the elderly arrived in Nablus by truck. They had been expelled from villages and towns in the surrounding area. The refugees were housed in a school. Inside, many families were gathered in one large hall. The hall was divided with pieces of cloth so that each family was given a few meters of space. It was horrible. The children cried, the women did not know what to do, and the men were very angry. Later it became even worse. First the rain poured down, and then the snow came. To me, snow was something wonderful. I stood in my room and looked out the window. I saw a boy from the camp’s daycare playing in the snow. Shocked, I saw that he was barefoot. After taking a few steps, he collapsed and began to cry.” 1950 “Of my nine siblings, I had the darkest skin in the family. That is why I was called ‘the brown one.’ My skin color was considered beautiful. My grandfather was the only person in the Nablus district who owned a radio. His friends used to gather in his house to listen to it. I would sneak in as well to listen. I was amazed at how large the radio was, like a cabinet. I tried to look for the announcer behind it. All I found were some tubes and a large battery connected to the radio. They listened to a radio station broadcasting from Cairo, Egypt. They played music from Sudan, which I loved to listen to and sing along with—something my grandfather noticed. ‘These are your relatives,’ my grandfather said, laughing.” 1967 “Abdel Nasser promised that we would be able to return to Palestine. We believed him; he was like a mountain to us. But the Israelis defeated him. We realized that we had to organize ourselves. At that time, I was studying at university in Cairo. I secretly joined the Palestinian liberation struggle. We formed small cells of three to five people so that we could join Fatah. Some of us received our military training in Syria.” 1968 “Israel attacked the PLO camp in al-Karama, in Jordan, under the leadership of General Moshe Dayan. Dayan regarded the attack as a picnic and invited Israeli journalists to witness the victory. They attacked with 15,000 men, fighter jets, and artillery. The goal was to kill all the fedayeen in the al-Ghor area, where Karameh is located. But together with the Jordanian army, the Palestinian fighters managed—for the first time since 1967—to defeat the Israeli army. For me, it was a turning point.”