Nakba #42 - Safia Hassan Shbayta

1930 “We owned 20 hectares of land and lived a good life. My father had six employees working in the fields. We grew cucumbers, tomatoes, wheat, corn, and other crops. We transported the produce to the port of Sidna Ali for onward shipment to Port Said in Egypt. In the 1930s the British closed the port. When my father came to collect our goods from the harbor, the British had already thrown them away. Despite this, they forced him to pay the port fee. My father’s cousin became so upset that he suffered a heart attack and died. For my father this was a severe blow—he still had to pay the workers’ wages. The British tried to break us by forcibly relocating our leaders, sometimes to Akka, sometimes to Safad. Sometimes they arrested people, sometimes they killed some. They wanted to force us to our knees. Many farmers became poor and were forced to sell their land and begin working for Jews. My father, too, was forced to sell a piece of land for a pittance to a woman in Miska. She had become wealthy after selling her land to the Zionists. The woman promised to take care of our land. When my father could afford it, he bought the land back.” 1937 “I was almost 14 years old when the settlers came to the village. The Jews tried to act like the British; they spoke English, but they were known in the village. One of them was called Elimelech. A Palestinian man asked why they were speaking English. He received no answer. They lined up seven men with their faces against the wall. Then they shot six of them in the back; the seventh lost his leg. I remember the names of some of them: Hassan Zreika, Muhammad Zreika, Ahmed Zreika, and Ali Harbiye. They also shot a man who had come from the south, from the village of al-Jura, and a worker from Syria. The Jews did it to spread fear.” 1948 “The rumor of the massacre in Dayr Yasin spread and people were afraid. Jaysh al-Inqad al-‘Arabi—we called them ‘the Syrians’—came to our village, and we believed they would defend us. But one of their generals explained that we were surrounded by Jewish settlements and that they could not protect us. One day, while six other women and I were working in the wheat fields, we were summoned and forced to leave the village along with everyone else. We fled on foot eastward, from Miska to al-Tira, a distance of three kilometers. It was the darkest day of my life.”