Nakba #12 - Mofid al Sadek

1948 — When was the first time you met a Jew? “It was when they bombed our village and we were forced to flee with only the clothes we were wearing. Everything else we had to leave behind. But I never actually saw them. We fled to the Christian village of Rmeisch, on the Lebanese side of the border. Friends of my parents owned a house there. They allowed us to stay for six years. They bought clothes for us and were very generous. After six years we were forced to leave. We had become an economic burden on our hosts. We moved to another village where my father got a job on a tobacco plantation. Then we moved on to Qana, where I helped my father with the work. We were not paid, but we were allowed to live in a house. I went to school in Qana. In middle school I began attending a school in Yafariya, in Tyre (Sur). We lived in a house and had our own tobacco fields.” 1976 “I got a job as a teacher in the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in Lebanon. The camp played a central role in the civil war in 1976 between the PLO and the Israeli-backed Phalangists. They carried out a massacre of the camp’s residents. Five thousand people were killed or disappeared. I was one of the 120 who managed to escape. We were forced to leave the elderly and the wounded along the road. Some were eaten by wild animals. After fifteen days of flight, without water or food, only seventy of us were still alive. Palestine belongs to us and will be returned to us. Those who do not like my words can go and drink from the sewers of the refugee camps. The British gave Palestine away through the Balfour Declaration of 1917. But how can a guest give away the home to other guests?”