Diaspora

Today is Blog about Palestine Day.

The following quote was taken from the war diary of David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel: “The strategic objective [of the Jewish forces] was to destroy the urban communities, which were the most organized and politically conscious sections of the Palestinian people. This was not done by house-to house fighting inside the cities and towns, but by the conquest and destruction of the rural areas surrounding most of the towns. This technique led to the collapse and surrender of Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, Safed, Acre, Beit-Shan, Lydda, Ramleh, Majdal, and Beersheba. Deprived of transportation, food, and raw materials, the urban communities underwent a process of disintegration, chaos, and hunger, which forced them to surrender.”

The day the Jewish forces entered the part of Jerusalem where my husband's mother was born, she and her sister had been doing the family's laundry. Situated at a prime location in at-Toor, or the Mt. of Olives, their house held a view of the valley below, including the pathway from the top of the mountain that still winds down into the heart of the Old City. My mother-in-law was nineteen that year--the year of the catastrophe.

Her first instinct was to flee. She dropped the aluminum laundry tub where she was standing, grabbed her sister's hand, and began running down the path eventually leading to al-Aqsa mosque. Shots were being fired in all directions, making it impossible to determine who was shooting whom. They ran, cowering down as low as they could, frightened by this uncertainty and chaos in their neighborhood--perhaps the most religiously diverse and significant stretches of road in all of the Holy Land. They reached the gates of the convent run by the silent order of French Carmelite Sisters. My mother-in-law told me that these nuns used to cover their faces. These nuns provided the frantic and scared young girls a place to hide for nearly two days. She has never forgotten the sisters' benevolence.

When she and her sister Fatima left the convent and returned safely to their house, the gunshots had ceased, and the clothes they had dropped had rusted from sitting wet in the aluminum tub. The world had also changed.

My mother-in-law grew up in the Mt. of Olives speaking Arabic, Hebrew, and Spanish. Her best friends and neighbors were Jews whose origins were Spanish; they were Sephardic or from el Sefardim. Some of the Sephardic Jews boast ancestors dating back to their expulsion from Spain by the Crown in 1492. My mother-in-law roamed the markets with her Spanish-speaking friends, bought vegetables from Hebrew-speaking merchants, recognized Shabbat with her neighbors who would invite her to share their Saturday meals. Her father was much loved among the Jews in Mt. of Olives; when he died, his janazah was attended by more Jews than Arabs. My mother-in-law grew up blissfully unaware of any ideological differences between her family and the families living harmoniously around her. In fact, just last year her most loved childhood friend, now an Israeli, then just a neighbor, came looking for her. She was so happy to find out that my mother-in-law is still alive, although not living in at-Toor.

My mother-in-law is blessed to have been born in a location so dear to the three Abrahamic faiths. No real destruction of any kind has taken place in the Mt. of Olives; it is still one of the most attractive tourist destinations for people from all over the world. Her brother still owns and lives in the home in which they were born, which boasts the most magnificent view of the Dome of the Rock. The Church of the Ascension and the Church of Mary Magdalene are just blocks away from my mother-in-law's childhood home; the silent order of nuns are still where they were in 1948. Not much has changed. They are among the lucky few.

I once called in a radio program hosted by a prominent right-winger in Alabama. They were interviewing a Palestinian intellectual who had come to Birmingham to speak about the Palestinian issue. This was pre 9/11, but in Alabama one could be hard pressed to find a sympathetic general audience willing to listen to anyone who criticizes Israel and its sovereignty, much less the US government's policies regarding the state of Israel. You know, it's the only democracy in the Middle East.

Anyway, the radio host was taken aback by my analogy (and this may sound cliché) of the Mexican Army marching into Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, wiping out cities and towns, setting up its own government, denying all property owners the rights to their homes or lands, stripping the people of their citizenship, and expelling them into places that do not want them. I asked him if he thought any American in his right mind would just bow down and concede, or would it be expected for every able body to take up arms against his oppressor. "Whoa now, you sound like you're for them," he said to me.

For them. The Palestinians. One of the most displaced populations in the world. They constitute one of the largest diasporas, around six million. Six million. Six million. Six million. Six million.