25/04/1998

DURING his visit to Israel, Tony Blair was, of course, invited to share in the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the State. While he was there, did he spare a thought for the six million or so Palestinians who are still paying the price for Israel’s establishment in 1948? In Gaza, he saw the teeming, overcrowded camps – half of Gaza’s population are refugees – the ramshackle buildings and the crushing poverty. But these sights will have revealed to him only one facet of the Palestinian experience after the cataclysm of 1948. In the 50 years since then, Palestinian fortunes have been overtaken by events so far-reaching and dramatic as to make the most fanciful story seem prosaic.

Take my own story, for instance. I was born in Jerusalem when the country was still called Palestine. I remember a happy, settled existence with my parents, my sister and my brother. We lived in Qatamon, a handsome suburb in west Jerusalem, mostly inhabited by well-to-do Christian Palestinians and a minority of Muslims like us. We had a spacious house which my father had struggled hard for after a modest start in life. It was a friendly, close-knit neighbourhood, and we knew and liked our neighbours and played with their children. My mother had a wide circle of friends, entertained frequently and cooked superlatively. We went on picnics in Ramallah, visited our aunts and uncles in Tulkarm, and went swimming in the sea off the coast of Jaffa. We expected to grow old in our country and some day to be buried in its soil.

What we did not realise was that great decisions had been taken over our heads and political events had been set in motion to make in our country a homeland for another people. And in line with these decisions, these other people, Zionist Jews from Europe, were steadily making their way into Palestine from 1920 onwards. But their plans went far beyond a mere homeland: they wanted a Jewish state of their own.

As we began to realise what was happening, resistance to these Zionist aspirations was born. As the Zionists retaliated, Palestine became a battleground between Arabs, Jews and the British forces, who tried unsuccessfully to control the situation. But in our cosy house in Qatamon, we felt nothing of this conflict and, amazingly, were able to enjoy the illusion of normality until 1946, when the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the seat of Palestine’s Government, was blown up by Jewish terrorists. Thereafter, and increasingly, the troubles began to affect us too. We were in a part of Jerusalem which directly abutted on to Jewish settlements and came under direct attack from Jewish forces. In their attempt to increase their control over Jerusalem from 1947 onwards, they targeted our neighbourhood and the other Arab ones in the vicinity.

The British Mandate authorities who ruled the country and to whom we looked for help turned their backs on us. They more or less washed their hands of the whole conflict and decided to leave Palestine on 14 May 1948. From the end of 1947 and into 1948, Qatamon became a war zone, with daily shootings and bombings; snipers, both Jewish and Arab, took over the streets and the empty buildings, as people began to leave in terror. By March 1948, nearly every house in our road was empty; only we and a few others hung on grimly. "This is my home", my mother declared stoutly, "no one is going to make me leave it!" But conditions steadily worsened. Our schools had closed, as it was not safe to travel. My sister, who was the eldest, became a boarder because she could not reach her school otherwise, and neither I nor my brother was allowed to go on to the road any more. The butcher and grocer in our area closed down and getting food was becoming hard.

By April, we were in a state of virtual siege. On the ninth of the month, the notorious massacre of Deir Yassin took place. Over 200 inhabitants of this peaceable village on the outskirts of Jerusalem were murdered in cold blood by Jewish irregular forces. When they toured the streets of Jerusalem afterwards, announcing over loudspeakers their threat to repeat the atrocity elsewhere, my parents decided that the time had come for us to leave. Never for a moment did they believe we would not return. We decided to go to my grandfather’s house in Damascus and wait there until "things settled down".

ON that final morning, my mother packed only a few summer clothes for us into a couple of small cases, since we would soon be back, she said. All our belongings, papers, documents, family photographs and mementoes – our whole history – were left behind. As the taxi came to take us away – probably the last car which dared to make the dangerous journey to Qatamon – I remember being gripped by a sudden feeling of gloom, as if I knew that when we drove away it would be for the last time. And so indeed it was.

In my grandparents’ house in Damascus, my mother kept thinking about the home we had left behind, full of our clothes, well stocked with food (for it was the custom for women to store staples like flour, sugar and olive oil), and furnished with all the special pieces she had saved to buy over the years. On 30 April, the whole of Qatamon was occupied by Jewish forces. We heard that plunder and robbery of abandoned Arab houses was widespread and uncontrolled. On 15 May 1948 the State of Israel was declared and in July Jewish families were being moved into the Arab houses we had vacated. At which point our own house was occupied we never discovered, and for years we wondered what that anonymous Jewish family thought when they moved in. Did they see our belongings, my toys, my brother’s bicycle, my sister’s school books and ever ask themselves who we were and what they were doing in our house?

From August onwards, numerous requests, pleas and demands were made to Israel to allow the return of Palestinians who had fled from their homes, but to no avail. In December, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 194, calling on Israel to repatriate the refugees or pay them compensation for the loss of their homes and property. This gave us hope and we waited anxiously for the outcome. But Israel remained deaf to all threats and entreaties. By 1949, the country had been emptied of most of its Palestinian inhabitants, approximately 750,000 people who had fled or been driven out. Concurrent Jewish immigration ensured the creation of a Jewish majority in Palestine where none had existed before.

In September 1949, after my father had managed to find work in London, we left Damascus. Once again, my parents said that this move was not for ever. But the years succeeded each other and UN resolutions came and went, enjoining Israel to honour its obligations towards the refugees, but nothing changed for us.

Growing up in England, I started to hear strange arguments from Israel’s Jewish and non-Jewish supporters. The country, I was told, belonged historically to the Jews, who were merely reclaiming what was rightfully theirs. This being so, they implied that we Palestinians had no claim on what did not belong to us, no right to return to the land of the Jews and no grievance.

The terrible losses we had incurred were trivialised and dismissed as if we had been impostors, had owned nothing in that country, perhaps had never even been there, until I found myself doubting my own memories and experience. These assaults on my history made me close my eyes sometimes and wonder if I had dreamed up the cream-coloured stone house in Jerusalem, the lemon tree under my parents’ bedroom window, the still, sunny afternoons when the adults were taking their siesta and we played outside, and all the sights and sounds of my childhood there.

In 1991, I had a chance to test out my fantasy. After more than four decades of exile in London, I finally took my courage in both hands and went to Jerusalem. This was no mean achievement, for we had all been brought up under the shadow of our parents’ grief for Palestine. When they realised that the country was irrevocably lost, they never spoke of the past again nor wanted to set foot in what had become Israel. "Better to keep the memory of our home as it had been intact than see it desecrated", my mother would say. But I longed to see it for myself. And so, on a hot August day, I went to Qatamon to try and find our house. The maps provided by my brother and sister were quite unequal to the task, since many of the landmarks had changed since we had lived there. One man I asked for help turned out to be an English Jew from Golders Green who knew nothing about the area.

Eventually, I found an old Israeli who remembered Qatamon as it had been in 1948. With his help, I found the old road and the house. There it was still, with the veranda that I remembered, the iron gate and the large garden which surrounded it, even the old lemon tree to the side of it. But the front door was different and whereas it used to be a villa on one floor, its occupants had at some time built another storey on top. As I stood before it in the heat, I tried to summon up the memory of how it had been, to bring back the echoes of voices and people as I had known them once. But it was no use. A black-coated orthodox Jew passed me as I stood there and looked at me curiously.

I decided to go up the veranda steps, as I had done a thousand times in childhood, and knock on the door. A Filipino maid answered me. Her employers were at work, she said. I told her I had lived in this house once long ago and asked if I could look round. She left me waiting while she went inside to telephone. I heard her repeating my request to her employers. When she came back she said they had given me permission and I could come in.

OF course it was not our house any longer and yet it was. But for the additional storey, the structure was the same, and some details, like the original tiled floors – no doubt considered "a feature" by Israelis now – were still there. But something had irrevocably gone. I was glad that I had not had to meet its present owners, as other Palestinians like me in search of their original homes have done. I did not want to linger and after a few more moments, I left.

Not unlike our house, the Palestinians of today are the same but different. They are more numerous than they were and widely dispersed. Today, 900,000 of them live in Israel as Israeli citizens; a further 2.9 million are distributed between Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza; an unknown number live elsewhere in the Arab world; and a smaller proportion, like me, are in Europe and America. About a half of the total number live in refugee camps. Until 1996, when the Palestine National Authority was set up and began to issue Palestinian passports to those under its jurisdiction, all of them were either stateless or bore the citizenship of the various countries in which they lived. But irrespective of where they live now and in what numbers, all of them bear the scars of that primal event of dispossession and displacement in 1948. And that event itself was heir to an earlier, calculated British act without which there would have been no Israel, no dispossession and no Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This was Britain’s extraordinary and thoughtless promise made in 1917 through the Balfour Declaration to give the Jews a homeland in a country not their own and without the permission of its inhabitants.

It would be only fitting if today’s British Prime Minister, in visiting Israel, were to bear in mind this legacy of the past and resolve to make amends for the sufferings of its innocent victims.