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searching for 1948
Feb. 6th, 2007 10:31 amBOSTON TO PALESTINE
www.bostontopalestine.org
Below: Hannah describes her search for a Boston based friend's family
home in West Jerusalem. Hannah is a young Jewish-American activist based
in Boston. She is currently working with "Birthright Unplugged" in
Palestine, a program she cofounded.
Hannah's writings and links: http://hannahinpalestine.blogspot.com/
Historical Context (by B2P): The 1948 war physically destroyed much of
Palestinian society and created the state of Israel. Zionist militias
which later became the Israeli military, attacked Palestinian villages
and expelled the inhabitants, becoming today's refugees in Lebanon,
Syria, Gaza and elsewhere. Most of these villages are only ruins today,
with some exceptions. In cities like West Jerusalem, many Palestinian
homes were in large buildings that remained intact and still contained
personal belongings at the end of the war. The newly formed Israeli
government gave many of these homes to immigrating Jews from Europe and all
over the world. For more historical context, see Israeli historian
Benny Morris' "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,"
Cambridge University Press, 1989.
---------------------
The Search for 1948
February 4, 2007
“Where do you want to go?” asked the taxi driver, expecting to give
me a short ride and collect a few shekels.
“Baqa’a,” I replied, “but it’s a bit of a project.”
The West Jerusalem neighborhood of Baqa’a is only a 10 minute drive
from the place in East Jerusalem where we were, but time travel takes
somewhat more
imagination.
“I’m looking for a house from 1948,” I told him, and handed him a
diagram of a house that looked similar to hundreds of other old houses
in the Jerusalem area.
“Is it yours?” he asked.
“No, a friend’s.”
Only a few months ago I found out that a friend of mine in Boston, who
I’d always known as Lebanese, was actually born in Jerusalem. In
1948, at the
age of four, he and his family, along with 800,000 Palestinian people,
were forced out of their home by pre-Israeli forces. They fled to
Lebanon, where
his father had lived before moving to Jerusalem 20 years earlier.
Nobody in the family has been back to Palestine since 1948, so I asked my
friend if he would like me to try to find his house. He gathered some
information, including a few nearby landmarks and a diagram of the house,
and I set off on my search.
This brings me back to Abed’s taxi, where I sat hoping he knew the
neighborhoods well enough to help me. I had planned to seek out an older
taxi driver, and possibly someone who spoke English so I could make
sure to communicate every little detail I knew. Abed is a young guy who
speaks very little English, but he seemed interested in and moved by the
project, and
immediately began to call all the older people he knew.
“Do you know where the Jordanian embassy was before 1948?” he would
ask, as this was our major landmark.
“Yes,” one man told him, “but it wasn’t in Baqa’a.”
“No,” said a couple people, “there was barely a Jordan at that
time. How could there be a Jordanian embassy?”
So we began to drive, looking for the other smaller landmarks, or for
people who might recognize the name of my friend’s father.
We left Baqa’a and crossed the street to another neighborhood that is
still mostly Palestinian. Not two minutes later, we passed an old man
and Abed stopped. We got out of the car, said hello,
and explained what we were doing. “You’re in luck,” replied the
old man, “I know more about these neighborhoods than anyone else in
the area.”
Before I knew it, his wife was serving me coffee in the middle of the
street and the man was telling his wife and daughters to go ahead to the
hospital because he would come in the car with us as long as Abed
agreed to drive him to the hospital afterwards. Abed agreed, and we
continued on our journey, this time with a new passenger.
We drove for about a half hour with little success, and then the man
(whose name I never learned) suggested we stop at an old house on the
corner. We knocked on the door, and an old Israeli man answered. He took
one look at us and asked, “Are you looking for someone who used to
live here?” as he opened the door and let us in. “You’re in luck,”
he said, “I know more
about these neighborhoods than anyone else in the area.”
So here I was inside a house with Abed the taxi driver, and two older
men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, who said they knew everything
about the
area. They talked for a few minutes and argued amiably for a few more
in a combination of Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The interaction had an
air of
pre-Zionism to it that is difficult to explain. The men were
interacting like any two older men would, both trying to be helpful and both
trying to prove what they knew. They used language of “Arab” and
“Jew” instead of “Palestinian” and “Israeli”, which many people
do, but it just seemed right in this situation. Like nationalism and the
way it has played out had nothing to do with this simple human search
for an old home.
It was getting late, so we took the name and phone number of the
Israeli man so we could try again another day.
Two weeks later, the only day out of several that wasn’t pouring
rain, I met Abed in Jerusalem. I had received more precise directions from
my friend in Boston, including names of other people who lived and
worked in the area and, most importantly, a photograph taken from the house
in 1940.
Abed met me and told me he knew where the house was, that he had gone
back there after our last search, and drove me to the neighborhood. We
parked and began to walk around, holding up the photograph to each gate
and entrance. We found
one house that looked quite similar and currently has a huge
construction project going on directly on top of it. The managers were Israeli,
the workers Palestinian. We went in and asked the workers what they knew
about the house, which wasn’t much. We were stopped on the way out by
a manager.
Abed explained in Hebrew that we were trying to find a house. The man
glanced at the photo and said, “Yes, this looks like the house.”
Another
manager came out and ordered us off the property. “This isn’t the
house,” he said. “There was nothing here before 1948.”
We stood outside for a few minutes as Abed explained to me (as though
explanation was needed) that the Israeli man felt threatened by us.
“We
need to find an Israeli to help us,” said Abed. “They think you and
I are here to claim the house because I’m Arab and you have papers in
your hand.
They don’t know we’re only here to look and photograph.”
“We should take the house,” I replied, only half joking.
By that time we had realized this was probably not the house we were
looking for. The gate looked the same but we couldn’t figure out the
angles in the
photograph and it just didn’t seem right.
Another older Israeli man on the street asked if he could help. Abed
explained that we were searching for a house, and the man joined us for
the next 20 minutes as we walked around the neighborhood. We kept
finding similar sights, but none of them fit together right. Finally he
asked, “Are you sure the house is in the German Colony?”
“No,” I replied, “it’s in Baqa’a.”
The older Israeli man who had helped us the first time had convinced
Abed to come to this area. So we got back into the car and headed back up
to his house. He answered the door and I shared all my new information
with him. It’s near the Trans-Jordanian consulate, I told him, not
the Jordanian embassy. There’s a road that goes down from the main
street towards their house.
Well, these two pieces of information were all he needed. He followed
me out to the street, pointed, and said, “Go two more traffic lights.
The Allenby building is probably what you mean, and that’s on your
left. There’s a street that goes down from there on the right.”
Something felt right about this, so I got back in the car excitedly and
we drove those two blocks, turned right, and got out and started
walking. The
streets were different than they were described to me, and the building
supposedly on the corner wasn’t there. But sure enough, after a few
minutes
of meandering, I found myself in front of a large building that was in
the background of the photo I was holding. I positioned myself exactly
at the
angle that the photo was taken from, and looked around. One street
continued to go down, so I took it. To my right was a synagogue that I
guessed was either my friend’s property or his neighbor’s. I hoped it
was not his, that his house had not been completely destroyed and
replaced by a synagogue.
We passed the synagogue and stopped in front of the gate to the next
house. This was it. Different from the photo, but with the same
dimensions, and seemingly the right distance from the larger building up the
street. We entered and found ourselves on the stone path described in the
e-mail I had in my hand from my friend’s older brother:
“…continue along the stone-paved path… some 8 meters, you reach
the level of the house… Move some 10 more meters and you will have the
six stone steps (to the left) that lead up to the veranda and you will
then be facing the main door, entrance to the house.”
I was facing the main door, the entrance to the house. I wanted to
knock on the door, but wanted to take in as much as possible first. I
walked around the house, wondering which plants and trees had been there
when my friend lived there and which were new.
Finally Abed knocked. No answer. We waited a few minutes and then left.
I came back about five minutes later to photograph more and the door to
the house was open.
I went to the entrance, knocked, and said “hello?” A man appeared.
“Do you speak English?” I asked.
“A little,” he replied, which turned out to mean a lot.
“My name is Hannah, I’m from the United States, and I have a friend
who I think used to live in this house before 1948. Can I come in and
look?”
He seemed hesitant but let me in. I asked if I could photograph and he
was slightly more hesitant, but again agreed. He asked if I was sure
this was the house, and I told him about the description of the path,
stairs, and entrance. I asked how long he’d lived there, and he told me
only a couple years. He rents the place from a French Israeli man who
has owned it for about five years. Before that, the building was owned
by a Moroccan Israeli family.
“Since 1948?” I asked.
“Well, the Israeli government probably had it first and then gave it
to them, but yes, for a long time.”
I kept photographing. I was a bit hesitant to have any meaningful
conversation with him because I was afraid it might spoil my ability to be
filming. As I was getting ready to leave, though, he began a
conversation:
“The reason I let you in,” he told me, “is that one time my
sister went back to Morocco to find our family house. The man currently
living there
wouldn’t let her in. She cried and cried, and finally he let her in,
but he wouldn’t let her photograph. This is why I let you in and let
you
photograph.”
“Do you want to return to Morocco?” I asked.
“No,” he said, almost laughing at the suggestion.
“If the situation changed?”
“No, Morocco is for the Moroccans and Israel is for the Israelis.”
“What about the Palestinians?”
“We were here first,” he said, “thousands of years ago. This is
our land, it says so in the bible.” I had noticed all the torahs and
other religious texts in the house, so it did not surprise me that he
was religious.
“Sixty years ago my friend was living here,” I said.
“History doesn’t start in 1948,” he answered.
There was no use arguing with religion. We said an awkward goodbye
(what I would usually say when someone has let me into his house would be
“thank
you,” but it didn’t seem right in this situation), and I left.
My search for 1948 was over, and amazingly, it was a success. As I
returned to East Jerusalem with Abed, I thought about how many people we
had involved in this project, and how important a project it is, both on
personal and national levels. I thought about some of those people, and
how their names suited the story perfectly:
The sweet and helpful taxi driver is Abed, “one who serves.”
The man currently living in my friend’s house is named Israel.
The old Israeli man who helped us find the house is named Shalom.
Perhaps if more people named Shalom helped refugees find their homes,
the word “peace” would have true meaning.
www.bostontopalestine.org
Below: Hannah describes her search for a Boston based friend's family
home in West Jerusalem. Hannah is a young Jewish-American activist based
in Boston. She is currently working with "Birthright Unplugged" in
Palestine, a program she cofounded.
Hannah's writings and links: http://hannahinpalestine.blogspot.com/
Historical Context (by B2P): The 1948 war physically destroyed much of
Palestinian society and created the state of Israel. Zionist militias
which later became the Israeli military, attacked Palestinian villages
and expelled the inhabitants, becoming today's refugees in Lebanon,
Syria, Gaza and elsewhere. Most of these villages are only ruins today,
with some exceptions. In cities like West Jerusalem, many Palestinian
homes were in large buildings that remained intact and still contained
personal belongings at the end of the war. The newly formed Israeli
government gave many of these homes to immigrating Jews from Europe and all
over the world. For more historical context, see Israeli historian
Benny Morris' "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,"
Cambridge University Press, 1989.
---------------------
The Search for 1948
February 4, 2007
“Where do you want to go?” asked the taxi driver, expecting to give
me a short ride and collect a few shekels.
“Baqa’a,” I replied, “but it’s a bit of a project.”
The West Jerusalem neighborhood of Baqa’a is only a 10 minute drive
from the place in East Jerusalem where we were, but time travel takes
somewhat more
imagination.
“I’m looking for a house from 1948,” I told him, and handed him a
diagram of a house that looked similar to hundreds of other old houses
in the Jerusalem area.
“Is it yours?” he asked.
“No, a friend’s.”
Only a few months ago I found out that a friend of mine in Boston, who
I’d always known as Lebanese, was actually born in Jerusalem. In
1948, at the
age of four, he and his family, along with 800,000 Palestinian people,
were forced out of their home by pre-Israeli forces. They fled to
Lebanon, where
his father had lived before moving to Jerusalem 20 years earlier.
Nobody in the family has been back to Palestine since 1948, so I asked my
friend if he would like me to try to find his house. He gathered some
information, including a few nearby landmarks and a diagram of the house,
and I set off on my search.
This brings me back to Abed’s taxi, where I sat hoping he knew the
neighborhoods well enough to help me. I had planned to seek out an older
taxi driver, and possibly someone who spoke English so I could make
sure to communicate every little detail I knew. Abed is a young guy who
speaks very little English, but he seemed interested in and moved by the
project, and
immediately began to call all the older people he knew.
“Do you know where the Jordanian embassy was before 1948?” he would
ask, as this was our major landmark.
“Yes,” one man told him, “but it wasn’t in Baqa’a.”
“No,” said a couple people, “there was barely a Jordan at that
time. How could there be a Jordanian embassy?”
So we began to drive, looking for the other smaller landmarks, or for
people who might recognize the name of my friend’s father.
We left Baqa’a and crossed the street to another neighborhood that is
still mostly Palestinian. Not two minutes later, we passed an old man
and Abed stopped. We got out of the car, said hello,
and explained what we were doing. “You’re in luck,” replied the
old man, “I know more about these neighborhoods than anyone else in
the area.”
Before I knew it, his wife was serving me coffee in the middle of the
street and the man was telling his wife and daughters to go ahead to the
hospital because he would come in the car with us as long as Abed
agreed to drive him to the hospital afterwards. Abed agreed, and we
continued on our journey, this time with a new passenger.
We drove for about a half hour with little success, and then the man
(whose name I never learned) suggested we stop at an old house on the
corner. We knocked on the door, and an old Israeli man answered. He took
one look at us and asked, “Are you looking for someone who used to
live here?” as he opened the door and let us in. “You’re in luck,”
he said, “I know more
about these neighborhoods than anyone else in the area.”
So here I was inside a house with Abed the taxi driver, and two older
men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, who said they knew everything
about the
area. They talked for a few minutes and argued amiably for a few more
in a combination of Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The interaction had an
air of
pre-Zionism to it that is difficult to explain. The men were
interacting like any two older men would, both trying to be helpful and both
trying to prove what they knew. They used language of “Arab” and
“Jew” instead of “Palestinian” and “Israeli”, which many people
do, but it just seemed right in this situation. Like nationalism and the
way it has played out had nothing to do with this simple human search
for an old home.
It was getting late, so we took the name and phone number of the
Israeli man so we could try again another day.
Two weeks later, the only day out of several that wasn’t pouring
rain, I met Abed in Jerusalem. I had received more precise directions from
my friend in Boston, including names of other people who lived and
worked in the area and, most importantly, a photograph taken from the house
in 1940.
Abed met me and told me he knew where the house was, that he had gone
back there after our last search, and drove me to the neighborhood. We
parked and began to walk around, holding up the photograph to each gate
and entrance. We found
one house that looked quite similar and currently has a huge
construction project going on directly on top of it. The managers were Israeli,
the workers Palestinian. We went in and asked the workers what they knew
about the house, which wasn’t much. We were stopped on the way out by
a manager.
Abed explained in Hebrew that we were trying to find a house. The man
glanced at the photo and said, “Yes, this looks like the house.”
Another
manager came out and ordered us off the property. “This isn’t the
house,” he said. “There was nothing here before 1948.”
We stood outside for a few minutes as Abed explained to me (as though
explanation was needed) that the Israeli man felt threatened by us.
“We
need to find an Israeli to help us,” said Abed. “They think you and
I are here to claim the house because I’m Arab and you have papers in
your hand.
They don’t know we’re only here to look and photograph.”
“We should take the house,” I replied, only half joking.
By that time we had realized this was probably not the house we were
looking for. The gate looked the same but we couldn’t figure out the
angles in the
photograph and it just didn’t seem right.
Another older Israeli man on the street asked if he could help. Abed
explained that we were searching for a house, and the man joined us for
the next 20 minutes as we walked around the neighborhood. We kept
finding similar sights, but none of them fit together right. Finally he
asked, “Are you sure the house is in the German Colony?”
“No,” I replied, “it’s in Baqa’a.”
The older Israeli man who had helped us the first time had convinced
Abed to come to this area. So we got back into the car and headed back up
to his house. He answered the door and I shared all my new information
with him. It’s near the Trans-Jordanian consulate, I told him, not
the Jordanian embassy. There’s a road that goes down from the main
street towards their house.
Well, these two pieces of information were all he needed. He followed
me out to the street, pointed, and said, “Go two more traffic lights.
The Allenby building is probably what you mean, and that’s on your
left. There’s a street that goes down from there on the right.”
Something felt right about this, so I got back in the car excitedly and
we drove those two blocks, turned right, and got out and started
walking. The
streets were different than they were described to me, and the building
supposedly on the corner wasn’t there. But sure enough, after a few
minutes
of meandering, I found myself in front of a large building that was in
the background of the photo I was holding. I positioned myself exactly
at the
angle that the photo was taken from, and looked around. One street
continued to go down, so I took it. To my right was a synagogue that I
guessed was either my friend’s property or his neighbor’s. I hoped it
was not his, that his house had not been completely destroyed and
replaced by a synagogue.
We passed the synagogue and stopped in front of the gate to the next
house. This was it. Different from the photo, but with the same
dimensions, and seemingly the right distance from the larger building up the
street. We entered and found ourselves on the stone path described in the
e-mail I had in my hand from my friend’s older brother:
“…continue along the stone-paved path… some 8 meters, you reach
the level of the house… Move some 10 more meters and you will have the
six stone steps (to the left) that lead up to the veranda and you will
then be facing the main door, entrance to the house.”
I was facing the main door, the entrance to the house. I wanted to
knock on the door, but wanted to take in as much as possible first. I
walked around the house, wondering which plants and trees had been there
when my friend lived there and which were new.
Finally Abed knocked. No answer. We waited a few minutes and then left.
I came back about five minutes later to photograph more and the door to
the house was open.
I went to the entrance, knocked, and said “hello?” A man appeared.
“Do you speak English?” I asked.
“A little,” he replied, which turned out to mean a lot.
“My name is Hannah, I’m from the United States, and I have a friend
who I think used to live in this house before 1948. Can I come in and
look?”
He seemed hesitant but let me in. I asked if I could photograph and he
was slightly more hesitant, but again agreed. He asked if I was sure
this was the house, and I told him about the description of the path,
stairs, and entrance. I asked how long he’d lived there, and he told me
only a couple years. He rents the place from a French Israeli man who
has owned it for about five years. Before that, the building was owned
by a Moroccan Israeli family.
“Since 1948?” I asked.
“Well, the Israeli government probably had it first and then gave it
to them, but yes, for a long time.”
I kept photographing. I was a bit hesitant to have any meaningful
conversation with him because I was afraid it might spoil my ability to be
filming. As I was getting ready to leave, though, he began a
conversation:
“The reason I let you in,” he told me, “is that one time my
sister went back to Morocco to find our family house. The man currently
living there
wouldn’t let her in. She cried and cried, and finally he let her in,
but he wouldn’t let her photograph. This is why I let you in and let
you
photograph.”
“Do you want to return to Morocco?” I asked.
“No,” he said, almost laughing at the suggestion.
“If the situation changed?”
“No, Morocco is for the Moroccans and Israel is for the Israelis.”
“What about the Palestinians?”
“We were here first,” he said, “thousands of years ago. This is
our land, it says so in the bible.” I had noticed all the torahs and
other religious texts in the house, so it did not surprise me that he
was religious.
“Sixty years ago my friend was living here,” I said.
“History doesn’t start in 1948,” he answered.
There was no use arguing with religion. We said an awkward goodbye
(what I would usually say when someone has let me into his house would be
“thank
you,” but it didn’t seem right in this situation), and I left.
My search for 1948 was over, and amazingly, it was a success. As I
returned to East Jerusalem with Abed, I thought about how many people we
had involved in this project, and how important a project it is, both on
personal and national levels. I thought about some of those people, and
how their names suited the story perfectly:
The sweet and helpful taxi driver is Abed, “one who serves.”
The man currently living in my friend’s house is named Israel.
The old Israeli man who helped us find the house is named Shalom.
Perhaps if more people named Shalom helped refugees find their homes,
the word “peace” would have true meaning.
