(C) Global Voices
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‘I will tell you what numbers can’t about Gaza’ [1]
['Asia Zughaiar']
Date: 2024-03-07
In the 2004 documentary by the MachsomWatch (Checkpoints Watch), a group of Israeli women who monitor and document the conduct of soldiers and policemen at checkpoints in the West Bank, I'm standing on the right side next to my father at minute 9:11. I was only six years old at the time, attending first grade. We were yelling at the soldier to let us pass because we were late for school and had exams. I remember my father being very frustrated then.
Despite these experiences, our Palestinian curriculum led us to believe in the existence of an efficient sophisticated council (the United Nations) where nations came together to address global issues and prevent wars and atrocities.
I witnessed the Israeli construction of a 9-meter (30-ft) high concrete wall, which began in the year 2002 and was later identified as “the apartheid wall.” The wall separated my school in Beit Hanina from my home in Kufarakab and created a barrier between my house and my cousins’ house. The wall sparked my curiosity about the term “apartheid.”
I remember hearing the sounds of construction of the apartheid wall down the street from our school, at the same time I was learning about the “Nakba” and all the pain associated with the word.
The Nakba, an Arabic term meaning “catastrophe,” refers to the events surrounding the 1948 Palestine war, which gave way to the establishment of the state of Israel. There were several massacres perpetrated against Palestinian civilians by Zionist paramilitary groups, which later became the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), or what many refer to as the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF).
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee or were expelled from their lands, leading to significant refugee populations in neighboring Arab countries and beyond. Generations have lived stateless in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, still waiting to return home 75 years later.
As little children in school in Jerusalem, we were convinced the answer was as simple as one plus one equals two; surely, the world allowed the Nakba to happen because they didn't know it was happening. According to the morals we learnt in our classroom as children, human lives matter regardless of religion, background, and language.
Our grandparents and great-grandparents who experienced the Nakba were blindsided by the terrorist Israeli mobs. My great-grandfather Hamed Zughaiar lived in Jerusalem’s old city in the same house as a Palestinian Jewish man called Mordachay in the 1920s. My Muslim great-grandfather spoke Yiddish, and his neighbour and friend Mordachay spoke Arabic. Hamed and Mordachay both worked as shoemakers in what is currently called Machne Yehuda market long before the establishment of Israel. My great-grandfather trusted the Jewish population, as he saw them as equals. The Nakba left deep generational traumas on my family, stories of which we still recount to this day. In 1946, my grandfather bought his dream house near the Jerusalem Cinematheque, only to be forced to flee with my great-grandmother Nazeemeh two years later. Upon their return a few days later, they found that the house had been occupied by an Iraqi Jewish family. Just like that, his dream house was gone. The only explanation that made sense to me is that they didn’t have phones back then, so they couldn’t videotape the atrocities they experienced; therefore, no one could save them.
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[1] Url:
https://globalvoices.org/2024/03/07/i-will-tell-you-what-numbers-cant-about-gaza/
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