What Was Palestine Before the Nakba?

By Mohammed El-Kurd / The Nation

I am writing this introduction in English and Arabic, and it is in these moments that the profound chasm between these two languages reveals itself. In English, there is a need to riddle the page with facts and figures detailing the essential cruelties of an atrocity that should be—and should have long been—internationally recognized. I’m tempted to squeeze into these lines a history lesson, to list the names of the various terrorist paramilitaries that formed the Israeli military that’s terrorizing us today; the number of massacres, exiles, refugees; the endless hectares of stolen land; the pregnant bellies split open in Deir Yassin. There is no need for such contextualization in Arabic: The Nakba breathes down our necks, invading our national identity and contorting our earliest encounters with our sense of self. It is relentless. It happens in the present tense, everywhere on the map. For some households, it began when a grandfather was dispossessed in Jaffa and sought refuge in Gaza, where it continues in the rumble of the warplanes across the blockaded enclave, introducing his grandchildren to their first—or perhaps third, or sixth—war. Not a corner of our geography is spared, not a generation.This essay and the accompanying photographs have been excerpted from Mohammed El-Kurd’s Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba, which was published by Haymarket Books on February 20.

And it is seemingly ubiquitous, following us even in exile. A Palestinian born in Lebanon’s Ein El-Hilweh refugee camp, and not in their grandparents’ Akka—which is both far and near, less than 100 kilometers away—will live tortured by their aborted potential, deprived of citizenship and freedom of movement. And it is absurd: Settlers with New York accents, armed with rifles, can escape criminal charges in the United States to squat in a Jerusalemite’s home, backed by their army, judiciary, and God (their favorite real estate agent).

Still, most, if not all, of this well-documented theft and bloodshed is denied and obfuscated by prominent political, media, and academic institutions in the Anglophone world.

Before conjuring the ability to write a few coherent paragraphs prefacing these photos, all I could think while flipping through them was: What have they done to you? What have they done to Palestine? I was struck by the images of Palestine before the walls and the colonies and the checkpoints clogged its arteries; images captured between towns and villages, now separated by concrete barriers and worlds apart, that were once intertwined socially and economically. Our eyes seldom encounter Palestine before the Israeli regime, a Palestine defined not by its ailments but by its industries and cultures. Yet it is important to resist the urge to romanticize that era. One must situate these photographs within the proper socioeconomic context and ask about what is not represented in these images: Who had access to cameras? Who was behind those cameras? What can be said of those who lived far from the flashbulbs and tape recorders? Where do we look for their fossilized legacies? The tessella of beautiful, unseen photographs that forms as you turn these pages is as illuminating as it is incomplete. There are many conversations we should be having with our grandparents, at their dinner tables, before their deathbeds, and even more work to do if we are to ensure that the victims and resisters of the present-day Nakba aren’t merely acknowledged in fleeting headlines.

These photos, along with the many others that appear in Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba, which was published in February, reaffirm that Palestine’s history does not begin in fleeing. Not only do they defy the brutal revisionism on the part of the empires and mercenaries seeking to vanquish us; they also disrupt the engineered cultural and political mystification of the Nakba that has, for generations, made its undoing seem impossibly remote.

By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss

As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin. 

Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.

Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes. 

Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.

Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.

On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.

There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.

The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.

Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.

They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel

The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.

We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.

The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.

After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago. 

What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.

“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”

“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality. 

Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.

“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.” 

Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed. 

“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”

When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.

He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.” 

I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows. 

We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.

/sp

You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.