When Palestinians insist that nothing will be resolved until the root cause of their predicament is addressed, Jenin is exactly what they are talking about. The atrocities over this past week perpetrated in the city of Jenin and its adjacent refugee camp are the manifestation of Israel’s settler-colonial project in Palestine and the reason why its apartheid regime and decades-long occupation must be dismantled. If this oppressive system continues unabated, Palestinians will continue to suffer time and time again at the hands of Israel’s brutal military machine, commandeered by the ever-increasingly extremist and right-wing Israeli governments that pull the strings.

For two days straight, the Israeli occupation army and air force pummeled the Jenin refugee camp with airstrikes, artillery fire and ground forces. In 48 hours, Israel killed 12 Palestinians and injured hundreds of others. This number is likely to climb, given that even ambulances were prohibited from reaching the wounded, undoubtedly exacerbating the status of the injured. Harrowing videos showed young men, boys even, wounded and incapacitated on the street, bleeding because ambulances were not able to reach them.

This is not the first time Jenin has been under fire, and if Israel is not stopped in its tracks, it will not be the last. In April 2002, Israeli occupation forces and fighter jets invaded the Jenin refugee camp, backed by armored tanks and bulldozers. The “battle for Jenin” lasted for 10 days, at the end of which at least 52 Palestinians, civilians and fighters were killed. The bulldozers deliberately razed over 400 homes and damaged several hundreds of others.

Cut to July 2023 and the situation is painfully reminiscent. On July 3, Israeli occupation forces proceeded to tear up the roads in the camp, severing water pipes and cutting the power. Hospitals, severely overcrowded and overwhelmed by the mass influx of casualties and people seeking shelter from the bombing, also suffered water cuts and electricity outages with scenes outside the hospital looking like a full-blown warzone.

However, this is no war. This is an occupied, civilian-populated area, whose residents have already been displaced at least once, in 1948 and perhaps again in 1967. Most of the residents are young, having only lived under Israel’s military occupation, which began in the West Bank in 1967. Their parents and grandparents will recall even more heinous atrocities and massacres from the Nakba of 1948, when they were forced out of their original homes inside what is now Israel.

This is why, when thousands of Jenin camp residents were seen fleeing the gunfire, the explosions, destruction and home raids, men and women carrying their terrified children in their arms out of the camp, the whole of Palestine was reminded of this generational trauma. The Nakba is still etched deep in the collective memory of Palestinians, its trauma not ‘post’ but ongoing, the wound reopened over and over again.

There is no doubt that Jenin and its refugee camp will survive and rebuild, just as they did before because that's how Palestinians operate. The scars created by this trauma will always run deep. It is not only unfair that they remain under occupation and apartheid, it is cruel and it is inhumane. The world cannot continue to look on as Palestinian cities, villages and refugee camps are decimated and still consider itself moral and civilized. The longer Israel is allowed to brutalize the Palestinians under its occupation, commit war crimes and violations with impunity, while still being welcomed among so-called civilized nations, the more the international community’s own moral standing will continue to erode.

This is not a story about numbers. Granted, numbers are very relevant, but not today. This is about role-play, about imagining yourself in another’s position and then, once realized, demanding justice, accountability and compensation for the unbelievable atrocity that must no longer be ignored.

This is about the Nakba, but this time, it is yours. Imagine that in a matter of days, sometimes hours, your entire world is turned upside down. You no longer have a home, belongings or money, except for whatever you could manage to hastily stuff in your pockets before running for your life. Zionist militias, armed and ready, invade your city or burn down your village and you have nowhere to go, so you flee. You have heard that in neighboring villages and towns, these militias have slaughtered hundreds of people, pillaged their homes and claimed the land as their own. Deir Yassin, where over 100 innocent people were killed, is just one of these documented massacres. This terrifies you to the bone, so you flee, children, house keys, maybe some pictures or personal documents, in tow. You join the leagues of other terrified people who are walking to an unknown future, hoping beyond hope that this nightmare will end in a few short days. Not in your wildest dreams did you imagine that you would never see your home again; that it does not matter if you left your front door unlocked or the clothes still hanging on the clothesline. Someone else, a stranger, will soon have taken your place.

This is just temporary, you convince yourself; this situation is not sustainable, you say, because nobody has the right to take away your home and your property, much less your homeland. If anyone dared, there was a world that believes in justice, rights and humanity that would not allow it. At least that is what you believed then.

But this is not your story and you should be very grateful for that. This is the story of the Palestinian Nakba and it is as real as it gets. According to official UN estimates, at least 750,000 women, men and children, or 75% of the Palestinian population of historical Palestine, were displaced, expelled and ethnically cleansed over the course of a few months, never to return to their homes. Their false hopes of return eventually turned into shattered dreams and a lifetime of exile in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jordan, or for those exiled closer to the northern border of Palestine, to squalid refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon.

Even the United Nations, upon realizing the magnitude of the Nakba or “catastrophe’ that had occurred, did not believe it would last for 75 years and counting. It created UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, to cope with the fallout of Israel’s creation over the wreckage of what was once Palestine. The agency was meant to provide emergency assistance to Palestinians displaced by the war until a permanent solution could be found. Its mandate has been renewed repeatedly since then for obvious reasons.

For those who were exiled, it is hard to tell when it finally dawned on them that they would never go home. Hope is a double-edged sword because it motivates people to continue to strive for their goals, in this case, the legitimate demand to return to their rightful homes. However, the flip side is the disappointment and desperation that takes over when year after year, this demand is ignored, maligned and pushed back by the powers that be, first and foremost by Israel, the perpetrator and maintainer of the atrocity and secondly, by its powerful global allies, the United States in particular.

The result is that these people, who had productive and meaningful lives just like anyone else, were so cruelly uprooted and dispossessed by no fault of their own and demand nothing more than their legitimate right of return. This is a right enshrined in international law and in particular, UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which clearly states: “Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date...”

These are nice words, ones that by any standard, should be binding. However, for anyone who has languished in the Biqa’a camp in Jordan, the Shati’ camp in the Gaza Strip or the Yarmouk camp in Syria, this resolution is nothing but useless ink on paper. The Palestinians have and never will relinquish their inalienable right of return to their original homes; time has proven that. Still, this is only part of the equation. It falls on the international community to uphold the standards, which it espouses. It has an ethical, legal and moral obligation to ensure that justice is realized for Palestine refugees and that Israel, the creator of this catastrophe, is held accountable for its dark past and crimes against the indigenous people of this land.

Now, think of this story, not from the lens of the Palestinians, a foreign people you may not know much about. Think of this story as if it were your own: it was your house that was stolen, your land that was given to another people, your relatives massacred and displaced and you whose identity and cause have been systematically denied for almost a century. Can you see it?

Hard times are exactly as they sound. But when these ‘hard times’ continue for close to 60 years, they become basically intolerable. Ask any Palestinian living under Israel’s brutal occupation and they will erase any doubts that ‘hard times’ doesn’t even come close.

Take this testimony from a woman, a teacher living in the northern West Bank city of Tubas, who told MIFTAH about the terrifying night the Israeli occupation army raided her home. The raid took place on February 23, 2022 at around 4:30 am. This is not unusual for occupation forces, which are trained to storm homes with families quietly sleeping in their beds, in the wee hours before dawn, to instill fear and panic and turn their lives and homes upside-down in a second.

This teacher, Maha, shares her home with her older sister, Dua’ and her elderly mother. She and her sister are also blind. “I was awakened by my sister yelling: who are you? Are you djinn or human? Maha, answer me! Is that you?” There was no answer. “I was still in bed when I felt something – I was not sure what – pull off my covers and push me to the floor. I was terrified and started calling out for Dua’. I could feel there were people in the room, all around me, right before one of them began to beat me. I was so scared and called out to my mother but I couldn’t hear her voice.”

Maha spent half an hour in sheer terror, alone, confused, being beaten and not knowing the fate of her elderly mother, as the Israeli trespassers ransacked her home, petrifying them all. “I cannot begin to describe the terror I felt; I have never felt that way my whole life,” she recounts.

Finally, after what seemed to be an interminable period, she heard the voice she was longing for the most: her mother. “She was screaming to us, telling us that the intruders were Israeli soldiers and that they had a large dog with them.” This terrified her even more, especially since she was forced to remain on the floor and she could hear her sister’s cries. “I remember thinking: if only I could see, to know what was happening around me, I would then go back to being blind. I just wanted to help and calm my sister down. I just wanted to help my mother. The soldiers made me totally incapacitated.”

Maha’s story is one of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have endured grueling house raids, arbitrary arrests, home demolitions and settler attacks. Still, even when there are no ‘active’ Israeli assaults on Palestinians, merely existing under Israeli military rule is anything but normal. Every Palestinian in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip is all too familiar with the hundreds of Israeli checkpoints interrupting the geographic flow between Palestinian cities, villages and camps. They are accosted by the sight of the illegal annexation wall, cutting along, and in places, deep into, West Bank territory, severing Palestinians from their farmlands, from their loved ones, from Jerusalem and from historic Palestine. They must apply for permits to build, to travel, to seek medical attention or to visit their loved ones in Israeli prisons, all at the whim of Israeli occupation authorities.

The raid on Maha’s house that night ended in zero arrests, but hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians have not been as lucky. Since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip in the June, 1967 war, over one million Palestinians have been illegally arrested by its occupation forces. That is a staggering number for a population that stands at approximately 5.3 million, according to Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimates for 2022. At present, there are nearly 5,000 Palestinian men, women and children being held in Israeli prisons and detention centers inside the West Bank and in Israel, the latter illegal under international law, which does not allow an occupying party to imprison their ‘subjects’ outside of the territories it occupies.

International law has never been an obstacle for Israel, something the Palestinians know all too well. According to testimonies collected by MIFTAH field researches, collected between 2020 and 2022, Israeli occupation forces never presented a legal search or arrest warrant during the raids. All of the testimonies stated that large numbers of soldiers participated in the raids, sometimes exceeding 20 or 30, irrespective of children, women or the elderly. Once detained, the men, women and oftentimes children, are taken to Israeli detention centers, sometimes held for days on end without having access to legal counsel, mistreated, deprived nutritious food, sleep, appropriate clothing and in the worst case, tortured.

The detainee is then brought before a “kangaroo” Israeli military court, which for Palestinians, has an almost 100% conviction rate. They are charged with ‘crimes’, all related to some form of resistance to the occupation and summarily sentenced, or placed under administrative detention. While this form of detention, which allows Israeli authorities to hold Palestinians without charge or trial, is technically not banned under international law, it is never meant to be renewed for years, as is the case with the Palestinians.

The nightmare does not stop there, however. For the families of prisoners, visiting their loved ones in Israeli prisons is always a grueling process. According to a January, 2023 MIFTAH report on Israeli violations of Palestinian rights in the West Bank, affidavits from families visiting imprisoned relatives in Israeli prisons reported that on average, the entire process takes between 12-14 hours. What’s more, once they arrive, the actual visit only lasts 45 minutes and takes place in rooms with no direct contact and a glass wall separating them at all times. In a 2019 testimonial, documented by the Israeli rights organization B’Tselem, 80-year old Hilweh Shabaneh, from the Ramallah-area village of Sinjil sums up the horrific journey to visit her son in the Nafha Prison.

“From four o’clock in the morning to nine o’clock at night, 17 long hours of dragging around from one place to another, from one bus to another and one security check to another, getting on, getting off, on and off. Even if I were made out of iron I would collapse”.

Shabaneh then unwittingly sums up Palestinians’ sentiments regarding life under Israeli military occupation, overall.

“I swear to God, I wouldn't wish this on anybody.”

- https://www.btselem.org/freedom_of_movement20200212_arduous_journey_of_palestinians_visiting_relatives_jailed_by_israel

The power of image is important to anyone who is concerned about how others view them. The way one is perceived, especially on first impression, is integral to the opinion of the outside world and their reaction/action towards them. This, it seems, is no different for a government or a whole nation. Politicians strive to perfect their image on behalf of their party in order to secure more votes, and whole countries put across a global image in order to attract people to their shores and boost their tourism industry. But the global image of a country is significant in other, more politically-driven, ways. This essay will look at how Israel understands the importance of its’ image in shaping other countries’ foreign policy towards it and how it manipulates the media in order to refine and justify the actions of the military in news reports, focusing particularly on the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid coverage.

Background: Propaganda, public diplomacy and soft power

In order to disseminate such an image, a government can employ what was originally labeled as propaganda. Following the harmful yet effective propaganda that was in circulation throughout the Second World War and the following Cold War, such image-shaping efforts have now been renamed in order to avoid the negative connotations. Governments now talk about ‘public diplomacy’.

Public diplomacy can affect the foreign policy of another country and thus influence their treatment towards one’s own country. While this can be done through diplomatic, economic and military means, it can also be achieved through ‘soft power’. Therefore governments target civilian audiences whose opinion has a bearing on the government’s policy. As the academic Manheim points out ‘public relations are more likely to have effect in foreign affairs than in domestic affairs because there is less knowledge and experience on part of the citizens’, therefore the coverage of foreign affairs becomes tantamount. In this way, outside governments began to realize that they can have a positive effect on the opinion of civilians and, in turn, on that country’s foreign policy through carefully grooming their public image and explaining their actions to the rest of the world through information.

As governments acknowledged the importance of such ‘information activities’, they began to devote more and more resources to the endeavor. The United States has the Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs which is dedicated to ‘supporting the achievement of US foreign policy goals and objectives, advance national interests, and enhance national security by informing and influencing foreign publics…’ The British government also employs their own methods of public diplomacy through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office which undertakes ‘a process of achieving the UK’s international strategic priorities through engaging and forming partnerships with like-minded organizations and individuals in the public arena.’ According to the FCO, ‘it’s not just about delivering messages but holding a two-way dialogue, listening to and learning from audiences around the world, in order to get a better understanding of the changing perceptions of the UK and its policies.’

Following suit, the Israeli government takes the role of public diplomacy very seriously and as such devotes a number of resources to educating and influencing foreign audiences, particularly those in the United States. The Israeli government has its own word that has been used since the 1970s in relation to their own public diplomacy work. Hasbara is roughly translated as ‘explanation’ and is used under the context of Israeli policy and actions. Along with the work undertaken by the Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, the government has created other ways in which the image of Israel can be explained and promoted around the world, from person to person.

Public diplomacy and hasbara are employed as tactics of ‘soft power’. When Hilary Clinton became Secretary of State, she remarked on the importance of a ‘smart power’ strategy, that being the attention to both hard and soft power. While hard power concerns military prowess and financial coercions, soft power deals more with development and education.

For example, the Hasbara fellowships bring young people from the US to Israel to learn more about the country so that they may become ‘effective pro-Israel advocates on their campuses’.

Perhaps, one of the most challenging obstacles to the image of Israel is the action of its military in respect of the occupation. For this reason, the Israeli Defense has its own department which deals with media relations concerning their own actions. The IF Spokesperson’s Unit is organized into a number of branches ranging from international media, strategies, public affairs and film. The last mentioned produces films and footage about the Israeli military and will be looked at more closely further on in this essay.

Such efforts of public diplomacy have been developed and stream lined so that, following Israeli military action, the appropriate process of ‘explanation’ and justification can be put into place. In order to show how the Israeli public diplomacy or ‘PR’ machine works, I will look at the media coverage following the Gaza flotilla incident in May 2010.

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Harriet Straughen is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.

Last night I introduced a friend from home to one of my new friends from Ramallah. As we chatted, we started to talk about the summer and the prospect for us in Britain to be able to venture outside, for camping, barbeques, festivals and the like. My Palestinian friend listened and nodded politely but I was sure he was holding back.

Further into the conversation, as everyone was more comfortable in speaking their mind, he admitted his frustration at hearing such things. As we freely talked about our summer plans, he had been thinking about the restrictions laid on him that prevents such summer time frivolity. For instance, when we talked about camping, he said he was thinking, ‘I am scared when I go camping. As my foreign friends enjoy the ‘freedom’ of sleeping in the great outdoors, I am nervous that a shot might fire over our heads at any time. I am worried that Israeli military could appear at any time and demand our ID, or even detain us for some unknown crime. My foreign friends do not think about this.’

This lack of freedom and the constant anxiety it instills is a fact of life that Palestinians, many of whom were born under occupation, must counter into their lives every day. As those of us who are lucky to come from a liberal, fair and free country, we are unaware of the constant stress caused by living under occupation. Whether this is about the length of a journey because of checkpoints along the way, or whether your family will get their permits in order to worship in Jerusalem during holy days, the occupation must always figure largely in the minds of Palestinians.

I am wary of talking too much about my holidays or the time I have spent travelling around Israel for fear of being insensitive towards those who can’t enjoy the same physical freedom as me. Since being here, I have learnt to be more aware of what Palestinians (particularly those restricted to the West Bank) are permitted and not permitted to do because of the situation and the way in which to ask questions. For instance, I am careful to ask about what plans they have for the summer or, for Christians, for Easter, because ultimately this decision is rarely just their own. They may plan to cross the border to visit family or enjoy a change of scene but this can only happen at the discretion of the Israeli authority which distributes permits. Regardless of holidays, families often find it impossible to visit each other between the West Bank and Jerusalem because of the travel restrictions laid down, resulting in months passing between family visits that would normally only take a 20-minute drive.

This restriction happens between West Bank towns also. Despite travelling from one Palestinian town to another, one could still be denied access by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint, therefore plans can be made but obstacles and delays are always prepared for, if not expected.

With the constant pressure of second-guessing anything that might come between you and daily life, it must be exhausting to make plans far in advance. When it is uncertain whether there will be clear access for work in the morning, it must surely be a risk to plan something more long term.

I invited this same friend to come visit us in Britain so that he could experience the festivals and the barbeques for himself. The suggestion was met with a polite but cynical smile. In order to get to Britain, he explains, he would have to be formally invited and able to provide reasons for being there and contacts that could vouch for him. In my ignorance, I assumed that these demands came from the Israeli authority. ‘No’ he tells me, ‘this is what your British government asks for.’

So here my friend from Ramallah is telling me about my own country’s visa requirements although he has never been there, never been to Europe. Just because travel seems so impossible at times, does not mean that many Palestinian people do not think about it, look into it, try it. Despite the daily obstacles faced and the amount of forethought that is required to complete the most basic of tasks while under occupation, Palestinians, like anyone else, have more ambitious plans, why shouldn’t they? Just because one is forced to live under a physical occupation, does not mean that one’s mind should be restricted too. The Palestinian people have just as many travel, educational and personal plans as any other but in their instance they can rarely be realized. So for those living in a free state, maybe give some thought, as Palestinians do every minute of the day, to the Israeli occupation and the difficulty of achieving what is a human right - to live life with a free body and mind.

Harriet Straughen is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.

In a recent interview with The Jerusalem Post, the newly-appointed head of the Israeli government press office, Oren Helman, spoke about foreign media and their need to see a different side to Israel than the one which is so often a focus in international media. Aside from the conflict, Helman talks about a new initiative called ‘There is more to Israel’ or TIMTI for short. He wants to ‘take them to see things, give them briefings, give them more information’. All of this seems fair and appropriate for a government press office. Helman then uses, as his example, the West Bank city of Hebron. He tells the Jerusalem Post, ‘You have to bring them there to see what is being talked about. It is not how they say, a city under the oppressive occupation of the Israelis. People are not suffering that greatly there.’ As a reflection of this, he cites the three malls and a new $10 million sports center found in Hebron.

After reading this, I took my own trip to Hebron, so that I too could see what was being talked about. As the bus entered the city, I saw the sports center and one or two of the malls. But a five-minute walk away from this main street, one reaches the edge of the old city of Hebron. Again, this is a bustling area with all manner of stalls and shops peddling their goods to the crowds of people walking through.

However, as I walk deeper into the old city, the crowds diminish as do the stalls and shops. Only two-three minutes’ walk from the main entrance to the old city, there are more shops closed then there are open. Above our heads a battered mesh covers the market street. On that mesh are rocks, some the size of dinner plates, interspersed with all manner of rubbish. One shopkeeper shows me the singed hole of his shop’s tarpaulin cover, the result of a burning object being thrown down through the mesh and landing in his shop. Above the market reside a number of Israeli settlers (approximately 400 in the center of Hebron), many of whom show their objection to the Palestinians below through such acts of violence and harassment. There is little wonder why so many shopkeepers have decided to leave their property below, unable to maintain a living under such circumstances.

Further along the market street, the area opens up to a square surrounded by beautiful but battered old buildings. As one looks up, several Israeli soldiers meet your gaze all monitoring the area from surrounding roofs and balconies, with their guns held up ready for any ‘trouble’.

I visited Hebron during Passover. During this time, there were increased ‘security’ measures employed in the city, as there was all over the West Bank and Israel. In Hebron, in order to ‘secure’ the area for the passage of the settlers from their homes to the Tomb of the Patriarchs/Ibrahimi Mosque, soldiers were placed every 10-20 meters along the old city street they would walk through. Each soldier held his gun to his chest so that the barrel was pointing at head/chest height for most people. Never having been in such close proximity to so many guns, my natural reaction was to physically recoil each time I passed them. At one point, an Israeli soldier on patrol turns around and points his gun directly at a child, no more than 12, walking behind him. To my horror, the child barely flinches, presumably he is so used to this sort of behavior.

The soldiers were stationed there until the settlers moved through to the holy site, completely closed to Muslim worshippers of the Ibrahimi mosque in the same location. Shortly after, I re-entered the area and spoke to one of its Palestinian inhabitants.

Leila both works and lives within the old city of Hebron. Her shop, the Palestinian Women’s Embroidery Co-operative, is situated right in the heart where the settlers had walked through that day, and where they walk through every Saturday. While the Israeli soldiers (reportedly around 6000 during Passover, 2000-3000 at all other times) are posted in Hebron in order to protect the safety of the Israeli settlers, it must be questioned who is at a greater risk of violence or harassment. Leila describes how the settlers often walk past and flip up the tables of the Palestinian stalls. They have been known to pull down the products from the front of the shops. Leila tells me how her sister had been working at the shop when a settler openly spat in her face twice. The settlers may be more brazen when the soldiers are not there but it seems the Israeli military themselves are also to be feared by the Palestinians.

“The army is often worse than the settlers,” Leila said. “They stop young men and they beat them which is very disturbing to watch. This is why so many people are too scared to come to the market to shop and so business is very bad.”

Leila has had personal experience of how the soldiers behave towards the Palestinian people in Hebron.

“I sent my son, who was only 15 at the time, to go buy me some bread. When he encountered some soldiers they accused him of throwing stones. They checked his pockets for rocks and even found the bread money in his pocket. But they still accused him and he was arrested for two months with a six-month probation. He is still too scared to leave the house.”

Leila also described how the situation in Hebron meant that it was not only the settlers and soldiers that were a threat but also those closer to home. Hebron is divided in its authority. According to the 1997 Hebron Protocol, the old city, surrounding the holy site of the Tomb of the Patriarchs/Ibrahimi Mosque, is under the total control of Israel in what is known as area ‘H2’. The rest of the city is under Palestinian Authority control and is labeled ‘H1’. As a result of this divide, Leila describes how criminals from other parts of the West Bank including the H1 area come to the H2 Israeli-controlled areas in order to escape punishment from the Palestinian Authority. Car thieves, drug dealers and more hide out in the H2 area and therefore pose an added threat to the Palestinian residents, who already have enough to deal with.

This part of Hebron, only 10 minutes from the “$10 million sports center and the three malls,” is a reminder that foreign journalists should indeed come and see what is being talked about. But they should see it for themselves not under the Israeli government press office’s organized trips. Just because one part of town doesn’t seem that bad, does not mean that people’s livelihoods and safety aren’t being threatened on a daily basis only a short walk away.

Helman concluded his interview about foreign journalists saying, ‘Give them the information. They are smart, professional, and experienced. They will know what to do with it when the time comes.’

I hope, having seen Hebron and other areas of the occupied West Bank (not just those offered by the Israeli press office) foreign journalists do know what to do with the information they are given. After all, they are smart, right?

Harriet Straughen is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.

Over the last few weeks I have been repeatedly told that Ramallah is not the ‘real’ Palestine. For this, I was told, I must travel further afield, go north, go south, go into Nablus or Hebron. I was unsure of what people meant when they said the ‘real’ Palestine. Do they mean more conservative communities? Or towns where there is not the easy access to cocktails and continental cuisine such as that found in Ramallah? Do they mean the villages separated by the wall?

The other day, I finally experienced the ‘real’ Palestine. It was not in the tense streets of Hebron or amongst the active demonstration in Bil’in, but here in Ramallah, in Al Amary refugee camp.

As I walked around the quiet and cramped alleyways of the refugee camp, I struck up a conversation (with the help of someone who could translate) with two women sitting and talking outside one of their homes. I wanted to know where they were from originally and one woman explained that she had come from a small village which she had been forced to leave in 1948 - she was eight years old at the time.

After being invited into their homes to continue the conversation, what followed was a powerful introduction to what the ‘real’ Palestine is.

One of the women is named Amna but she prefers to be called Um Mohammed, meaning ‘the mother of Mohammed’, her eldest son. She was eager to talk about her past and tell her story.

Amna, 71, spoke of the village where she was born along with her brothers and sister. Beit Affa, near Ashkelon, was once home to many Palestinian families. She described how it had been a village of peasants who had planted their own vegetables, an idyllic spot surrounded by trees. When she was eight years old, however, this picture of rural tranquility was disrupted. Jewish forces began to attack the village. Most people took to hiding in their homes to avoid the snipers who would shoot those on the street. Amna’s memory is strong and she has little trouble in recalling both her own experience but also the military exercises that were taking place at the time, something which must have been explained to her later. She remembers the Egyptians flying over with their planes and promising the Palestinian people that they would reclaim any villages captured by the Jewish forces. However, the Egyptians were unable to stop the night raids taking place and the Palestinian people took to fleeing into the woods. From that point on, they were unable to return to their homes.

Amna recalled that, at the time, she didn’t fully understand the situation or why, as they ran from building to building, her brother kept forcing her head down (out of the line of bullets) – her overriding memory is of continually tripping over because of her brother’s actions to save her life. She laughed at her girlish naivety. Amna can still remember the names of most of the villages she moved around. She can remember that the Egyptians tried to reassure the fleeing Palestinians that any land that was taken by Jewish forces would be recaptured by the Egyptians that night – something that obviously didn’t happen. Amna recalls how, every morning, her family tried, unsuccessfully, to re-enter the village from which they had just fled.

Amna also talked of everything that they had left behind. Under the illusion that they were going to be able to return in a couple of days, most families left the majority of their belongings at home and simply hid the most precious. Amna and her family had wrapped and hidden any gold or money that they had within their house, believing they would be back to retrieve it once the fighting was over. They left chickens and cows in the village and only took one camel to carry their mattresses.

The family moved from village to village, eventually settling in Gaza. But this was not the end of Amna’s journey. Now married and with children, she was persuaded by her brothers to move to the West Bank in the 1960s for a better way of life. As she departed, she had been warned that she may not be able to return to Gaza.

Her and her young family initially moved to a house outside the camp but it had been too expensive for them so they took a place inside Al Amary which was half the price and that is where they have remained.

Through all this displacement, I ask her about how she feels for the village of Beit Affa. She tells me she longs for the village. Both her and her family dream of returning to the place they are from, despite her children never having visited it. But Beit Affa is no longer in existence. During the fighting of 1948, the village was completely obliterated.

In a moment of sad reflection, she laments all the people who were killed at the time she was forced to flee. The mix of pain and nostalgia when talking about her past are evident on her face. The event took place over 60 years ago and yet, as Amna herself asks, ‘Does anybody forget where they are from?’

Amna has not forgotten her Palestine. For her and so many others the ‘real’ Palestine is the home they remember and the life they used to live, not the modern day reality of the refugee camp. The ‘real’ Palestine surely has to be the people and their individual histories. Whether they live in an apartment block in Ramallah or a farm in the South Hebron hills, it is them and not their current situation that defines them.

Background – Over 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed in the run-up to the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948. 800,000 Palestinians were displaced, resulting in over 4.5 million registered Palestinian refugees around the world today.

Harriet Straughen is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.