Local Palestinians’ memories of the Nakba

Today marks the 77th year of the Palestinian Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, a grim anniversary of the violent expulsion and dispossession of roughly 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. 

This history feels simultaneously distant and familiar as images of Palestinians under unrelenting bombardment have flashed across our screens for nearly two years. 

To better understand the significance of the Nakba, I wanted to get beyond the headlines and hear from local Palestinians about their personal experiences. In my search for stories from Nakba survivors, I was connected with two women, Fatma and Camellia, who were willing to share their families’ memories. Both women are daughters of Nakba survivors, and although they didn’t know each other before moving to Rochester, they have become close friends, connected by an unspoken understanding.  

Fatma and Camellia, both residents of Rochester suburbs, requested to remain anonymous, fearing for their personal safety and the safety of their families still living in Palestine. I have changed their names to pseudonyms.

We met at Camellia’s home. I was welcomed with unmistakable Palestinian hospitality, offered tea, sweets, and freshly baked manakeesh (Palestinian flatbread) topped with za’atar (a blend of herbs and spices) and olive oil. I came prepared with some questions, but I really just listened. Their memories carried the conversation and surfaced emotions that have been passed through generations. 

A village lost but not forgotten 

Fatma began her story with remembrances of her village, Deir Yassin.

“My grandmother and my dad described Deir Yassin as a prosperous community. A village once alive with the laughter of children,” she says.

Deir Yassin was located high on a hilltop just west of Jerusalem and was surrounded by orchards of peaches, plums, and olives. The village was famous for its limestone quarries and skilled stonemasons. Fatma’s great-grandfather was the village mayor, and her grandfather was a prominent contractor who helped supply Yassini stones for construction in Jerusalem. 

Fatma stresses that Deir Yassin “was known to be a very peaceful village, and despite the (escalating tension) during the British Mandate, the village had non-aggression agreements with the neighboring settlements.”  

Then, she began to recount her family’s memories of what happened at Deir Yassin, stories she grew up hearing from her grandmother and father, who was only five at the time. 

Memories of a massacre 

The Deir Yassin massacre was a tipping point in the violent exodus of Palestinians. A British report sent to the United Nations in the weeks following the attack provides a description: “The deaths of some 250 Arabs, men, women and children, which occurred during this attack, took place in circumstances of great savagery. Women and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing. … Those who were taken prisoner were treated with degrading brutality.”

On the morning of April 9, 1948, Fatma’s grandfather woke the family in a hurry before dawn, alerted by the village night watchmen of an imminent attack from Zionist militias. Her grandfather, who was 30 years old, grabbed an old Ottoman rifle and told his 25-year-old wife to lock the door as he ran out with the other men into the darkness. “He never came back,” Fatma says. 

Her grandmother told Fatma how she huddled with her five children, ranging in age from four months to 10 years, in a corner of their house and tried to keep them quiet as the militia raided the village. A grenade crashed through their window and exploded in an empty room. The blast caused one of the babies to cry and alerted the militia outside. They banged on the door and tried to force their way inside.  

In a dialogue etched into her memory, Fatma’s grandmother recalled the gunmen shouting, “Is there a man inside?” She replied, “No.” Then they said, “Open the door and we will let you live,” and she pleaded, “You have to swear by your Ten Commandments that you won’t kill me or my children.” They swore, so she unlocked the door, and the militiamen barged inside and forced the family out.  

Forced from home 

Fatma’s grandmother hastily packed and handed a bundle of belongings to Fatma’s father. Her father remembered how a militia member stopped him and took his bundle, saying, “You’ll have it when you come back.”

When Fatma’s father stepped outside, bullet casings covered the yard. Fatma remembers her father telling her how, as a 5-year-old, he was excited at first. As any little boy might, he started jumping around and shouting, “Look at all these shells!”

Her grandmother remembered that moment differently; she looked past the casings and cartridges and saw the bodies of her family and neighbors murdered outside their homes. She recalled how a female member of the militia searched their clothing and pulled out gold jewelry and cash that had been tucked away in the babies’ swaddling clothes. Everything of value was stolen. 

The militia rounded up other survivors, mostly women and children, along with seven elderly men, and corralled them together. Fatma’s grandmother was reunited with her sister, who told her their mother had been killed. For nine agonizing hours, they were forced to stand in the sun.

Trucks arrived, and the survivors were taken to a nearby settlement, Givat Shaul, and paraded through the streets. 

“The brutal treatment and dehumanization left a permanent scar in my father’s memory,” Fatma says. He told her crowds of Zionist settlers taunted and spat on them as they were driven through the settlement. 

A fractured family 

Fatma told me the survivors were driven to Jerusalem and dumped in a public square. 

Her grandmother was left widowed, robbed, and homeless with five children to care for. Circumstances forced her to give up four of her five children to an orphanage, Dar-Al-Tifil, founded by Hind Al Husseini for the children of Deir Yassin. Only able to keep the youngest, who was still nursing, she grieved the loss of her living children, two daughters and two sons, including Fatma’s father.

After a year at the orphanage, Fatma’s father and his brother were able to reunite with their mother, but the two eldest daughters stayed and graduated from the orphanage school, only seeing their mother for visits. The family had relocated to another village and eventually moved to Jordan to rebuild their lives. 

An open wound

Fatma says her family members have never had closure from the emotional scars of the massacre. There have always been missing pieces of their family’s identity. Although Fatma still has a copy of the original deed to her family’s property in Deir Yassin and her grandmother always kept the key to their home, they have never been back. No one knows where her grandfather’s body may have been buried or disposed of. 

For her, Deir Yassin, “is a place of family tragedy; it would be like stepping into a monument of pain.”  

In her final years, Fatma’s grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s. With deep sadness, Fatma says, “I will never forget how she wandered through the house, cradling pillows in her arms, believing they were her children, desperately trying to save them.”

When Fatma moved to Rochester, she intentionally raised her family in a diverse suburb, “so my children would grow up knowing Jewish children and not just seeing Israeli soldiers on TV killing Palestinians like I did.” She has also found an unexpected source of healing in a local memorial for the Deir Yassin massacre. “I was delighted to discover the memorial so close to home, in Geneva, of all the places in the world! I want our community to know that their Palestinian friends and neighbors are hurting, reliving the Nakba watching the slaughter in Gaza.”

Piecing family memories

Camellia’s story begins with the death of her father two years ago. After more than 35 years of being kept apart, her father, Yousef, was reunited with his siblings in a quiet room at the King Hussein Cancer Center in Amman, Jordan. For a brief moment, Camellia describes how the grip of disease was broken by the joyous banter between sisters and their beloved brother, reliving a lifetime of memories. She couldn’t believe the improvement in her father’s condition and wondered if somehow he might survive. But time was not on their side; the Israeli government had given the sisters permission to leave Gaza for only one week to visit their dying brother. 

Camellia told me that this was also the first and only time she ever met her aunts in person. Women she grew up speaking to, but had only seen in pictures, she could finally hug and hold. Camellia reflects on that moment in the hospital: “My aunt was telling me stories about my dad when he was a child, and I had never experienced this in my life. Sitting with my aunt, telling me about her brother … which is very normal, but we’ve been robbed of this.” 

Piecing together family memories, Camellia describes their long-lost home, Al-Jura, as a small coastal fishing village. Her aunt remembers living in a beautiful, large stone house next to the sea. Camellia’s grandfather was a fisherman and supported a family of 10. He and his wife had eight children, and they instilled a deep love of family and the sea that has been passed down through the generations. 

Refugees in their own home

In November 1948, Israeli military forces bombed the village from the air in preparation for a ground invasion. Fearing the same fate as Deir Yassin, Camellia’s family fled south for their survival. Hoping they would return, they took the key to their seaside home. At the time, Camellia’s father was two years old. 

Camellia recalled the story of how her family fled, her grandmother carried Yousef while dragging one of his older sisters, who had fallen ill. After a while, she wasn’t able to carry him any further and made an impossible choice to leave him behind on the road. Camellia’s aunt told her how she picked up her little brother, Yousef, and carried him over 13 miles to Gaza.

Camellia’s father and aunts lived their entire childhood in tents. As a teenager, her father helped his mother give birth to his baby sister in a tent. Between 1948 and 1967, the family was displaced at least five times to different parts of Gaza. Over the years, the tents were replaced by shelters made of stone and mud, built by hand. Camellia’s aunts described the conditions of the camps as completely lacking infrastructure or sanitation; 20 or more families shared a single latrine. As children, Camellia’s father and siblings spent hours every day waiting in lines for food and water, and attended school in tents run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

Opportunity and exile 

Camellia told me her father completed high school at the age of 16 and received a full scholarship from UNRWA to continue his studies in Egypt. His mother told him, “Go, you are our chance to be saved. Go, and finish your education.” So, he left for Egypt, earned a master’s in engineering, and worked to send money back to his family. 

“He was so proud that he was able to send money home for all his sisters to get a higher education,” Camellia recalls. “For any Palestinian I have ever met, education is a big thing, because we don’t have anything and they try to take everything, the only thing we can keep is our education.”

The money Yousef sent back funded his sisters’ education; they became teachers and earned master’s degrees and PhDs in Gaza. 

Unpredictable regional politics restricted where her father could live, work, and travel. As a stateless refugee, he had no birth certificate or passport, only an Egyptian travel document. Camellia recounts her father’s saga of statelessness, moving from Egypt to Syria, where he married and began a family, then Saudi Arabia, America, and finally Jordan. 

No matter where they lived, his status as a stateless refugee left Camellia’s family vulnerable. Camellia and her siblings, born in Syria and Saudi Arabia, were never recognized as full citizens. Camellia told me how she needed a sponsor to attend public schools and that health care was only accessible through charity or private hospitals. 

Camellia and her family struggled with identity and belonging, she says. “It’s almost like we didn’t exist, but we do exist … and there are a lot of us.” 

She wrestled with her inherited statelessness. “For a while I kept blaming my dad,” she recalls. “Why did he leave when he had the right to go back … but if he went back, I probably wouldn’t be alive right now. I realized that he just wanted the best for his kids, wanted us to survive, to be able to tell our story.”

Calling home 

Camellia told me, with tears in her eyes, “We are living a nightmare, we just want this genocide to stop, how many times can we go through grief?” Last year, her aunt called her from Gaza, the same aunt her father had helped deliver in a tent. She called to tell her that a new grandchild had been born, and they named him Yousef.

“They named him Yousef because they had hope for this child, hope that he might grow up like my father and be able to provide a better future for his family,” she says.

Camellia could not believe that this child, too, over 70 years later, was born in a tent.

The joy of new life was short-lived. Baby Yousef’s mother was malnourished and stressed from being forcibly displaced by the Israeli assault on Gaza. He was born prematurely and required medical care, but the neonatal intensive care unit had been bombed.

After only a few days, the child died.

A historical perspective

For Palestinians, the Nakba is not a single historical event; it is an ongoing struggle for survival and the right to return. In the last two years, the Rochester-area Palestinian community has been suspended in grief, fearing for their families still living under occupation with no end in sight. To understand Fatma and Camellia’s personal stories in the arc of history, the following is an outline of events that preceded the Nakba.

The British seized Palestine from the Ottomans in 1917, during World War I. After the war, the League of Nations established a mandate giving Britain responsibility for Palestine. The neighboring nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan all transitioned from similar mandates to sovereign states. However, the commitment to facilitate a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, outlined in the 1917 Balfour Declaration and incorporated into the League of Nations mandate, stood in the way of Palestinian statehood.

The Balfour Declaration was a major political victory for a growing movement in Europe called Zionism. The Zionist movement lobbied the world’s major colonial powers seeking support in founding a Jewish state, which was articulated at the time as a settler colonial project. To that end, British authorities facilitated unprecedented European Jewish migration and settlement in Palestine while imposing a restrictive occupation on the Palestinian Arab population. 

In the following decades, the British crushed Palestinian opposition to colonization and armed Zionist militias to assist in maintaining control. When Britain later restricted Jewish immigration, some Zionist militias turned their weapons on the British. By 1947, the British had lost control and referred the issue to the United Nations. The UN General Assembly approved a partition plan that would divide Palestine into two states. The proposal disproportionately redistributed land, granting the majority of it to the minority Jewish population while confining the Arab majority to less than half of their homeland. 

Zionist leaders accepted the partition, but Palestinians and Arab nations rejected it, and the plan stalled before the UN Security Council. The UN plan collapsed as the British withdrew from Palestine and the violent dispossession of Palestinians that would become known as the Nakba began. On May 14, 1948, one day before the British Mandate officially ended, Zionist leaders declared the independence of the state of Israel. 

The next day, a regional war erupted between the neighboring Arab states and Israel that lasted nearly a year. In 1949, hostilities halted as Egypt, Lebanon, Transjordan (Jordan), and Syria signed separate armistice agreements with Israel. As a result, Israel gained more territory than allocated under the UN partition plan. Palestinians were excluded from the armistice agreements, leaving the key issues of Palestinian statehood and the refugee crisis unaddressed.

—Brennon Thompson

Brennon Thompson is a Rochester resident and community advocate. He holds degrees in urban planning and international relations, and his professional work and scholarship has focused on the legacy of racial segregation at home and colonialism abroad. The views expressed here are his own.

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