al-Sawafir al-Shamaliyya - السوافير الشمالية: Faloujah Seige

Let me first send a word of thanks to Mr Said Ajjawi for this tremendous effort, which indicates how keen he is to preserve the memory of Palestine to posterity. The writer is a cousin of Mr Shukri Ismail who was interviewed in this site. He was born in 1940 seven years after Shukri was born, and at the time of nakba was 8 years old, so a young boy at that age still remembers many stories other than those mentioned by cousin Shukri.

One of those stories is that we were driven by the "hagana" gangs to the famous village of Faloujah, a village which was beseiged by the Israelis when it was defended by the Egyptian Army in 1948. One of the night attacks was memorable as I still remember my late father speaking of a great Egyptian officer leading the battle and repulsing the Hagana atack, and his name was Jamal Abdel Nasser.Now every one knows who this man is.
Another story is that we were told not to go back to Sawafir, as the Arab armies will liberate it in no time and we would be able to do that summer's harvest of rich wheat which our land yielded at the time. Now it has been almost sixty years since that harvest was wasted.
A third story was that my elder brother , the late Abu Khalid ( Fayez Ismail)after the name of Jamal Abdul Nasser who was also called Abu Khalid,and I went to the location where Sawfir is located and found out that it was planted with watermelon, peaches and pears, and a Jewish farmer spotted us there and sarcastically asked: is this your land? Make yourself comfortable and have some melons !!!!