Bayt Nabala - بيت نبالا: Return home after 50 years. Part 1

You cand fined this artical in :
http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/980512/1998051201.html

Memories of a 1948 survivor
Palestine, History, 5/12/1998

Looking at the landscape that once was the site of his home village, Mustafa Yousef Khalil wiped silent tears that rolled down on his face and spoke to himself: "Oh God. Please rest our souls in peace. Bring us back to our land. Bring our children back. What happened to us was incredible. Unbelievable. Where are our grandfathers and our brothers with whom we lived together in dignity on our land? I pray to you, God, not to pardon those who caused all this injustice to us and those who oppressed our people and insulted us."

Abu Yousef, as Mustafa Yousef Khalil is better known in Jalazoun refugee camp near Ramallah, does not keep his house key anymore. Most of the Palestinians who left their homes back in 1948 took their keys with them and hoped they would return in a week or two, perhaps a month at the longest. Abu Yousef said he has two wounds that are still fresh and painful deep in his heart. The first, he said, was when he and his family left their home village and became refugees in 1948. The second one was when Israel occupied the rest of the Palestinian land in the June 1967 war. Right after that war, all his dreams had collapsed.

Abu Yousef and hundreds of others from his village returned to Beit Nabala near Lod [Ben Gurion] airport to see what happened in the twenty years that had passed since they last left. "We drove in buses to the village. We were very eager to check what had happened over the past twenty years. The Israelis allowed us through. But to our disappointment, we saw everything was ruined and destroyed. We saw no traces of the houses that existed before. Israel had leveled everything. All the village houses were razed."

It was at that moment that Abu Yousef felt his dreams of return were evaporating. He later became certain that the return dream, if it ever would come true, would not be fulfilled in his lifetime. "When I saw Israel building new Jewish settlements in the West Bank I felt that the Jewish state has no intention at all of pulling out. Since Israel was building more settlements and houses on newly-conquered territories, sure she would never consider giving back what it occupied more than two decades earlier," he reasoned.

The chat with Abu Yousef took place in three separate rounds. First, he welcomed me at his shop. The next day, we went to the village itself and when we returned to his house in Jalazoun, we continued our chat over a cup of tea, white cheese, slices of tomatoes and home-made bread which his wife had prepared a few hours earlier.

In the first session at his shop, Abu Yousef spoke of his memories and feelings. I suggested we go to the village and check what had lately happened over there. He sounded enthusiastic about the idea but was hesitant. "How can I go there to my home village without a permit?" he asked. Abu Yousef, like thousands of Palestinians who live in the West Bank, whether under Israeli military occupation or in the Palestinian areas, is not allowed into Israel without special permits issued by the Israeli military authorities. He was worried he would be taken to prison if found walking around inside Israel without a permit. But it seemed that the idea of visiting his village was intriguing enough for him to change his mind. "When shall we go there? Today is a bit late. How about tomorrow morning?"

The drive with Abu Yousef to his home village was a unique experience on its own. Despite the new network of roads that Israel built, Abu Yousef was still capable of recognizing almost every stage of our trip to Beit Nabala. He sounded like a national geographic encyclopedia as he listed names of villages that we drove through. He never used a single Jewish name of those sites but gave the original Palestinian names, which were eventually altered by Israel.

It took some 40 minutes to arrive to the village. Halfway before we got there, an Israeli army roadblock marked the start of the so-called Green Line that served as Israel's pre-1967 borders. Abu Yousef was a bit disturbed when one of the soldiers manning the checkpoint stared at him for a minute, which felt like ages. The soldiers then allowed us through. The wrinkles on Abu Yousef's face had apparently convinced the soldier that the old man would never be a suicide bomber.

"I know we are not going to fulfill our return in my lifetime but I am definitely sure that my grandchildren one day will return," he said as we stepped out of the car. Next to the parking lot, stood an old building, which Abu Yousef identified as the main village school. Today, the school premises are used as a regional office for the Jewish National Fund, an organization that raises donations from world Jewry to promote Jewish settlement in Palestine.

From that school Abu Yousef started his journey through the time tunnel back to the pre-1948 days. He looked around and in a few minutes, all seemed to have returned to his memory. "That is where our house was. There lived my uncle. And here we used to play. All those meadows around were full of orange and olive trees. We had plenty of cactus trees in the village. I still remember how my mother used to wake up early in the morning, collect cactus fruits, peel them and bring them for breakfast.

"Our village was big. It was a center for those traveling from north to south and vice-versa. We had a very big house. Our family was doing well but once we left the village, we lost everything and we had to start from the beginning," he said. He remembers how most of the villagers made their way towards Ramallah on foot. "We had no cars at the time. There was only one lorry in the village. Some of the people had mules. They all had left and hardly took anything with them. A few people took some blankets and mattresses but no furniture. We all thought we would be away for one or two weeks, until the fighting was over. None had even imagined we would be kept away for so long."

When the fighting started around Beit Nabala village, recalled Abu Yousef, members of the Jewish gangs took positions on the hilltops surrounding the village. They pounded it with bombs and machine guns. There was no military balance between the attackers and the defenders of the village, and the people ran away. "We went up the mountain. The older people remained behind. We spent our nights under the trees. All we had with us was a number of blankets to cover the children."

A week after they left their village, Abu Yousef remembered that his mother used to keep her money in the stable where their sheep and horses lived. He decided to sneak back into the village and get the money. "I told a friend of mine to come and join me. We both walked for some time until he suddenly stopped and said that he gave it a second thought and decided to pull out of that adventure. He was afraid of being shot by the Jews. But that did not change my mind. I walked on my own hiding between houses and buildings as Jewish snipers started firing in my direction. The Jews were watching us from the neighboring hills on the northern side of the village. They watched us through binoculars. Bombs that were used by the Jews had burnt the valley. I walked through the street that led to the village center. The Jews were firing at every moving object. I saw one body next to our house. Cats were busy eating up the victim's face. I crawled. I opened the gate. The doors inside the house were all locked. A house next to ours had received a direct hit. It looked like someone was trying to hide inside that house. The Jews fired a bomb that opened a hole in the main wall. I went to the room where the money was. The money was hidden in one of the cradles we used to store food for our animals. I kicked the cradle with my foot and broke it to pieces. I did not wait to put the money in bags. People at that time had no banks. I took the whole jar and crawled my way out of the village for about one and a half-kilometer. I finally arrived to a place full of trees where I stopped to take a break and hide my money in my clothes. I walked back to where the rest of my family was waiting. A few days later, my father wanted to retrieve his money, which he too hid somewhere down in the stable. He ordered us to prepare a mule to carry him down to the village. We put him on the mule and went down with my sister and sister in law to collect some food. We were peasants and we used to prepare our own cheese and oil. As we opened the door to our house, shooting flared out. The snipers had seen us. My father took his money and we all ran outside where we saw the mule jumping in panic as the heaving shooting frightened it."

The family of Abu Yousef escaped first to the little town of Bir Zeit near Ramallah. They moved from one place to the other until they finally came to Jalazoun refugee camp where they have been living since the early 1950s. With the money he had, Abu Yousef bought a land slot on the entrance to the camp where he built his house outside the UNRWA-run camp jurisdiction. His house and the adjacent little shop are landmarks at the camp's entrance. Many stop by his shop to buy a box of cigarettes or a cold drink or to just throw a couple of questions to the man who seemed to know everything in the camp and the neighborhood.

I first went into his shop asking if he knew people old enough to remember the 1948 war and the subsequent exodus of the Palestinians. He quickly volunteered, but not before he gave me four other names of men who still live in the camp.

As we walked through the long green grass that covered what once was the land of Beit Nabala, Abu Yousef was gaining more and more power. He was so energetic that I, some thirty years younger, had to hold my breath as I tried to catch up with him. I was surprised because in the beginning, when I suggested we go to the village, I was worried that he might collapse from exhaustion. He didn't. The view of his village, inter-cut with memories of the old days, had pushed new life in his veins.