The Hebrew expression for the Holocaust is the Shoah. The irony is not lost on Palestinians that the Arabic translation of shoah is nakba. Palestinians refer to their shoah as the Nakba: the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes as a result of the creation of Israel in 1948. This uprooting continues to this day. Israel’s policies have always been supported by the U.S. However, no U.S. president — Republican or Democrat — has ever gone so far as to defy international law by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Until now.
Like Palestinians everywhere, St. Louis’ Palestinian community commemorates their losses and their commitment to the justice of their cause.
On Palm Sunday, April 25, 1948, my father’s uncle Edmond drove to the family house in the Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa, Palestine. In a panic, he urged the family — brother Abdallah, sister-in-law Julia, and nephews Elias (my father) and George — to jump in the car and head for the hills. Zionist forces had shelled Edmond’s house from the direction of Beit Yam. Abdallah resisted. “How can we abandon everything?” Julia prevailed. “Are you going to sacrifice the lives of your two sons?” Elias and George made a pact. They left their jackets on a table in the sitting room and promised, “We’ll be back in 15 days.”
They never did retrieve those jackets.
Jaffa’s residents fled following reports of the massacre of Palestinian villagers in Deir Yassin on April 9. My father remembered Zionist forces warning, “Leave or you’ll meet the fate of Deir Yassin.”
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