One day in April 1948 we were assembled in front of our boarding school, an old Ottoman building in Beersheba. We were twenty or thirty boys, aged ten to sixteen, sons of Beersheba sheikhs.
‘We have a grave situation,’ the headmaster announced. ‘The Jews are killing Palestinians in Jaffa and Jerusalem. There is a big massacre at Deir Yassin. I cannot protect you here. Go home.’
My home, al-Ma’in, was forty kilometres away. Transport was irregular and unsafe. The Haganah ran patrols with machine guns mounted on jeeps, shooting at will. The British were unable or unwilling to help. Sometimes they were among the culprits.
Two cousins of mine, in their early twenties, were schoolteachers in nearby villages. They came to Beersheba to find means of transport to al-Ma’in and I met up with them. An acquaintance with a pickup agreed to give us a lift. The journey had to be aborted several times because of Jewish roadblocks. The British offered no protection. In the last attempt he was afraid to continue. He dropped us by the roadside and left.
We walked in the direction of our home until darkness fell. A while later, we saw headlights approaching. Not sure what the vehicle was, we waited until it was close. It was one of our relatives driving a tractor. When I got home my mother couldn’t believe her ten-year-old son had walked most of the way from school and arrived safely.
A few weeks later, in the early hours of 14 May, one of my older relatives saw on the horizon a monster with 48 eyes. It was 24 armoured vehicles. She cried in a desperate voice, which pierced the darkness: ‘Oh, my sons. The Jews are coming to take you.’
I couldn’t see anything, but I was guided by the noise, screams and the shuffle of feet. We knew what to do: hide in the wadi. The ravine was two to three kilometres away. It was a dry bed in summer, five to ten metres deep. In the darkness, we recognised one another only by sound and silhouette. Someone noticed the figure of a man. It was the schoolteacher. Abu Leyah was a peaceful man who had never carried a gun. He came from a nearby village, Burayr. Perhaps embarrassed to find himself among screaming women and children, he bolted out into the unknown.
We heard thuds and saw fire and smoke. The invaders were burning our homes and destroying our buildings.
‘That’s the school,’ someone shouted. They blew up the school that my father built in 1920.
‘That’s the bayara.’ A thick black cloud billowed up, lit by the flames. It was the flour mill that my father and his cousin had built twenty years earlier.
My brothers, Ibrahim and Mousa, had two old machine guns and stayed by the school, firing at the invaders. It was hopeless. Later in the day, the Jewish attackers moved on. We emerged from the ravine and inspected our home. The scale of devastation was immense. Nothing was left except rubble and ashes.
To our great relief, we found that my brothers were safe. My father, who had been in Khan Younis, arrived. We stood among the rubble and the stench of burning tents. My father told my brothers to go back to university and to take me with them to continue my education in Cairo. We left, never to be allowed to return home to al-Ma’in.
On the same day, David Ben-Gurion spoke to other settlers in Tel Aviv and declared a state for them on the ruins of my home. Born as David Grün in Płońsk, Poland, he had travelled to Palestine in 1906. In March 1948, while Palestine was under the administration of the British Mandate, he initiated Plan Dalet. In a matter of months, the Haganah attacked and depopulated 530 towns and villages. They carried out at least 95 massacres, in which 15,000 Palestinians were killed.
They attacked Beersheba on 21 October 1948. A week later, Ben-Gurion came to inspect the town. He admired the fine stone government buildings, the Arab houses and the boys’ school, where I had been a student. He liked them so much so he decided to live there. After his death in 1973 he was buried at Sde Boker, a little to the south of the town, near the Arab village of Rakhama (renamed Yeruham in Hebrew).
In the 78 years since 1948, I have never ceased to think, plan and strive for my right of return home. I started school in Cairo, where my brothers were already at university. In the summer holiday I returned to Gaza, to scenes I had never imagined. Masses of people were flooding the small enclave that became known as the Gaza Strip. They took shelter in schools, mosques and open areas. They tried to find ways of making a living. I saw one man with a small table at the roadside selling sandwiches. Weeks later, he opened a restaurant.
The refugees reassembled their villages. Each mukhtar (headman) tried to bring his people together in one camp and look after them. The village structure and name were retained but moved to a new location. Characteristics of the village were maintained. One village was noted for its weaving. They strung their weaving posts along the camp roads, not to be touched by anyone. Two hundred and forty villages from the southern half of Palestine that had been attacked and destroyed were reassembled in a tiny place, only 1.3 per cent of Palestine.
Resistance groups were formed to fight back against the occupiers. My cousin Hasan was one of the fedayeen. He was an affable young man with a smiling face. When he came back from a foray in the occupied territory, he would tell us what had happened to this or that house or garden. He was killed by a concealed mine. The refugees also formed political groups. My cousin Abdullah, a veteran of the 1936-39 revolt, set up the Executive Committee of the Refugees Conference. It continued to speak for the refugees until the PLO was established in 1964.
As for me, I continued my education in Cairo until I got a degree in engineering. I then travelled to study for a PhD at University College London. In my spare time, I pored over documents relating to Palestine in London’s various libraries and archives. In Germany I found aerial photos of Palestine from the First World War. Over the years, I accumulated many maps and documents. There were more records of my country, including al-Ma’in, in colonial libraries than in Palestine. The reason is simple. Since we did not plan to invade other countries, we did not need their maps. In 2010 I published the Atlas of Palestine 1917-66.
The right of return is not only sacred to Palestinians and protected by international law; implementing it is also feasible. There are 246 Palestinian village lands where no Jews live today. There are 272 village lands which have fewer than five thousand Jews. Beersheba district is practically empty except for Beersheba City.
Generally, Jews live in 927 listed localities with a total population of 5.5 million within the armistice line of 1949. But that may be misleading. Only fifteen of those localities have a population of more than 100,000. Others are much smaller: 62 have a population between 10,000 and 100,000; and 850 are small settlements, mostly kibbutzim, of a few thousand people. In other words, 90 per cent of Jews live in 77 localities out of 927. The area they occupy is 1400 square kilometres, or 6 per cent of Israel’s area. The rest of Palestinian land is empty, used as military camps. The obvious conclusion is that occupied Palestine is largely empty. Palestinians can return home without much displacement of the settlers.
In Beersheba district, the situation is more striking. There are only 150,000 settlers: fewer people than in a refugee camp in Gaza. In 12,500 square kilometres – half of Palestine – the population density is seven persons per square kilometre. The owners of this land live in refugee camps in Gaza where the population density is 20,000 persons per square kilometre. The contrast is striking. I arranged a competition for young Palestinian architects in which 330 have participated so far. They made reconstruction plans for sixty villages.
My life’s journey, through many countries as a foreigner, should end where it started, at Ma’in Abu Sitta. David Ben-Gurion, who led the forces that destroyed my village and sent me into exile, is buried in my hometown. And I wish to be buried in my birthplace.