    
Quicksand, Oil and
Dreams
The story of one of five
million dispossessed Palestinians
By Michael S. Ladah
Chapter 1
Exodus
While the year of my birth
is in doubt, the date is not disputed. It is difficult to understand how anyone can be so
certain about the day and month of an event, but not the year. I was born in Jafa on the
eastern coast of the Mediterranean. As to where Jafa is and to which country it belonged,
or now should belong, is a political question that only few have been able to answer, at
least since 1948.
I was born on February 1, 1940 to Palestinian
parents of differing origins. My father is said to have been of Greek origin. Legend has
it that his ancestors came from Greece and immigrated to Palestine many centuries ago. His
ancestors were fishermen who lived on a small peaceful Greek island with a large extended
family. The men did most of their fishing at night while the women and children slept, and
the men slept while the women and children went about their business during the day. One
night, the legend goes, while the men were fishing, a notorious Greek pirate who lived on
one of the larger islands raided their fishing party. Their catch was taken and some of
the men were badly beaten, although none of them were killed.
The fishermen retaliated by attacking one of
the pirates' smaller ships while at sea and a long feud began. The pirates were superior
in numbers and weapons, but the fishermen had a greater will to survive and avenge their
losses.
The conflict escalated. To strike back at the
united fishermen, who now had the whole island rallying behind them, the pirates raided
the homes of the fishermen one night when the fishermen were at sea. The pirates
confiscated some valuables, destroyed some homes and molested the women; children and
women were killed in the process. The fishermen swore to retaliate and rid themselves of
the evil pirates. But they were very well aware of the inferiority of their strength.
Still, they wanted to end the conflict once and for all. They worked on a plan that took
them months to put into action. One dark summer night, the fishermen loaded their boats
with all of the possessions that they could carry, took their families and sailed to
Palestine. Before they set sail to Jafa, however, they first sailed by the pirates' fleet
in the middle of the night, recovered their valuables that the pirates had stolen and
massacred some of the pirates while they slept.
The story of the Greek fishermen spread up and
down the Palestinian coast like wildfire. The fishermen, now feared and respected for what
they did, came to be known as the "Sting" among all those who came to know them
later in their new home.
My mother was born in South America to
Palestinian parents who had immigrated to Buenos Aires in search of work and better
living. My mother’s father grew up in Palestine on the Mediterranean seashore. He
lived under the rule of the Turks during the last decade of the ailing Ottoman Empire. He
was born into a large family that was, and still is, well-known throughout Palestine,
Jordan and Lebanon. My grandfather returned to Palestine from Argentina, when my mother
was only 5 years old, and became an independent trucker transporting goods from the Jafa
Port to Jerusalem and Trans-Jordan.
My grandparents on both sides were Christians,
living in an Islamic society. There were many Christians and Jews living in Palestine at
that time, just before World War One ended, but the majority of the population were
Moslems, mainly of the Sunni sect. The Sunnis were very tolerant of the other two
religions, perhaps more than their other Moslem counterpart sects, but definitely more
than the Ottoman Turks were. Long before the early years of the twentieth century, the
Ottoman Turks had no friends remaining anywhere in the Arab world, let alone among the
Christian minorities. Although the Turks were ruthless to the entire Arab population, old
timers who lived during these days used to relate stories indicating that the Turks tended
not to discriminate in their cruel treatment. Nonetheless, Turks generally tended to
sympathize with Moslem Arabs, using the Christian minority population as a target of their
aggression. The massacres of minority religious groups had old roots in the Ottoman
Empire. The Ottomans used the Christian minorities, in the Arab world and in other
societies who came under their control, to shield them from attempts by the rival Moslem
sects to wrest control of the empire from those who were in power at the time. One such
Christian minority that suffered immensely under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire was the
Armenians. When new Ottoman rulers came into power, they massacred a large number of the
more prominent members of those Christian minorities who had been used by the previous
rulers to protect themselves against the new authorities before they had come into power.
The cycle of violence continued for many generations, and massacres of Christians
continued throughout the last hundred years of Ottoman rule, finally culminating in the
Armenian genocide, one of the most horrifying holocausts of recorded history.
An embroidery of the Via Dolorosa
At the end of the First
World War, the Arab Middle East was chopped up and divided among the Allies, as spoils of
war, to colonize, govern and exploit. Because the Allies (mainly Britain and France) were
Christians, the rights of the Christians (and possibly of the Jews) in Palestine were more
protected under their rule than under the rule of the Ottoman Turks. My grandparents, who
grew up under both the rule of the Ottoman Turks and the rule of the British, witnessed
the transition in the way the Palestinian population was treated. My grandfather used to
tell stories about the transition period and how the Palestinian population lived in
constant fear under the Ottoman Turks. My grandparents, who lived next door to a Moslem
Sunni family with whom they were close friends, told many stories of how the two families
suffered during the Ottoman rule and during the transition to the British rule. During
searches that the Turks frequently conducted for young Arab men to draft into the Ottoman
Army, hordes of Turkish soldiers would call on a neighborhood unannounced, surround the
area and search all the homes one by one. Any young man they would find, they would take
on the spot and induct into the infamous Turkish Army whose members, in those late days of
the dying Ottoman Empire, had no supplies, no food and no clothing. When they searched the
homes, the Turkish soldiers would grab anything that suited their fancy, stealing clothes,
food, drink and especially their favorite loot, live chickens.
During the last stages of the war, contingents
of the British Army reached parts of Palestine and started to search for Turkish soldiers,
taking them as prisoners as they would find them. It was now the turn of the British
soldiers to search Palestinian towns and neighborhoods, house by house. When the British
soldiers called, my grandmother would see them from the window and, before she would open
the door, she would run to the closet and take out an icon of the Virgin Mary neatly
packed and hidden in the closet from the eyes of potential Turkish intruders. My
grandmother would run to the front door and open the door with the icon still in her
hands, purposely and conveniently visible. The British soldiers would mumble, smile, leave
her alone and then go to the Moslem neighbor's house. Before the soldiers would reach the
next house, my grandmother would beat them through the back entrance, only to hand over
the icon to the neighbors to use as their shield when the soldiers knocked. If the Turkish
soldiers came later, my grandmother would hide the icon of the Virgin Mary, cover her face
with a veil borrowed from the neighbors, and pretend to be sick as she opened the door. My
grandmother told stories about how her home and the rest of the neighborhood was visited
by British soldiers, then Turkish soldiers and again by British soldiers, all only days
apart. During this time my grandmother would be shuttling the icon back and forth, just as
her Moslem neighbor would be shuttling the black veil back and forth.
My grandparents, as well as the whole
Palestinian population (Moslems, Christians and Jews), survived the Ottoman rule, but only
with great difficulty and hardship. My Armenian wife's ancestors, however, were not as
lucky. It was they who suffered one of the worst atrocities known to man at the hands of
the Ottoman Turks.
Although I was born in Jafa, I remember little
about my childhood there. This comes as no surprise since I lived in Jafa only a few years
before my family and I had to leave. While my life in Jafa as a child remains but a vague
memory, fainter than a dream, my last days in Jafa and my departure from there are as
clear as yesterday.
During the first few months of 1948, there was
considerable debate among Palestinians about the safety of their families in Palestine.
This debate was especially intense among members of my parents’ extended families. I
remember my mother and my grandparents talking about leaving our house in Jafa and going
to the mountains for a short while until the fighting stopped. My parents had done that
once before during WWII. They had traveled to Jiffna, a small Christian village outside
Ramallah, and stayed there for a few weeks until things cooled down (or until my parents
got used to the idea of the war). My father was not interested in leaving Jafa again.
Members of my parents’ extended families
constantly argued with my father that the situation was becoming unsafe for the entire
population, but especially for children. Their argument was supported by random acts of
violence committed by both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict where Zionist Jews
exploded bombs in various business and residential districts of Arab towns, and
Palestinian resistance groups exploded bombs in various business and residential districts
of Jewish towns. The Zionists were anxious to motivate Palestinians to vacate their
homeland to make way for Jewish immigrants from the west. Palestinians responded by trying
to motivate the Jewish immigrants to return to where they had come from. The Government of
Palestine, at that time administered by the British under the Mandate System, had lost its
effectiveness and had virtually no control over the violence. Additionally, the British
had very little incentive, if any, to control the situation, and were anxious to hand the
area over to its local population, the Palestinians, as part of an agreement made by the
British Government for Palestinian independence. The British Government had also promised
a "homeland for the Jews in Palestine" through its vaguely worded Balfour
Declaration. The Zionists, who extracted such a declaration from the British Government,
intended and interpreted such a promise to mean, and felt justified in fighting for, a
political presence in Palestine in the form of a state. The Palestinian population, on the
other hand, felt betrayed by the British Government who had promised Palestinian
independence ever since the British started their rule of Palestine under the Mandate
System. The Palestinian population felt that the British gave the Jewish population a
promise they had no legal, moral or ethical right to give. Therefore, both sides felt
committed to their respective side of the argument and were ready to die to defend it by
any means, including acts of violence against innocent civilians.
My father, Salim, was not agreeable to leaving
Palestine and did not, at first, agree with the argument that it was unsafe for him or his
family to stay in Jafa. He did not fear what was going on. He felt comfortable where he
was and always felt that he was able to go anywhere in Arab Jafa, Jewish Tel Aviv and any
other parts of Palestine and Trans-Jordan without anyone or anything bothering him. Salim
had been an orphan when he was 8 years old and grew up with his older brother and sister
in a Lutheran missionary orphanage and school, the Syrian Orphanage, otherwise known as
the Schneller School, in Jerusalem. Father Schneller, who had come to Jerusalem from
Southern Germany in 1854, had founded the Orphanage in 1860. The purpose of the Orphanage
had been to give orphans from Greater Syria (today's Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine)
a home and a school, which would enable them to learn a trade. So many Palestinians of my
father’s generation were graduates of the Syrian Orphanage (the Schneller School).
My father learned the trade
of diesel mechanic during the four years he was at the Schneller School, and returned to
live in Jafa with his aunt, his mother's sister, when he was 12 years old. After working
for a couple of years in a Palestinian Arab's machine shop, Salim went to work in Tel Aviv
in a shop owned by the Smerlings, a Jewish family who had been in Palestine for many
years. Salim was a hard worker and his training at Schneller School prepared him for the
hard work and high performance that was required of him in this new job. Salim felt very
close to his new employer and his employer’s family. He learned Hebrew in no time and
learned the Jewish customs and traditions out of respect for his friends, the
Smerling’s sons. The Smerlings had three sons who were about Salim’s age. The
three sons and Salim became very close and the four of them saw one another not only
during work, but outside work as well. The old man Smerling was very fond of Salim and
treated him like one of his sons. As a matter of fact, one of the Smerling boys often
jokingly complained to his father that he treated the Arab (my father) better than he
treated his own sons and was teaching him more of the trade secrets than he was teaching
them.
I do remember, when I was very little, vast
orange groves where my parents used to take me and my sisters to the home of their friends
for tea (in the English sense). I remember the pleasant smell of orange blossoms and the
smell of the orange leaves, which my father used to rub in his hands and place under my
nose for me to smell. He knew it was a favorite scent of mine. It is a smell that, even
today, reminds me of those orange groves, especially when someone opens a bottle of rose
water, or when I eat Arabic sweets made with rose water. In the orange groves, my two
sisters and I had tea with milk, ate German cakes and cookies and played with little
puppies in the afternoon sun. My parents and their host family would make fun of me; my
father would tease my mother when my white neat shorts and nice yellow shirt would get
muddy brown. My parents would later explain to me that the beautiful Sunday afternoons we
used to spend at the orange groves were with the Smerlings at their country home.
Salim did well working for the Smerlings and
within a short period he saved enough money to establish his own machine shop business in
partnership with two Palestinian Moslems from Jafa. In his new venture, Salim continued
his close association with the Smerlings who shared a lot of projects with him; he and his
two Moslem partners reciprocated by giving the Smerlings some of their customers when the
new shop was too busy to handle more work. Little did Salim know that his friendship was
strong enough to keep him and the Smerlings tied together even after the Arab-Israeli War
divided them. This friendship between the Christian Palestinian Salim and the Jewish
Smerling family of Tel Aviv would endure and survive not only one, but two Arab-Israeli
wars.
When the conflict got worse and there was news
of killings in the countryside and in major cities such as Jafa and Tel Aviv, my father
made an announcement at home that was most stunning to me. He declared that the children,
my two sisters and I, ought to take a vacation from school and stay home until things were
safe again. I felt that this was amazing, considering that my father had never accepted
any of my reasons for not going to school. On the days when I missed school, or ran away
from school, I knew what to expect when my father got home and it was not very pleasant to
think about. Well, he made the decision that it was not safe and I quietly and in my heart
agreed with him.
An embroidery of Damascus Gate - Jerusalem
One afternoon when I was
playing at home, my grandfather came into the house unusually early. With him was my
uncle, my father's brother. They were whispering until my mother went to greet them at the
entrance of the house, and then they suddenly stopped and there was complete silence. I
was surprised to see my uncle in our house that day. He was a person I would see only on a
special holiday or special family gathering. The fact that my father was not home made it
especially unusual. My mother tried to find out what was going on, but they must have told
her to get them something, because I saw her hurry to the kitchen. My grandfather and my
uncle went to the end of the hall far away from my parents' room.
That hall, I definitely remember. It was very
long, starting from the main entrance of the house on one side and a small passage to the
kitchen on the other side. Along the perimeter of the hall were rooms. The first was my
parents', then there was the kids' rooms where my sisters and I slept, then my aunt's room
and then my grandparents' room. On the other side of the perimeter there were my uncles'
rooms, about four of them, and then the last room by the entry to the kitchen was the
large dining room. There were chairs lined by the wall around the whole perimeter between
the entrances to the rooms. There must have been over twenty chairs. I had seen my parents
host quite a few social events and neighborhood meetings in our house, all of them in that
long spacious hallway. The walls on both sides of the hallway were decorated with
tapestries, hanging from the top and covering most of the walls all the way to the floor.
One particular tapestry I still remember very clearly portrayed a desert caravan with an
oasis in the background.
My grandfather and uncle went all the way to
the end of the hall by the dining room and sat whispering. I sat in one of the chairs
outside my parents’ room, clear across the other end of the hall. After a while my
mother was back with two small cups of Turkish coffee and two glasses of water on a round
tray. As she put the tray down on a small table between the two restless men, she demanded
to know what was going on. I could hear my mother crying, saying that she was afraid and
that she had the right to know everything. My grandfather, his voice getting loud,
responded that my father had a slight incident but was okay. He went on to say that my
father would be home soon and that the discussion would be more meaningful when he
arrived.
After a while my grandmother came, then my
aunt, then more uncles and more relatives. Most of them were familiar to me. I could tell
that it was the middle of the afternoon because I was getting hungry and ready for my
mid-afternoon snack. Also, I could hear the neighbors' children and I knew they were
coming home from their school down the street. My mother must have forgotten me. This was
the time when I would normally come home from school and the time when she would have
snacks ready for my sisters and me. I was about to ask my mother to give me a snack when I
heard a loud commotion outside the house. One of my uncles came rushing in, opened the
second panel of the main door as if something big was going to come through the doorway,
and four men came in carrying a stretcher with a man lying on it with his legs and his
head bandaged. Then I saw my mother at the other end of the hall run toward the main
entrance faster than I ever knew she could run. The man on the stretcher was my father. He
had been going from Jafa to Tel Aviv that morning and a bomb exploded only a few meters
away from him, killing a number of people and injuring many more. My father had been taken
to the hospital in Jafa, only a few blocks from our home, and was being released after
having been treated. My uncles made space for the men carrying the stretcher and ushered
them all the way to the corner of the hall where my grandfather and my uncle were seated.
The men placed the stretcher down on the floor next to the end wall, and my uncles tried
to make my father more comfortable by placing pillows around him. The sight of my father
in bandages was terrifying. I always saw my father as a strong man and never thought that
any harm could come to him. I approached the area where my father was, but the people
around him pushed me aside as if it was not a place for children. I pushed myself forward
until I came close to where my father was lying, on the stretcher, with my mother sitting
on a pillow on the floor next to him and my grandfather and my uncles all around him
talking quietly and in serious voices. As my father caught a glimpse of me peeking at him
through the people, he called me to come sit next to him and started to explain that the
bandages were covering a small hurt and that he was going to be fine soon.
As I sat there between my parents, the
discussion went on. Then my older uncle spoke, explaining how the situation was becoming
dangerous for the family and that we should all leave for a while to make sure we remained
safe. It was only going to be for a few weeks, he explained, so why take a chance. My
uncle knew how my father felt about leaving, but he implored my father to reconsider for
the sake of the children who were often in harms way playing around the neighborhood for
much of the day. My uncle mentioned a case where a few days earlier someone had
intercepted a lost camel that drifted into our neighborhood. There was a bomb hidden under
baskets of eggplants on the camel's back; had the camel not been noticed early, the bomb
would have detonated right across the street from our house. My uncle also mentioned
instances where whole Arab families were killed in cold blood in remote towns and
villages. He made his case by reminding everyone that there were groups of armed Zionist
militias that were roaming the areas they controlled and announcing on loudspeakers that
all Arabs should leave or their fate would be certain death.
Many of the men spoke. Some of them sided with
my uncle and others made patriotic speeches about how it would be cowardly to leave and
not stand our ground to fight. My father spoke up. He explained how he had been opposed to
leaving all along and thought that little harm would come to his family, but that today's
explosion changed his mind, especially when he thought of the children. My father told
everyone that if they decided to leave Jafa, he would agree to leave also, but that either
the whole family would leave or the whole family would stay. After many arguments, a
decision was made that everyone would leave within two days, to give my father a little
time to recover from his injuries. During the same meeting it was decided that all the
families present, ten families in all, would leave on my grandfather's truck to a small
Christian village called al Taibeh outside Ramallah in the Palestinian highlands. It was
therefore necessary, my grandfather emphasized, that no bulky belongings were to be
carried on the truck to ensure enough space for all the people. We would take enough water
and blankets and bring money and jewelry. The decision was made on Friday evening, and the
exodus was to be on Sunday, Palm Sunday 1948.
Palm Sunday in Jafa, like everywhere else, is
normally a very festive day. It commemorates the journey of Christ from the Mount of
Olives to the city of Jerusalem, where the Messiah came riding a donkey with the public
cheering him waving palm and olive branches. In Jafa, as in most Palestinian cities and
villages with churches, the procession of Christ entering Jerusalem is re-enacted with
parishioners carrying olive and palm branches and circling the church, celebrating the
coming of Christ to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. The night before we left, the adults
stayed up late talking about leaving and deciding what little they could do before the
journey. They talked about how to secure the houses and the belongings they were leaving
behind. That Palm Sunday in Jafa must have been the saddest Sunday my family had ever
known.
In the morning no one went to church. My uncle,
Michael, had prepared the truck; he wrapped a tarp around the sides and across the top, as
they do with army trucks, to protect the occupants from the weather. He also spread
blankets along the floor of the truck and placed pillows for people to sit on. He left in
the mid-morning to collect the families, starting from the farthest and working his way
back to our house. By the time he arrived back, it was the middle of the afternoon. We
were the last family to climb on board. As we left the house to get on the truck, my
grandfather and my older uncle bolted the front door of the house and nailed the doors to
the frame, just as they had done earlier in the day with the back doors. As my mother got
into the cab of the truck, she gave a loud scream because she did not know where she left
my baby brother whom she had been carrying in her arms earlier. She found him with one of
my uncles, took him in her arms and started to cry. When everyone was on the truck, we sat
there for one minute of silence as my grandfather said a prayer and asked the Lord to
bless our journey and make it safe. My uncle, Michael, was getting more restless with
every minute of delay, because he wanted to clear all the checkpoints along the way before
sundown. We were stopped many times at makeshift checkpoints along the way, mainly by
Jewish armed men belonging to one or another of the factions. Every time we stopped at a
checkpoint, my grandfather would stand at the end of the truck and open his arms, as if to
protect the others behind him in case there was shooting. We were all afraid that someone
might start shooting at one of the checkpoints, but, thank God, the trip went smoothly.
By the time we made it to al Taibeh, it was
starting to get dark. The challenge for the adults was to find places for everyone to
spend the night. As the adults managed to find one or two rooms for the ten families, we
unloaded our blankets and pillows and prepared makeshift beds. Every family claimed a
spot. Children snuggled next to their parents and, for a moment, there was complete
silence. There were two questions on everyone's mind. What has become of us? And when are
we going back? The children could not ask quietly. I could hear them crying, "Mom, I
want to go home." or "Mom, it's time to go back." Little did they know that
this was to be their home hereafter, for they had become Palestinian refugees.
Most Palestinians who left after us were even
less fortunate. Many would have no choice but to make the journey after the Zionist
militia made examples of those who wouldn’t leave. Even the women and children would
be forced to walk to areas of Palestine beyond the control of the Zionists. The Zionists
were now claiming the confiscated areas as their ‘national homeland’, including
the towns and villages where countless generations of Palestinians had lived for hundreds,
even thousands, of years. The Jewish national homeland would be founded on lands that the
Palestinians had been working for centuries. The fleeing refugees were allowed to take
only what they could carry and most of them left with their hands full: they carried their
most valued possessions, their young children who could not walk the tens of miles across
muddy fields and steep, rocky hills. Many of the expelled families arrived without their
children and without the aged, many of whom could not survive the ordeal.
© 2001 Michael S. Ladah - All Rights Reserved
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