In Gaza, Saleh Al-Naami records the stories of those who witnessed the violence upon which Israel was founded During the night her husband had returned on camelback from a 40-day trading trip to Saudi Arabia. It was early June 1948, and when Farija Abu Salaysil, then 19, woke she found their daughter Thariya, who was two years old, playing with her father's hair, as he was asleep. Farija pitied her husband, Mohamed, then 23, and worried that Thariya would awaken him. So Farija carried Thariya into the mud home's reception and played with her as the sun's rays shone through the wooden windows of the house. After Farija finished tidying the house, she decided to surprise her husband by harvesting some grapes from the family vineyard 200 metres from the house. They lived in Al-Shuweihi village, west of Bir Saba city in southern Palestine, populated by a few dozen Bedouin families that had settled in the area hundreds of years earlier. Farija walked, with Thariya behind her, towards the vineyard. They passed through beautiful natural scenes made all the more splendid by the area's silence broken only by the twittering of birds. When Farija was only a few metres from the vineyard gate, however, she let out a thundering scream. She had found her husband's father, Ibrahim, 55, and his oldest brother, Salaam, 28, covered in their blood. She drew a little closer and discovered that both had been shot several times in the head and chest. She stepped back, picked up Thariya, and ran screaming to tell her husband and the rest of the family what she had seen. But as she approached the village she saw its men, women and children running chaotically west. As she approached in shock, her brother, Musalam, came to her, carrying his eldest daughter, Fadiya. He told her that the Haganah gang, one military arm of the Zionist movement, was opening fire on everyone and that she had to leave in the direction of Gaza, which then was under Egyptian rule. Farija managed to make it home and hastily awoke her husband. Hysterically she told him what had happened and Mohamed resolved to go to the vineyard to see the bodies of his father and brother. Farija prevented him, convincing him that he would sentence them all to death if he delayed leaving the area for Gaza, which was 40 kilometres away. Farija, who is now 79, narrated these details to Al-Ahram Weekly. She lives in the home of her oldest son, Awni, in the Al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. Farija, whose left eye was removed following chronic infections, has three sons and two daughters and 30 grandchildren. Thariya is now 62 and lives close to Farija. She lived for 30 years with her husband in Kuwait before moving to Iraq following the first Gulf war. She was forced to return to Gaza following the onset of the US occupation of Iraq. Despite her ill health, Farija's memory remains strong. She recalls that the day before the Haganah forced the people out of her village, residents were talking about the unusually abundant crop that season. Ramadan Audallah, 74, who currently lives in the Birkat Al-Wiz area in the central Gaza Strip, was 14 when the Zionist gangs forced his village's residents to leave in June 1948. His village was called Kokaba, and was located 20 kilometres north of Gaza. Ramadan still remembers the sight of blood flowing in his village when the Haganah raided it. "I was looking out the window of my home when Haganah members carried an old man called Mahmoud Abu Samra, who was 85, and threw him, alive, into the village's main well. After that, they pelted his corpse with stones," he told the Weekly. He says that village residents who saw what was happening decided to leave as soon as the Zionists departed. Ramadan adds that the Zionists gradually stepped up terrorist operations aiming to uproot residents from his village. The Haganah first burnt down vineyards, olive orchards, and orange gardens, and killed farmers' livestock. The farmers were unarmed and defenceless. When the Haganah found that these means had not succeeded in driving the people from their homes, they began to kill people at night. Ramadan says that all the people left the village and went to Gaza without even taking their clothes, and that Haganah members hunted down those fleeing and killed them. "We had hopes that the United Nations would return us, or that the Arab armies would after they won the war," he said. "We didn't know that we were to become the victims of a major conspiracy." Ramadan falls silent for a moment, his tears flowing onto his white beard. Then he recites verses of folk poetry explaining his attachment to the land he was torn from. He says he tells his 20 grandchildren that they must never forget Kokaba. The testimony of Abdul-Hayy Awad, 75, is little different from Ramadan's. Abdul-Hayy was 15 when he was uprooted from Hamama village, 25 kilometres north of Gaza. He says that the first incident he witnessed, and which proved that the Zionists were intent on expelling his village's residents, took place in late May 1948. He, his father and his older brother, Abdul-Rahman, were working their land on the village's eastern border when they were startled by a volley of gunshots fired from the north. They threw themselves to the ground and crawled away. When they returned to the site, once the Zionist gangs had left, they found the bodies of three neighbour farmers who had been shot point blank as they were eating lunch in their hut. "The most horrendous things I ever saw took place in early June," he told the Weekly. "With my own eyes I saw groups of Haganah beat three farmers on the head with axes until they smashed." Abdul-Hayy says that when the villagers stopped going to their farms and gardens, and remained at home, Haganah planes bombed the village's houses, killing 20 and destroying 10 homes. Following this event, villagers fled south towards Gaza. Abdul-Hayy says that the village's leader, Abu Mustafa, realised that he had left behind money and returned to the village to recover it. He was on his way back when Zionists raided the village again. The old man, in his 70s, raised a white flag thinking that it would save him. Haganah members opened fire and killed him. After being expelled from his village, Abdul-Hayy settled in a refugee camp west of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. He has been there ever since. Hussein Naimat, 80, was expelled from his Bedouin village, Fatis, which was 40 kilometres east of Gaza. He recounts how Zionists employed methods other than killing in their expulsion of residents. "They realised how much the Bedouin are attached to their animals, and especially their horses," he told the Weekly. "And so they would steal animals and horses, and threatened the people that if they didn't leave, they would steal all the animals, and so the people left quickly." Hussein adds that the people's hasty departure from their village was aided by the psychological war waged by Zionist gangs. They spread information about massacres they committed in villages across Palestine, making people flee in fear for their lives. Even some who fled as children still remember their expulsion. Emad Hassan, 67, was seven years old when he was expelled with the rest of the people from his village, Al-Jiyya, 30 kilometres northeast of Gaza. "I still remember that day... As we were fleeing, my mother suddenly threw me to the ground in a wheat field, and sat beside me when she heard the sound of a car. She thought it belonged to one of the Haganah gangs," he told the Weekly. What these long-suffering people did not know at the time -- and what many new historians in Israel have since revealed -- is that the expulsion operations were organised as part of the implementation of "Plan D" ordered by the executive council of the Jewish Agency in early 1948. Yigael Yadin, at that time commander of operations in Haganah and who later assumed the posts of army chief-of-staff and deputy prime minister in the government formed by Menachem Begin in 1977, oversaw the plan's execution. Historian Michael Bar-Zohar, who wrote David Ben-Gurion's biography (Ben-Gurion was head of the Jewish Agency's executive committee and became Israel's first prime minister), says that Ben-Gurion had issued orders to the Haganah to employ "all means" to remove the Palestinians from their land.
