Saf-Saf was a small village of 900 or so inhabitants, only a few kilometres south of the Lebanese border. As Afif recalls, the villagers had a large piece of fertile land, known as the ‘Bayader’ in Arabic, where they would grow wheat. The villagers would cut and refine the wheat, and tie it to cows in long strands to transport it. Agriculture was a primary source of income for these simple villagers, and in addition to wheat, Saf-Saf grew olives (a staple of Palestine), grapes, figs and tobacco.
As Afif describes it, Saf-Saf for the most part produced enough to feed its own inhabitants, with the occasional trip being made to major Palestinian centres, such as Safad, to sell excess Agricultural produce. Lacking much modern infrastructure at the time, excess produce of the village would be transported via donkeys, or simply carried there using clay pots. There was only one paved road that passed by Saf-Saf, where the occasional car would drive by. Since there was no plumbing either, the villagers would go to a spring in the Bayader to collect cold fresh water.
Among his few childhood memories, Afif recalls having a wooden bicycle and playing with a ball in the bayader. He also remembers attending a small elementary boy’s school, founded during the British mandate in Palestine. Saf-Saf was a simple village, with most of the houses made of clay or mountainous rocks, where the people enjoyed a simple and relatively peaceful way of life on their fertile land. Many of the small Palestinian villages were similar to Saf-Saf; humble Mediterranean peasant communities. It is not hard to see then, how the events of the 1948 ‘Catastrophe’ came as an unexpected shock to most Palestinians, in both magnitude and endurance.
Afif recalls his village having a handful of old rifles, about 4 or 5, with a similar number of men volunteering every night to guard the village. This was in response to the rising military activities of the Israeli militias, namely the Haganah, Irgun and the Stern Gang, whose more prominent members included future Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. Interestingly, the latter at the time were wanted by the British authorities for ‘terrorism’, and it is thought that the word itself was first used to describe these characters.
The majority of Palestinian villagers at the time probably did not imagine that many of them would become refugees at the conclusion of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war which began after Israel declared independence in May 1948, and was attacked by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq (Jordan had a prior agreement with Israel over land annexation). By the end of 1948, approximately 750,000 Palestinians became permanently dispossessed from their homes, and approximately 400 Palestinian villages, including Saf-Saf, were destroyed or abandoned. Eventually, most of this abandoned property was annexed by Israel with the passing of the 1949 ‘Absentee’ law.
Israel generally states that because the Arabs rejected the UN’s partition plan of Palestine, and attacked Israel, they are responsible for the fate of the Palestinian refugees, despite the fact that Israel began expelling Palestinians from their villages prior to the war’s outbreak. Israel’s position also largely ignores the well-documented systematic campaign of intimidation that either forced the Palestinians to flee directly, or indirectly.
In Saf-Saf’s case, a young Afif recalls how his mother had warned him not to play outside and stay home. Innocent as a young child would be, he heard that “the Jews were coming” and thus he was forbidden from playing in the Bayader and straying too far away from home, not quite comprehending what was happening.
As fate would have it, Saf-Saf fell on Friday October 30th, 1948, after a fierce battle between members of the Arab Liberation Army and the Israeli Militias, during what was known in Israel as “Operation Hiram”. The village defenders fruitlessly attempted to save the village, but being severely under equipped and relatively unorganized in comparison to the Israeli militias were unable to resist, subsequently raising the white flag signaling their surrender.
Afif’s faint recollection of the ensuing massacre of approximately 60 youths, and the subsequent rapes and deportations that took place after the village surrendered are strikingly similar to those described by Israeli Journalist Gideon Levy. In a book review entitled “Exposing Israel’s original sins (11/03/2000)” in the prominent Liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, he describes the systematic Israeli military campaign whose primary aim was to deport, frighten and terrorise the Palestinian population, which was predominantly peasant, to flee.
This was, in the various writings and famous quotes of Israel’s founders, simply to ‘transfer’ the Palestinians away from the cultivatable land, to make room for the masses of Jewish Immigrants from Europe, and eventually the Middle East, to settle. Many of the early Zionist leaders from Theodor Herzl to David Ben-Gurion spoke or wrote about deporting the native population of Palestine, the Palestinian Arabs. Despite attempts by the European Jewish immigrants in Palestine to purchase land, prior to the war’s outset the Jewish population of Palestine was only able to acquire approximately 6% of the land area of Palestine, even though the U.N.’s partition plan granted them 50% of Palestine as a Jewish state. One at this point would question how the farmers in Saskatchewan would react if the Canadian government or the U.N. were to grant 50% of their land to recent immigrants to Canada.
Needless to say, there was a small Jewish community in Palestine prior to Israel’s creation, which had lived in relative harmony with the Arab inhabitants, much in contrast to the Jewish experience in Europe. It was only when the massive influx of European Jews began to occur that tensions between Arabs and Jews began rising, as the European Jews made no secrets of their desires to setup up a Jewish National home in Palestine, with or without the consent of the majority Palestinian Arab population.
Afif, as it turned out, was one of the luckier Palestinians. Growing up in a crowded tent with his 11-member family in the notorious refugee camps of Lebanon, he would study almost every night using only a kerosene lamp for light. The hardship he endured most of his young and adolescent life as a refugee helped him develop the will and endurance to overcome what fate had given him. Taking advantage of UN funded schools, he was able to earn his high school diploma and began teaching at a high school in Lebanon and eventually Bahrain. Afif saved enough money to travel to the United States, and was able to successfully acquire his Bachelor and Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering, and was thus in a position to support his family, who were not quite as fortunate.
Several hundred thousand Palestinians in refugee camps in the Middle East are still waiting for the day that a solution to the refugee issue will emerge. The United Nations has continuously upheld Resolution 194, affirming their rights to return to their homes to no avail, as generations of Palestinians have been born as stateless refugees, while Jewish immigrants from Europe and the Middle East migrate to the lands the Palestinians had once lived on. To this day Palestinians are seeing their lands continuously expropriated by the state of Israel, despite condemnations from International and Israeli human rights groups, and in contravention of International Law.
Afif will probably never be able to see his old village, or rather what’s left of it. His clearest childhood memories are those of the shanty towns, poverty and turmoil of the Lebanese refugee camps. While any person, from Ethiopia to New York, claiming to be Jewish, can immediately immigrate to Israel (which lies on the ruins of some 400 Palestinian villages), Afif will remain stateless, without a country to safeguard his rights and offer him permanent and unconditional shelter, for the rest of his life. Being one of the luckier Palestinians, however, his case is not quite as unfortunate as that of other Palestinians still condemned to a life of exile and statelessness, who remember their villages and cities, and their old Mediterranean lifestyles. Never losing hope, some Palestinians have been known to keep old title deeds and rusted keys to the properties they left behind, in the slim chance that one day they may be given the opportunity to return to their ancestral homes.
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