Tears for Tarshiha Read online

  Published by Wild Dingo Press

  Melbourne, Australia

  books @ wilddingopress.com.au

  www.wilddingopress.com.au

  First published by Wild Dingo Press 2018

  Text copyright © Olfat Mahmoud, Dani Cooper & Helen McCue 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968,

  no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission

  of the copyright owners and the publisher of this book.

  Designer: Debra Billson

  Editor: Catherine Lewis

  Cover photos: Government Press Office (Israel);

  Old Palestinian Tatreez-Embroidery Image: lenazap (iStock)

  Print in Australia by Griffin Press

  Mahmoud, Olfat, 1960.

  Tears for Tarshiha / Olfat Mahmoud.

  ISBN: 9780648066361 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9780987178596 (ebook: pdf)

  ISBN: 9780987381347 (eBook: ePub)

  To my parents who nurtured in me my love of Palestine and Tarshiha and my desire to return to my homeland.

  Acknowledgements

  For several decades my friends, in particular Helen McCue, my family and colleagues have been urging me to tell the story of my life as a child, teenager, wife, mother and activist living in the Palestinian refugee camp of Burj Barajneh in Beirut, Lebanon. It has taken time, but with the help of all these people Tears for Tarshiha has now been published.

  I wish to acknowledge the gifts given to me by my parents and the love and encouragement given by my father and my mother who supported me throughout their lives. This book and all the work that I do would not have been possible without the love and support of my extended family, especially my husband Mahmoud and our boys, Chaker, Fayez, Hadi and Hani.

  I am exceptionally grateful for the professional help in bringing my story to a wider audience from publisher Wild Dingo Press, and in particular its founder Catherine Lewis, who has an enduring commitment to giving voice to the world’s refugees.

  I am grateful to all the wonderful women, my sisters in the struggle, who have been through so much with me and have always been so loving and supportive. I acknowledge all of the international development agency staff, in particular Union Aid Abroad APHEDA, who have supported my work in the camps, and all the wonderful volunteers who have given their time and energy to help us. I would like to thank also the Oral History department of the National Library of Australia.

  There have been a number of wonderful people who have read this manuscript and who have encouraged me to continue during the difficult times. Their sage advice and suggestions are the backbone on which this manuscript has been crafted. They know who they are without being named.

  Finally, I wish to thank Dani Cooper and Helen McCue for their encouragement and assistance in bringing my story to the printed page.

  Table of Contents

  The Catastrophe ( al Nakba )

  Around the brazier

  A family dispersed

  Camp life

  A people’s army

  Nursing the enemy

  Encircled

  Back to Beirut

  The massacre

  Nawal’s brother

  A taste of freedom

  Down Under

  Bar Elias

  New life

  The promise of Oslo

  Life and death

  Woman on a mission

  My personal diaspora

  Epilogue

  Return to Tarshiha

  Photo Section

  Introduction

  Tears for Tarshiha is the story of my friend Dr Olfat Mahmoud who was born a refugee in Burj Barajneh, one of several Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon. I first met Olfat in 1982 having resigned my Middle Eastern consultancy with the World Health Organisation after the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut. Olfat was a nurse in Gaza Hospital when I met her, and we soon became good friends.

  Olfat’s story is the story of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees living in camps in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East, so it echoes the lives of millions of refugees worldwide. Through Olfat’s story of leadership, extraordinary courage, dedication and resilience in war-torn Lebanon, we see the life of a refugee woman, nurse, mother, academic and outspoken advocate for her people who longs to return to her ancestral home and live in peace.

  My friendship with Olfat has been sustained over the past 34 years initially though my work with Union Aid Aboard-APHEDA, then later through ongoing advocacy for refugees. It has been with Australian trade union support and Australian government funds that considerable development assistance has been provided not only to refugees in Lebanon but also to Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories.

  Along with many others, for many years I had been urging Olfat to write her story. In March 2001 I spent six weeks with her, recorder in hand, reflecting on her life. Later, when she was in Australia, we did more interviews. In 2013 Dani Cooper conducted further interviews. It was an extremely emotional journey with lots of tears and laughter as Olfat recalled the trauma and joys of her life. I interviewed her mother, father, grandmothers and aunts as well as other family members living in the Burj Barajneh camp. I spoke, too, with Olfat’s friends and colleagues. Using all the material, Dani Cooper has woven one woman’s story of struggle for Palestinian rights, principal among them the right of return, into a personal narrative that captures Olfat’s pain, exile, statelessness, and courage.

  Seventy years on from the flight of Palestinians from their homeland, Tears for Tarshiha is a timely reminder of the present-day failure of the Middle East peace process and the failure of the international community through the United Nations to address the fate of some four million Palestinian refugees, to address the key issue of the Right of Return and to address the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory.

  Throughout her life Olfat has not ceased to fight for the principle, enshrined in international law and in numerous UN resolutions, of the Palestinian right of return. Her contribution to that principle has taken her all over the world, speaking about life in the camps and advocating for peace. In 2015 when she was invited to the UN in New York for a ceremony marking the formation of UNRWA. Speaking on behalf of Lebanese-based Palestinian refugees in the presence of the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Olfat said:

  As a Palestine refugee in Lebanon, I have very limited rights, I am stateless, and I exist but am not recognised. . . My father and mother and my grandmothers and grandfathers and my children will remain refugees even if they marry Lebanese. For us the phrases ‘human rights’ and the ‘right to be free from statelessness’, and ‘the right to live in dignity and safety’ have lost all their meaning.

  I hope this book will help raise understanding of the plight of Palestinian refugees and their rightful quest to return to their homeland.

  Dr. Helen McCue AM, Southern Highlands, NSW, Australia 2018.

  1

  THE CATASTROPHE ( AL NAKBA )

  I was not yet born, but on a winter’s night on March 10, 1948, a group of 11 men I would never meet sealed my fate. On that Wednesday, these 11 men—Zionist leaders and young Jewish military officers—met near the seafront in northern Tel Aviv (Tel al Rabia in Arabic) at a rectangular, white building, ironically known as the ‘Red Hous
e’ in deference to its previous life as a workers’ union headquarters. There they finalised the blueprint of a plan to systematically clear Palestinians from their homeland. Before the evening was over orders had been delivered to military units on the ground to prepare for the expulsion of Palestinians from large swathes of the region. It took six months to fulfil the mission and ‘when it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed and 11 urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants’1. My village of Tarshiha, in northern Palestine, was among the last to be cleared. It was October 1948 and the military operation—what my people call al Nakba, the catastrophe—was by then concentrated on the Upper Galilee where my family had lived for centuries. As the Palestinian men of our region fought back, the Israeli ground offensive was reinforced with an aerial bombardment.

  Today I can but imagine the terror my grandmother, Alia, felt as death rained from the sky, but the details of the day’s events are etched in my memory—placed there through my grandparents’ countless retellings to our family. In my mind I see my grandmother Alia racing back to the township from the fields, where she worked each day, with the roar of planes reverberating overhead. Milk from the jar she carries is splashing on to her clothing and face as she runs. Other women race beside her, stumbling at times as their feet catch in their long skirts, but propelled on by their terror and fears for their children. Smoke and dust rise from the village as the bombs fall. Alia hears the women’s cries for their children as they run towards the devastation, her own voice echoing in the chorus.

  As she arrives home, Alia races through the house calling for her children. There is no answer. Panic mounts. She runs next door and finds them huddled together, crying, with the neighbour and her family. Alia’s oldest daughter, Hind, just 12, has her arms wrapped around her younger siblings. She falls into my grandmother’s outstretched arms sobbing, ‘Yamma, I’ve been praying for you to come back, I’ve been praying’.

  Alia reluctantly pulls away from her children and runs towards the village centre where her sisters, cousins and other family members are sheltering in one of the few two-storey homes. ‘Please Allah, keep them safe,’ she pleads again and again out loud. ‘Allah, let them be safe.’ The village, which had survived since the days of the Phoenicians, is in ruins. Debris is everywhere: broken glass, rubble, and amidst the collapsed buildings, the wounded and dying. A young woman Alia recognises is lying on the ground, her legs blown off. A horse has been killed; human and animal flesh and blood mix together in death. Blood is splashed up the walls and soaking into the dusty road. And then she sees them—her niece and her beautiful four young boys. Dead. The shock barely registers before she races on. There is no time for grief, no time to mourn or bury the dead. There is time only for the living and to run.

  Alia is now desperate to find her other relatives. Mahmoud, her husband, is on the eastern side of Tarshiha with his brothers and other men, trying to repel the Israeli ground troops. It is a vain hope—men with rifles and farm implements are no match for the well-armed Israeli troops. Every minute now counts as she seeks to stay one step ahead of the invaders. She is desperate to leave but won’t go without her family. At last she finds them in one of the village’s churches. Muslims and Christians—Palestinians all—crowded together, praying their place of sanctuary will not be hit. Alia’s Christian neighbours beg her to stay, but she knows what can happen to those who linger when the Israelis march in. In Deir Yassin, just six months earlier, more than 100 men, women and children had been murdered by Israeli paramilitaries.2 The massacre reverberated across Palestine and fuelled the flight of hundreds of Palestinians from their homes as the Israelis advanced. The same fear takes hold in Tarshiha.

  Now reunited with her family, Alia gathers her children and collects a few items from home. She feeds the chickens, locks the house and puts the key, and a few pieces of jewellery and gold, inside the folds of her dress. With her children, sisters and other family, she heads to Tarshiha’s western edge, to avoid the advancing Israeli army, and flees north towards Lebanon, 20 kilometres away.

  She would never return. To this day I wonder if, as she walked away, my grandmother glanced back momentarily for one last glimpse of home. I hope so, but I doubt she realised she was walking into exile. Instead I expect Alia simply heaved her load more firmly on to her shoulders, shushed the children and head down, pushed forward to safety.

  Of course, my family are not the only ones fleeing. There are hundreds of people on the move. Alia sees old people struggling to walk but cannot help as she carries her two youngest. As they flee, Israeli planes swoop low, harassing and terrifying them, pushing them to leave Palestine. Everyone is sure they will be bombed at any moment. When the planes approach, they run off the dusty road, pulling the children near to protect them. Often, they walk through olive groves and orchards, where branches scratch their bodies. Cousin Ahmed, who trades in Lebanon, arrives and guides villagers along the safest and quickest route. But still their constant companion remains the fear of being shot and killed.

  On their first night of flight, my grandmother’s family lies in the fields among olive trees, sheltering as best they can. Alia doles out the olives, cheese and bread she has grabbed from the house. There is momentary joy the next day when my grandfather Mahmoud rejoins the family, bringing with him some of the family’s sheep and cows. But he also delivers the news that Tarshiha is lost.

  The family continues its forced trek towards Lebanon, finally reaching its borders on the third day. Alia now realises the extent of the exodus with thousands of Palestinians crossing the border. For three days more they continue to walk, and by now the flight is taking its toll. While the days are warm, the nights in the open fields are cold. Alia’s youngest son, Ahmad, not yet weaned, dies from pneumonia. Muhammad, just shy of two, soon follows. In the Islamic faith the dead are buried as soon as possible, so the two baby boys are laid to rest in an unmarked grave in the fields, time only for a short ceremony and prayers. Weighed down with grief, Alia continues on her forced march to the village of Aita Al Sha’b. There, she is reunited with other families who join the trek on to Qana and Burj el Shamalie, where they finally rest.

  It has been six days and it is only now Alia and her family learn that the Israeli army has occupied Palestine. Still, Alia remains confident they will soon return home. She has her house key and their animals. Fields will soon need tending. What would the Israelis want with her home? But this certainty is shattered when Alia’s grandfather, worrying over what has been left behind, decides to return to Tarshiha. The fighting is over, and he is an old, unarmed man. But that is of no consequence. The order in Israel is to shoot anyone who tries to return, and he is killed in his attempt to cross the border. Alia understands at last that the road home is closed.

  Our exile has begun.

  2

  AROUND THE BRAZIER

  Although I was born there, I have always known Lebanon is not my home. I am Palestinian and although I have never been home I know my land intimately—its smells, its landscapes, its tastes, its history. It is embedded in the deepest reaches of my psyche, imprinted in my DNA. Every winter’s night in Burj Barajneh, the refugee camp in the southern suburbs of Beirut where I was born, I would make the journey back to Palestine as I sat with my family trying to keep warm by the brazier. With the glowing embers shadowing their faces, my grandparents—Alia and Mahmoud—would tell me, my brothers, sisters and cousins, of their life in Tarshiha. Even as the Israeli government on the international stage denied the very existence of Palestine, my grandparents would breathe it back to life around the fires. And each night they would promise us that we would one day return to our homeland.

  Tarshiha—the name is like a breath on the wind, but in fact it invokes a famous Arabic warrior, who died fighting the Crusaders. Our village, like many in the Galilee, reached back into history. Its narrow
stone-cobbled streets held tales of biblical times, the arrival of the Crusaders in the 12th century and the rule of the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s. The surrounding mountains and rocky fields had been toiled for generations, home to ancient olive groves up to 4000 years old and rows of citrus trees.

  When my grandmother told us stories of the village, I had an inkling of habits and customs unchanged with the passing of time. She wove a picture in words of young women working together on their family’s land growing fruit and vegetables, gossiping and laughing as they toiled. My mother, Hind, she would reveal, helped as a young girl to build beehives, and the white honey from the bees was a delicacy shared with family, friends and neighbours in the dar (an open-air square in the front or centre of the house).

  My grandparents, like most families, kept animals for meat and milk and with the crops they grew were relatively self-sufficient—everything was homegrown and homemade. They would barter with their neighbours or use their produce to pay for needed services.

  Like many villagers, however, the family’s main source of income was tobacco—a crop introduced by the British in the 1920s. Traders would visit the farm to buy the tobacco, but Alia’s father also sold tobacco in Haifa, strapping the crop on to donkeys and walking the beast to the port city 50 kilometres away. After a successful sale, as was the custom, he would slaughter a sheep and distribute the meat to the poor in the village.

  While my grandmother wove her tale of food and family, my grandfather was determined we know our history and the battles our people had fought to remain on their land. He was better than any encyclopaedia and, long before a television entered the refugee camp, he was our main source of entertainment. Leaning in towards us, the firelight shadowing his face, my grandfather evoked our country’s past, taking us back to the days when our village was ruled from Constantinople, to our more recent history as a bargaining chip in international diplomacy. He would outline the circumstances in which Palestine had been ‘gifted’ in the aftermath of World War I to the British as a protectorate under the Sykes-Picot Agreement3, his tone mocking the international leaders who believed we were a present to be wrapped and handed on.