Coffins on Our Shoulders: The Experience of the Palestinian Citizens of Israel

Chapter Two

Chapter Two The Abu-Shamlas reached Acre as part of a continuous stream of displaced Palestinians the day it was captured by the Israeli forces. The men were rounded up and arrested.
Aarif and his son Mohammad, who at thirteen looked older than his age, were no exception. For three long months Maryam turned up every morning at the police headquarters to plead for her son until she finally convinced the officers in charge to let him go. Most men, including
Aarif, were detained for more than eighteen months. No indictments or legal proceedings of any kind were ever filed. Nada, twelve at the time, and her younger sister Nazmiyah, recall how in their first few days in Acre, thousands of incoming displaced Palestinians gathered in the al-Jazzar mosque in the old city, sleeping in the courtyards and on the floor of the great hall. At first they all 41 believed it would be only days before they were allowed to return to their homes. The army, however, had other plans. The road from Acre south, toward Haifa, was blocked; the old walled city was cordoned off and isolated from the newer quarter, trapping those in and around the mosque. Initially, travel out of town was impossible: it required special travel permits from the army, and none were being issued. Soldiers fired shots at anyone attempting to escape or otherwise break the harsh rules that the IDF imposed on the conquered town. Only the sea route north, to Lebanon, was kept deliberately open. Shortly after the IDF took over, it found Palestinian residents of Acre who had stayed put despite the hostilities and appointed them as members of a board of trustees. The board assumed responsibility for providing the incoming flow of displaced families with food, shelter, and other basic needs. On a number of occasions, members of the board broke into empty homes of Palestinians who had fled to Lebanon and made them available for displaced families. Nazmiyah recalls that the family, along with their paternal aunt and other relatives from Haifa, some thirty people all told, slept in a large room of a Palestinian house that had been opened by the board. With time, this temporary measure tended to become a permanent solution. Its consequence can still be felt in some of the more impoverished and rundown quarters in mixed towns inside Israel today.1 More than fifty years later, many of the displaced families are yet to fully recover from the social, economic, and emotional trauma of 1948. In the spring and summer of 1948, many Palestinian refugees and displaced persons were malnourished, sometimes hungry. In Acre many lived on bread and olives. Only the more affluent families, mainly local ones who had remained in Acre, could occasionally afford the luxury of canned meat or other forms of more substantial nourishment . The International Red Cross, the presence of which began to be felt in Acre soon after the hostilities abated in late spring, gave away ration cards to help regulate the distribution of basic foodstuffs. With time, these ration cards, called by the Palestinians Kart Mu
an, became a precious thing for the internally displaced—the first form of documented identification officially sanctioned by the state of Israel. 42 c h a p t e r t w o • • • • • In the immediate aftermath of the war, Palestinian refugees in Palestine /Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, and beyond were preoccupied primarily with the realities and hardships of survival. Families were fragmented and impoverished, uprooted from their birthplaces and communities of origin. Survival required unrelenting effort. Getting through the bitterly cold, snow-filled winter of 1950 in temporary domiciles, finding food for children, looking for work, and scraping together an income were all-consuming tasks.2 Uncertain of the fate of their dispersed kin, people were losing hope of reunification. Many were shocked, unable to fathom why they personally and the nation as a whole were being subjected to such a cruel fate. The hope of many refugees and displaced Palestinians that help would come from Arab states which would turn around their destiny was quickly dashed. Instead they began to realize that the war they had just lost was destined to have irreversible and lasting outcomes. Those in refugee camps outside Israel were preparing for long-term, even though temporary, life in exile. Those within were reluctantly beginning to come...