A personal reflection on Nakba Day

Blog post by Rayya Ghul, University of Edinburgh

Nakba is an Arabic word, roughly translating to ‘catastrophe’ and is the word Palestinians use to talk about the appropriation of land and expulsion and exile of over 800,000 people during the partition of Palestine to make way for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.  The nation state is a modern invention.  When Palestinians are told “there is no such country as Palestine” what is meant is there was never a nation state called ‘Palestine’.  And that’s true, despite many maps from 5th Century BCE onwards having some version of ‘Palestine’ on them.  It’s also true that there was no such country as Israel before 1948. Facts are never the whole story.

Nakba Day, the 15th May, the day after Israeli Independence Day, is the day Palestinians around the world come together to commemorate and bear witness to their catastrophe.  For my father, it was the day that he could no longer return home.

My father, Mahmud Ghul, was born on May 3rd 1923, in Silwan, a village in East Jerusalem, which featured in the news last year because the Israeli authorities are attempting to ethnically cleanse it as part of their policy of ‘Judaising’ the area towards their goal of establishing Jerusalem as their capital.  The area of Silwan where he lived was called ‘hart al-ghul’ or ‘home of the Ghuls’ as many family members had lived there for decades, and some still do. Israeli guides tell tourists that no Arabs lived in Silwan before 1967.

He was the fourth of seven children and already as a child, showed promise as a scholar.  He had a talent for languages and as a teenager was able to translate easily between Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. He excelled at school and at university and for a while worked as a teacher in Jerusalem.  At some point he wanted to marry and made enquiries around Silwan.  However, every eligible young woman turned out to be his ‘sister’. To explain further, at the time of his birth his mother had been unwell and had been unable to breastfeed him.  As was customary, he was wet-nursed by local women and according to the contemporary laws, this meant that all the children of his wet-nurses became his siblings.  Fed up, he applied for a scholarship to do his Masters in South Arabian Studies in Cairo.  He graduated in 1948 and was unable to return to Jerusalem as he had been out of the country on his Palestinian passport at the time of the Nakba and was effectively made stateless.  He was lucky enough to be accepted to study for a doctorate at SOAS in London as a displaced person until he eventually was given a Jordanian passport.  It was there he met my mother, a displaced German from Silesia.  He was the first person in his family to marry outside of the village of Silwan, let alone someone from another country.

My father completed his PhD and we moved to St Andrews where he had been appointed as a lecturer in Semitic Languages.  As a child I learned about war and displacement from both my parents, as well as a deep respect for education and scholarship from my father.  On one occasion that I was begging for some toy or item of clothing to be bought for me, he said, “Material things are of no value, everything can be taken away from you.  The only thing that people can’t take away from you is what’s in here”, he added, tapping his forehead”.

He was passionate about Palestine and in the 1950s and early ‘60s I think he still had some hope that the United Nations might prevail and politicians could be persuaded to take on the Palestinian cause for justice.  He would get angry at the political rhetoric that suggested that Israel ‘had made the desert bloom’, when they were actually using modern agricultural methods that had been imported from the USA into areas where previously Palestinians had been cultivating the land in a sustainable fashion, tending olive and citrus groves, growing vegetables, fishing in the Mediterranean and herding sheep.  He became enraged when phrases such as ‘a land without people, for a people without a land’ were uttered on the radio or read in a paper.  He would describe the Palestinian culture and customs to me at length to prove to someone that his memories, his reality had existed. He wrote frequent, long letters to the BBC complaining about misrepresentation of history and received polite, but dismissive replies. He despaired when he was accused of hating Jewish people having grown up with Palestinian Jewish neighbours, friends and colleagues and he always cautioned me against prejudice and stereotyping.  Even then, boycotting Israeli goods was a way to fight back. I recall going shopping with my mother to the greengrocer, and her asking, to the rest of the queue’s surprise, in front of a pile of Jaffa oranges, “do you have any oranges today?” and hearing the even more surprising response, “not today, Mrs Ghul”.

I make my father sound like an angry person, but in fact he was incredibly genial, warm and humorous.  He was short, at 5’2” and had an infectious grin which revealed gappy teeth and made everyone feel like they were the most important person in the room when he was talking to them.  He was beloved by his students and respected by his colleagues in the field.  He and colleagues had deciphered inscriptions found in the Yemeni desert and made it possible to read Saba’een, the language of Sheba.  He was a meticulous scholar and polymath with a prodigious memory and for me he was like a walking encyclopaedia, seeming to know the answer to every question.

In the 1960s we were able to travel to Silwan and to Jericho where my grandmother lived.  She owned a large citrus grove and various properties and land in the area and I loved being able to visit and sleep outdoors, help her with the cooking and hear stories of how naughty my father had been as a child; so naughty that she had to tie him to the kitchen table and rub chilli on his lips, apparently. My father taught me how to make hummus properly, creaming the tahini with water and then lemon so it didn’t congeal when you added the chickpea puree.  He’d obviously learned something from his mother.

He died when he was 60, of cancer, in 1983.  His hopes for the establishment of a Palestinian state had faded.  However, I am grateful that he did not live to experience the horror of having to watch the West Bank wall go up, apartheid-style checkpoints being established, the bombings of Gaza, escalating settler violence and the disintegration of any semblance of Palestinian leadership that works for the liberation of Palestine.  I think it would have broken his heart completely.  That is the daily experience of Nakba for Palestinians.

Rayya Ghul

Rayya Ghul works in the Institute for Academic Development at the University of Edinburgh where she is the academic lead for the Edinburgh Teaching Award.  She has a collection of thobes, the Palestinian national dress, which, on request, she will share with stories of their origins and information about the embroidery.

Image credit: Author’s own.