Lessons of Our Elders: What They Lost When They Lost Jerusalem

The 1967 Naksa was a blow that prompted Yousef to compose Jerusalem Symphony. Granddaughter Hana describes the symphony as “an interfaith dialogue in the making, interposing the sounds of church bells with the Adhan from the mosques, demonstrating the unity in Al Quds.”2

In the 1980s, Yousef established a music school in Jordan’s capital, Amman, that offered music education to young people across the region. Through it, he expressed his “unwavering commitment to cultural preservation.” According to his granddaughter, he “believed that music and culture held more significant influence than weapons.”

Yousef died in 1997.

Daughter Randa Kamal wrote the story of her father, Yousef Kamal, who was born in 1927 and raised in a palatial home in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. The memories he shared with his daughter conveyed his deep love of Jerusalem, which he believed to be the most beautiful city in the world. He recalled its large, international, multifaith community living peacefully during the years he was growing up. Memoirs written by Palestinians who recount their life before 1948 make a point of noting that Muslims, Christians, and Jews interacted easily with one another, and Yousef was no exception; he counted Jews among his best friends.

Fighting broke out as Zionist militias aimed to seize control of Palestine to turn it into a Jewish state. Yousef’s parents decided to leave for Cyprus temporarily; however, before leaving, his mother washed the bedsheets, anticipating their return and wanting her family to find a well-kept house when they did. That day never came.

The family house was seized and turned into a Jewish religious bookstore.

Anton Telegraph had been working as an accountant at a car dealership and living in Jerusalem’s Qatamon neighborhood when he and his family fled the violence following the 1948 War. They went to Jericho, thinking it would be temporary. There he married, but within a few years, Anton and his wife, Margarette Jouzy, found the city too tense and left the country for Amman, Jordan. They settled there and raised a family.

The short account of this couple is written by their granddaughter Ghalia, who reports that her grandparents wanted to make sure that their children knew the beauty of the land they came from. And so, they would take them on visits to their relatives back in Jerusalem. Ghalia tells us that “On one of their visits, my seedo and teta took their children to seedo’s old home in Katamon, but the sight of this stolen home that once housed so many family memories, was bittersweet with someone else inhabiting it.”3

This need to see the old family house is as compelling as it is painful. Its takeover by strange outsiders is a violation that squeezes the heart of the rightful owner, but the need to confront the house is hard to resist. Clearly the grandparents’ references made a strong impression on Ghalia, who sees the physical house as the locus of the family’s origin and ends her story with these words:

The descendants of Serat Dawood Ahram and Eisa Ahram can trace their lineage all the way back to the days of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi. Writing about her maternal grandparents, Mai Saleh Zaitoon summarized their legacy with these words: “[It] echoes the emotional tale of loss and shattered harmony as a result of a brutal occupation. Al Quds [Jerusalem], their cherished city, was unique in both its history and communal coexistence of people from all three religions.”4 And indeed, Mai grew up hearing about her grandmother’s Jewish doctor and Christian friends.

That easygoing lifestyle was shattered in 1948. Her grandparents moved to Amman and then Aleppo due to Eisa’s responsibilities as an Arab Bank employee. After 1967, they could not even visit Jerusalem—a huge loss for them. Their granddaughter recalls that they held on to “their memories of a harmonious era” in Jerusalem and their “hope for a future where harmony and coexistence might once again flourish in their hometown.”

Once upon a time, there was an ancient village in the Jerusalem District called Deir Yasin. Prior to the Colonial British Mandate period, it was known for its agriculture. In the 1920s, its residents started to make a living from stone quarries; limestone was plentiful in the area. By 1948, the village was relatively prosperous, with a population of over 600 Arab residents who had positive relations with Jews who lived in nearby settlements. That all changed on April 9, 1948.

Whenever Deir Yasin is mentioned today, it is thought of primarily as the site of a massacre of Palestinians committed by Zionist militias during the weeks before the establishment of the State of Israel. It was not the only massacre of Palestinians that Zionists committed in the process of creating their Jewish state, and it was not even the largest massacre committed to further that goal. But it was arguably the most well-publicized massacre of those awful months, and when news of the killing traveled like wildfire, it set off a panic among Palestinians that led them to grab their loved ones and hit the road—a self-preservation move that they saw as temporary.

The descendants of those panicked villagers still wait to be allowed to return.

Fatima Sammour’s granddaughter is the narrator of this specific account—unlike other narrators in this volume, she chose not to give her name.

On that spring day in 1948, Fatima hid with her five children in her home, the oldest 10 years old and the youngest 5 months old, until the Zionist militias came. They forced her out of her home, where she saw corpses on the ground, including that of her uncle; she and her children were put in a truck, searched and robbed, and paraded in a nearby settlement before being turned over to British troops. It is worth remembering that much of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was accomplished under the indifferent eye of the British Mandate government, which simply ran out the clock as the country unraveled until its long-announced departure date.

In addition to her uncle, Fatima had lost her mother in the massacre; presumably her husband, too, was killed, although his death does not appear to have been confirmed or even reported.

She settled first in Abu Dis (a Palestinian village abutting Jerusalem), and then moved on to Jordan. Her granddaughter recalls that when she died in 2001, Fatima had in her possession the key to her home and the stamp of the “mukhtar” (mayor) that had belonged to her father.

Her granddaughter ends her account with these words: “Allah yerhamek Tayta (may God have mercy on your soul), and may your dream of us returning, not as visitors to a site of tragedy, but as residents reclaiming their rightful home, come true.”5

East Jerusalem mayor Rudi al-Khatib was among the first Palestinians to be deported by Israel to Jordan after they occupied the eastern side of city in 1967 because of who he was and the role he played in Palestinian civil society. His wife only learned of the upheaval in her family’s life by hearing it announced on the radio.

Granddaughter Suha al-Khatib tells the story of her grandfather’s deportation in March 1968 at the age of 54. Taken from his home at 3 a.m., he was driven to Jericho, subjected to interrogation, accused of treason and incitement, and then taken to the bridge leading to Jordan and told to walk. In December that year, his wife was arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to jail. An international campaign secured her release after 15 days. She was given permission to leave the country to visit her husband but then discovered that she was denied permission to return to her city. Only after the Oslo Accords were signed in the mid-1990s were the Khatibs allowed to return to their city, Jerusalem.

Suha recalls that as mayor, Ruhi was responsible for introducing streetlights in the Old City. Clearly her grandparents told her a lot about Jerusalem other than his accomplishments as mayor, because she ends her account with these words: