GAZA CITY: Half of the Hamduni family lives in a quiet village in northern Israel, and the other half is in the besieged Gaza Strip. Sixty years after the war that created Israel they are more divided than ever.
In the Beach Refugee Camp, a Gaza slum on a sewage-poisoned stretch of the Mediterranean coast, Safaa, 70, holds the keys to her family home in Jaffa, now an upscale suburb of Tel Aviv, from which her family fled in 1948.
Just a few hundred kilometres (miles) north, Mahmud, 55, an Arab Israeli citizen who owns a tractor company, reclines in his spacious and well-furnished house in the quiet village of Tamra where he has lived most of his life.
As Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary, Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, the expulsion of some 700,000 people during the 1948 war, an event that for them is the core of the decades-old Middle East conflict.
For Safaa s family, confined to the Gaza Strip, and for some 4.5 million Palestinian refugees scattered across the occupied territories, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, the war that followed Israel s birth never really ended.
"We teach our children that we will return one day to our homeland, we will return to Jaffa and to Tamra," Safaa says. "We ve kept the keys to the old house in Jaffa and the documents that prove we own it."
The Hamdunis story begins in the 1940s with Mohammed, Safah s deceased uncle, and Suleiman, Mahmud s late father, two orphaned brothers from a Bedouin family living near the northern town of Akka in British-ruled Palestine.
"Mohammed went to Jaffa in the 1940s. He was a young man and he needed work. He met a city woman there but in order to marry her he had to lie about his origins," Mahmud says over a lavish meal of grilled meats and fresh salads.
"So he told her he was a member of the wealthy Al-Najami family in Akka. It was a lie! He had merely worked at a shop they owned," he laughs.
The ruse worked, however, and the two were married in 1945 and moved into her family home in Jaffa, a house Safaa remembers from her childhood.
"I remember the days before the expulsion like a dream. They were beautiful days. My father used to take us to the beach every Friday and to Jerusalem also," she says.
Copyright 2008, by
Times Of Oman
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