Mohsen Mahdawi
I really want to go all the way back to 1948. I am carrying the story, hopes, and struggles of my ancestors. And 1948 was a disaster year for the Palestinian people and for my family, who resided in a town called Umm Khalid (Netanya now), just a few miles away from the Mediterranean Sea. Zionist militias attacked the town and my family were exiled. They were told that it was going to be a couple of weeks before they could return. It’s seventy-six years later and we are still waiting for that return. In the aftermath of that Nakba, I was born and raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank called Al-Far’a. It’s in the north of the West Bank between Jenin and Nablus.
I am the oldest of eight siblings. Growing up in a refugee camp of about sixty-one acres with ten thousand people roughly on it, you hear your neighbors, you smell the food in the neighborhood. There is no privacy, no place for kids to play. We went to United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees schools and received basic services there. But the depth of the suffering is not necessarily only because of the conditions of being in a refugee camp, but also the continuous injustice and oppression that the Israeli army and military were imposing on my family and on my people.
I witnessed the second intifada as a child. I was ten years old when it started, and it was a very traumatic experience for me, for many other children, and for the Palestinian people. I saw my best friend killed in front of my eyes when I was a child. He was shot by an Israeli soldier in his chest and he fell dead. He was fourteen years old, I was twelve. My uncle was killed on my birthday. He was shot twice in the head and once in the shoulder. I was expecting to celebrate with him that day, my eleventh birthday, and unfortunately, instead of celebrating, I went to my uncle’s…
Auteur: Mohsen Mahdawi
