Amman, Jordan – David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, believed that the reminiscence of the Nakba, or “disaster”, would finally fade for the tons of of hundreds of Palestinians violently expelled from their homeland by Zionist militias in 1948.
In 1949, a yr after the State of Israel was created, he’s reported to have mentioned: “The previous will die and the younger will overlook.”
It is a prediction that amuses Omer Ihsan Yaseen, an erudite 20-year-old optician and third-generation Palestinian refugee residing in Jordan’s capital, Amman.
“We’ll return, I’m positive of that,” he says firmly as he factors at a thick iron key that after opened the heavy-set doorways to his grandparents’ stone home in Salamah, 5 kilometres east of Jaffa, now a part of Tel Aviv in Israel.
The important thing takes delight of place in a selfmade shrine-like show devoted to Palestinian identification that hangs on the wall of his family-run optician, subsequent to a show of designer sun shades and spectacles.
It accommodates a group of memorabilia, together with lumps of sand and soil smuggled in from the Gaza Strip and Jaffa by household mates through the years.
Omer’s father, Ihsan Mohamad Yaseen, picks up some Jaffa soil with a mild reverence, permitting it to run via his fingers right into a small bowl.
The household’s dwelling was burned down in the course of the first Arab-Israeli struggle (Could 1948 – January 1949), the 58-year-old explains, however the important thing stays an heirloom and stands as an emblem of resistance and the fitting of return.
Ihsan has lived all his life in al-Wehdat, a chaotic, bustling Palestinian refugee camp positioned within the Hay al-Awdah suburb of southeast Amman.
The camp was one among 4 arrange in Jordan after the Nakba to accommodate tens of hundreds of Palestinian refugees however has lengthy outgrown itself and now melts seamlessly into the encompassing areas of southeast Amman.
Like many Palestinians who’ve lived their complete lives in these camps, Ihsan nonetheless sees it as a brief resolution earlier than his household can return to their homeland.
He takes lengthy breaths as he remembers the reminiscences handed down by his dad and mom. Behind him, photos of Palestinian intellectuals line the partitions, together with the poet and authors Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani.
Ihsan’s vivid descriptions paint an image of a household residing in a close-knit neighborhood that might whereas away the evenings of their dwelling’s conventional internal courtyard, singing and dancing and surrounded by fruits, together with the world-renowned Jaffa oranges, that flourished within the temperate Mediterranean local weather.
The blissful reminiscences fade into ones of violence after the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary power, tore via the village.
He pulls out a strolling stick that belonged to his mom, engraved with the phrases of a track titled Oummi (My Mom).
Aseel Yaseen, Ihsan’s amiable 28-year-old daughter, joins her father and brother as they clasp the cane and belt out an impromptu sing-a-long.
Ihsan continues, however his phrases falter, and his eyes reveal a deep generational trauma.
Clenching the important thing firmly in his fist, he says that the native authorities had instructed his dad and mom that they might return in every week, as soon as the violence had ended, in order that they grabbed their key, packed some baggage and left for the Gaza Strip.
“I don’t know who offered our homeland. However I noticed who paid the worth”
Every week was 19 years earlier than the household have been uprooted as soon as once more when Israel seized the remaining Palestinian territory within the 1967 Conflict, an occasion additionally known as the “Naksa”, which means setback or defeat.
Ihsan’s mom, who was six months pregnant, was pressured to stroll from Gaza with him to Amman, an exhausting monthlong trek that took her via the sweltering warmth of the Negev desert.
