In the early 1920s, Abdel Jawad Abdel-Latif al-Azzeh, a wealthy feudal lord from the notable Azzeh clan from the crown village of Beit Jibrin decided to propose to the family of beautiful Ms. Nazeerah Jabre, the young daughter of another wealthy elite family from the town of Jaffa. Her father Mr. Jabre rejected the offer.
The Azzeh's were wealthy notables who have ruled the entire south of Palestine for decades. They were once close to the Ottoman rulers of the region of Palestine, attempted a rebellion against them, held close relationships with all other major clans across Palestine and owned the largest landscapes anywhere. Their power was unchallenged and entire populations pledged loyalty to them. Members of al-Azzeh could recite their lineage for hundreds of years back; their girls often held the title princesses and their men princes. They were true royalty.
Beit Jibrin, the ancient Eleutheropolis, or the Roman City of the Brave, has become their headquarters. Known as a bread-basket, its region was famous for vast lands used to grow wheat that would be sold across the Mediterranean as well as enormous sheep-farms. The once major planned city under the Roman Empire has turned across the years into a village, but also a de facto capital that served the Ottoman Empire in controlling the Southern region of Palestine.
However, Mr. Jabre did not see the match. The Western-influenced-and-educated elite lived in a modernized city. He was a member of an elite class, owned a villa over-looking the Mediterranean and has traveled to Europe often where the Jaffa oranges his farms grew were sold. Old pictures show his workers cleaning each orange and wrapping it with thin white paper. Those oranges were too valuable to be sold in an unflattering bulk fashion.
His family saw movies at the theaters in Jaffa, shopped at high-end stores across the elegant boulevard Jamal Basha and in Europe, and interacted only with like-minded Jaffans who were part of an emerging class of Westernized Palestinian Arabs.
The suitor did not give up. Blond haired with pretty green eyes, his thin frame held such phenomenal strength which the Jabre's have under-estimated with their rejection. Encouraged by his carob-color-haired sweetheart, he initiated with vandalizing and burning down of the Jabre's orange groves, threatening their primary source of wealth and vanity. The Jabre's knew they would be devastated since the rulers of Southern Palestine were directly making the calls against them, so they gave in to his demands. For the next 80 years the two sweethearts lived together happily and in love.
Year upon year, their story was spoken of inside the circles of the Azzeh family, now dispersed across the entire world following the 1948 Diaspora and the creation of the state of Israel.
In 1948, the Palestinian reality and everything else has paused in time. The Jaffans left Jaffa and the Jibrinis left Beit Jibrin under heavy bombardment. History tells of a meager support offered by the Egyptian army and few trans-Jordanian soldiers attempting to rescue the village. The Azzeh members who tried to defend their village were disappointed by the disgraceful support offered by their once very close friend the King Abdullah of the Kingdom of Transjordan.
Yet stories like these have put a face to what may have been or could still have held true today for the Palestinians had they not left. Stories about prosperity or sheer happiness in a land once claimed as theirs have for 63 years put a face on an absent name: Palestine. For generations, Palestinian children sat listening to their grandparents recite their true stories that took place somewhere far away from the miserable living inside of refugee camps in countries that never felt like home.
Stories like these were true and were made vivid by the story-tellers. Palestine was no longer just a memory; it became a state of mind. These stories were about a lost paradise that is so far, yet so near. Its existence proved in history books and its place on earth clearly indicated on old maps; and sometimes, they were able to sneak-a-peek from across the borders and think: “When ye come into the land of [Palestine], this shall be the land that shall fall unto you for an inheritance”.
Just like in the Jewish heritage, Palestinians grew more than a sentimental admiration to the land of Palestine. It was not only the place where their history starts and ends, it was not only the place they were told was where Prophet Muhammad have ascended into heavens and where Islam’s actual divine practice was laid down and where Jesus (i.e. Christianity) was born. It was more than a country, it was the place they knew was where they could taste freedom and develop a sense of security from an eternal threat of remaining ostracized, exodusized and from another Sabra and Shatilla massacres. It is where the generations that followed the 1948 Catastrophe felt they could prosper and safely raise their children with dignity.
The World's Jewry may have been the one nation on earth that held the most sentimental value towards the historic land of Palestine for the longest time, but the past 63 years have proved that Palestinians are not willing to let go of Palestine either, and that they too are more than ever attached to their ancestral homeland.
Today, Beit Jibrin and its vast landscape have been turned into what has become to be known as Beit Guvrin National Park, part of Israel's attempt to turn the land of Israel green while erasing blood-stains while at it.
Jaffa, on the other hand, lost its title as the Bride of the Mediterranean, and its status as the cultural center for Mandate Palestine and a city in its own right. Most of its 120 thousand residents fled under fire, were driven out of their homes by force, or escaped before things have truly escalated. The city sat in near-ruins for about 60 years as the southern neighborhood of modern Tel Aviv before Israel annulled the absentee-law which has for long protected the properties of the Palestinians who fled in 1948. The annulment which have returned the shabby-but-once-graceful Hotel Orient Star on Lake Tiberias back into its former glory, and which allowed wealthy Jewish businessmen to face-life the old city in Jaffa into one of the most expensive properties in southern Tel Aviv, with a touch of denial regarding the past and the honorability of such investments.
In 2007, I was back to the Ben Gurion Airport after nearly seven years spent in the US. A Palestinian Arab who did not speak Hebrew but carried an Israeli passport, I raised many eye-brows. The thing that seemed to annoy the security officials the most was the fact that I spoke no word of Hebrew and did not remember the exact address for my parents’ house in Jerusalem. I was held in question by security for hours before I was released sans my luggage. I suffered from mild depression for about a week, but made up for it by inviting my mother to a lunch to be remembered at the American Colony hotel in Jerusalem as we waited for my luggage for two days in a row.
That same week, I walked into an old book store in Ramallah. As I awaited my turn at the cash register I grabbed an old Magazine, as-Sirage/ The Oil Lamp, probably given the name by the same cultural center that ran my family-owned movie-theater in Ramallah. On the cover was a picture of a fabulous modern young woman with her hair nicely waving across her bare shoulders wearing a 20s-style pink flappers dress and golden necklace, she was standing next to a seated young man with a thin-frame and a traditional Palestinian white Qumbaz, a traditional linen robe worn by men at the time. The magazine was published in 1996 but it has waited for 11 years for me to pick it up just to be stunned by the title of the Picture: “Mr. Abdel Jawad Abdel-Latif al-Azzeh and his honorable wife Mrs. Nazeerah Jabre, Jaffa, 1922”. Those were my maternal great-grandparents and their story I was told all along was true. The past was true, Palestine is true, and now I was certain.
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