I Survived Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine in 1948. I Fear My Family Might Not Survive Its Genocide in Gaza
By Mutlaq Mahmoud Abu Elkhair
Seventy-six years ago this week, I was forced to flee my home village in Palestine during the establishment of the state of Israel, taking refuge in Gaza, never to return. Now, at 96-years-old, I and hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians who have been driven from their homes by Israel in recent months face the possibility of being expelled from Gaza altogether as a full-scale invasion of the town of Rafah looms.
I was one of approximately 750,000 Palestinians who became stateless refugees during the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, the term Palestinians use to describe their expulsion and dispossession during Israel’s founding in 1948. Since the 1950s, I have resided in the Tel El-Sultan refugee camp in Rafah, but I originally hail from the Palestinian village of Barqa in what became southern Israel. Barqa was famous for its citrus, bananas, sesame, and barley, before we were forced out and the village destroyed by the Haganah militias that were the precursors to the Israeli army. Today, I am told, only two houses remain standing in Barqa, but I have never had the privilege to see them because I have been prevented from returning.
Barqa and hundreds of other villages north of Gaza were systematically attacked and depopulated between May 10–13, 1948. The idea then, as it is now in Gaza, was to create fear and panic, sending Palestinians fleeing, at which point their return would be denied, and their villages destroyed or repopulated with Israelis. The militias forced the remaining inhabitants onto trucks and took them to the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. I barely made it out alive, and walked down the coast with my family over 36 miles, insisting my wife need not take her favorite clay pot because it would be only a matter of days before we returned.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because we are facing a repeat of this fate today, but on a much larger and more violent scale. Since the start of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza seven months ago, Israeli officials have made their intentions clear, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoking a genocidal Biblical passage in a speech to the nation before Israel launched its ground invasion, to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich calling for the “total annihilation” of Gaza last week.
More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed so far, mostly women and children. Nearly two million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes, most of them now huddled in tents in Rafah near me, next to the Egyptian border. Entire communities and towns have been decimated, including Gaza City, until recently the largest Palestinian city. Starvation is rampant, a result of Israel blocking the entry of food and other desperately needed humanitarian aid. And almost all centers of knowledge, healing, worship and culture have been destroyed.
What we are experiencing now in Gaza is a continuation of the 1948 Nakba, or what we call the Ongoing Nakba. Between 1948 and October 7, 2023, Israel never stopped systematically dispossessing Palestinians, stealing our land for illegal settlements, destroying our homes, depriving us of our most basic rights, and imprisoning or killing anyone who resisted these violent policies. Starting in 2007, Palestinians in Gaza endured a cruel, suffocating Israeli siege and naval blockade that made Gaza virtually unlivable, with Israel periodically launching devastating bombardments on the tiny, densely populated coastal strip, killing thousands of civilians.
No one has been spared this current onslaught. I have seen men, women, and young children slaughtered before my eyes. I have seen the elderly and the disabled buried alive under the rubble of buildings leveled by Israeli bombs. I have seen entire families wiped out at once. I have seen enough to make a young person age overnight.
My sons, who lived in Gaza City, fled to Rafah with their families and there are now more than 70 relatives living in my house. I am scared to death that one Israeli bomb will wipe out our familial lineage completely, as it has so many others.
I am certain that any person of conscience recognizes what’s happening in Gaza is a stain on humanity and a grave injustice. I don’t know how much time I have left, or whether I will survive Israel’s impending attack on Rafah. But as someone who survived the Nakba and decades of Israeli oppression, I never thought I would live to see it happen twice — and that its perpetrators could do so with total impunity. What message does this send to our young people?
I call on President Biden and the international community to use all the means at their disposal to impose an immediate, permanent ceasefire, and to force Israel to allow the unfettered entry of food and medicine, before there is nothing left of Gaza and thousands more lives are extinguished. If not for my sake, for the sake of this next generation.
Mutlaq Mahmoud Abu Elkhair is a retired merchant and Nakba survivor who lives in the Tel Sultan Refugee Camp in Rafah in southern Gaza.
