Notes
PREFACE
1. Phrase borrowed from Rosemary Sayigh’s work Voices: Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement, online book, Al Mashriq, 2005/2007, https://almashriq.hiof.no/palestine/300/301/voices/.
2. Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 154.
FOREWORD
1. Matthew Hughes, “Women, Violence, and the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39,” The Journal of Military History 83 (2019): 500, https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/17614/5/FullText.pdf.
2. Ibid, 501.
3. As cited in ibid.
4. As cited in ibid., 502.
INTRODUCTION
1. UNRWA, “Where We Work, Gaza Strip,” https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/gaza-strip.
2. BADIL, Survey of Palestinian Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons 2016-2018, Vol. IX (Bethlehem, Palestine: BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency & Refugee Rights), https://www.badil.org/en/publication/press-releases/90-2019/5013-pr-en-231019-55.html.
3. Salman Abu Sitta, Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2016), ix.
4. Ibid.
5. Mahmoud Darwish, “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words,” Middle East Report 154, September/October 1988, https://merip.org/1988/09/those-who-pass-between-fleeting-words/.
6. Eóin Murray, “Under Siege,” in Defending Hope: Dispatches from the Front Lines in Palestine and Israel, eds. Eóin Murray and James Mehigan (Dublin: Veritas Books, 2018), 30.
7. UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees 2006: Human Displacement in the New Millennium, April 20, 2006, https://www.unhcr.org/publications/sowr/4a4dc1a89/state-worlds-refugees-2006-human-displacement-new-millennium.html.
8. United Nations, Gaza in 2020: A Liveable Place?, August 2012, https://www.unrwa.org/userfiles/file/publications/gaza/Gaza%20in%202020.pdf. See also Bel Trew, “The UN Said Gaza Would be Uninhabitable by 2020 – In Truth, It Already Is,” Independent, December 29, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/israel-palestine-gaza-hamas-protests-hospitals-who-un-a9263406.html; Donald Macintyre, “By 2020, the UN Said Gaza Would be Unliveable. Did It Turn Out that Way?” The Guardian, December 28, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/28/gaza-strip-202-unliveable-un-report-did-it-turn-out-that-way.
9. Pinhas Rosenbluth, “The Jewish Right to Israel: An Ethical Approach,” in Who Is Left? Zionism Answers Back (Jerusalem: The Zionist Library), 197.
10. Mark LeVine, “Tracing Gaza’s Chaos to 1948,” Al Jazeera, July 13, 2009, https://www.aljazeera.com/focus/arabunity/2008/02/2008525185737842919.html; Salman Abu Sitta, “Gaza Strip, the Lessons of History,” in Gaza as Metaphor, eds. Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar (London: Hurst and Company, 2016), 90.
11. LeVine, “Tracing Gaza’s Chaos to 1948.”
12. Ilana Feldman, cited in ibid.
13. Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 416.
14. Ihsan Khalil Agha, Khan Yunis wa shuhada’iha [Khan Younis Martyrs] (Cairo: Markaz Fajr Publishing, 1997).
15. Abu Sitta, “Gaza Strip, The Lessons of History,” Palestine Land Society, 2016, http://www.plands.org/en/articles-speeches/articles/2016/gaza-strip-the-lessons-of-history.
16. Helena Cobban, “Roots of Resistance: The First Intifada in the Context of Palestinian History,” Mondoweiss, December 17, 2012, https://mondoweiss.net/2012/12/roots-of-resistance-the-first-intifada-in-the-context-of-palestinian-history/.
17. CJPME, “Israeli Colonies and Israeli Colonial Expansion,” Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, (CJPME) Factsheet Series No. 9, 2005, https://www.cjpme.org/fs_009.
18. Zena Tahhan, “The Naksa: How Israel Occupied the Whole of Palestine in 1967,” Al Jazeera, June 4, 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/06/50-years-israeli-occupation-longest-modern-history-170604111317533.html.
19. Cobban, “Roots of Resistance.”
20. The New York Times, “Israel Declines to Study Rabin Tie to Beatings,” July 12, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/12/world/israel-declines-to-study-rabin-tie-to-beatings.html.
21. A phrase often used after the signing of the Oslo agreements. “Political Economy of Palestine,” Institute for Palestine Studies, https://oldwebsite.palestine-studies.org/ar/node/198424.
22. Abu Sitta, Mapping My Return, 317.
23. Edward Said, cited in Abu Sitta, Mapping My Return, 187.
24. Abu Sitta, Mapping My Return, 299.
25. James Bennet, “Arafat Not Present at Gaza HQ,” New York Times, December 3, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/03/international/arafat-not-present-at-gaza-headquarters.html.
26. Ghada Karmi, “‘The Worst Spot in Gaza’: ‘You Will Not Understand How Hard it is Here’ Until You See This Checkpoint,” Salon, May 31, 2015, https://www.salon.com/2015/05/31/the_worst_spot_in_gaza_you_will_not_understand_how_hard_it_is_here_until_you_see_this_checkpoint/.
27. Ghada Ageel, “Gaza: Horror Beyond Belief,” Electronic Intifada, May 16, 2004, https://electronicintifada.net/content/gaza-horror-beyond-belief/5078.
28. Dennis J. Deeb II, Israel, Palestine, and the Quest for Middle East Peace (Maryland: University Press of America, 2013), 36.
29. Mark Tran, “Israel Declares Gaza ‘Enemy Entity,’” The Guardian, September 19, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/sep/19/usa.israel1.
30. Indeed, the announcement in early 2020 of the Trump–Netanyahu “deal of the century” now seems to have made Israeli unilateralism a mainstay of US foreign policy in the Middle East. For more details, see Avi Shlaim, “How Israel Brought Gaza to the Brink of Humanitarian Catastrophe,” The Guardian, January 7, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine; Shlaim’s article was also published under “Background and Context,” in Journal of Palestine Studies 38, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 223–39, doi:10.1525/jps.2009.xxxviii.3.223.
31. Ghada Ageel, “Introduction” in Apartheid in Palestine: Hard Laws and Harder Experiences (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2016), xxx.
32. Ibid., xxvi.
33. Oxfam, “Timeline: The Humanitarian Impact of the Gaza Blockade,” Oxfam, 2020, https://www.oxfam.org/en/timeline-humanitarian-impact-gaza-blockade.
34. For details, see Sara Roy, “The Gaza Strip: A Case of Economic De-Development,” Journal of Palestine Studies 17, no. 1 (Autumn, 1987): 56–88.
35. Shlaim, “How Israel Brought Gaza to the Brink.”
36. “World Bank Warns, Gaza Economy is Collapsing,” Al Jazeera, September 25, 2016, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/09/world-bank-warns-gaza-economy-collapsing-180925085246106.html.
37. Eva Illouz, as cited and discussed in Ghada Ageel, “Gaza Under Siege, The Conditions of Slavery,” Middle East Eye, London, UK, January 19, 2016, https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-under-siege-conditions-slavery.
38. Ghada Ageel, “Where is Palestine’s Martin Luther King? Shot or Jailed by Israel,” Middle East Eye, London, June 26, 2018, https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/where-palestines-martin-luther-king-shot-or-jailed-israel.
39. Bel Trew, “The UN Said Gaza Would be Uninhabitable by 2020—In Truth, it Already Is,” The Independent, December 29, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/israel-palestine-gaza-hamas-protests-hospitals-who-un-a9263406.html.
40. David Halbfinger, Isabel Kershner, and Declan Walsh, “Israel Kills Dozens at Gaza Strip,” New York Times, May 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/world/middleeast/gaza-protests-palestinians-us-embassy.html.
41. Mahmoud Darwish, “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words.”
42. Edward Said, “Invention, Memory and Place,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Michell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 250.
43. Jonathan Adler, “Remembering the Nakba: The Politics of Palestinian History,” Jadaliyya, July 17, 2018, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/37786.
44. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: One World Publications, 2006), 231; Pappe attributes this term to Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
45. As cited in John Randolph LeBlanc, Edward Said on the Prospects of Peace in Palestine and Israel (New York: Palgrave MacMilllan, 2013), 44.
46. Sonia Nimr, “Fast Forward to the Past: A Look into Palestinian Collective Memory,” Cahiers de Littérature Orale no. 63–64 (January 2008): 340. doi:https://doi.org/10.4000/clo.287.
47. For more details, see Peter M. Jones, “George Lefebvre and the Peasant Revolution: Fifty Years On,” French Historical Studies 16, no. 3 (Spring, 1990): 645–63.
48. Oral History Association (OHA), “Oral History Defined,” OHA, https://www.oralhistory.org/about/do-oral-history/.
49. Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 25, https://tristero.typepad.com/sounds/files/thompson.pdf.
50. Alistair Thomson, “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History,” The Oral History Review 34, no. 1 (2007): 52–53.
51. As cited in Ramzy Baroud, “History from Below” (PHD dissertation, Exeter University, United Kingdom, January 2015), 28.
52. Rosemary Sayigh, “Oral History,” 193.
53. Sherna Berger Gluck, “Oral History and al-Nakbah,” The Oral History Review 35, no. 1 (2008): 68.
54. Ibid., 69.
55. Malaka Shwaikh, “Narratives of Displacement in Gaza’s Oral History,” in An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba, eds. Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha (London: Zed Books, 2018), 16, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329130803_Narratives_of_Displacement_in_Gaza’s_Oral_History_2.
56. Edward Said, as cited in “The Role of the Public Intellectual,” Alan Lightman, MIT Communications Forum, http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/legacy/papers/lightman.html.
57. Sayigh, “Oral History,” 193.
58. Edward Said, “On Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Salman Rushdie (1986),” in The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Self Determination, 1969–1994 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 126.
59. PalestineRemembered.com, “Nakba’s Oral History Interviews Listing,” https://www.palestineremembered.com/OralHistory/Interviews-Listing/Story1151.html.
60. Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, “Introduction: The Claims of Memory,” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, eds. Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 3.
61. As cited in Lightman, “The Role of the Public Intellectual.”
62. Rosemary Sayigh in Maria Fantappie and Brittany Tanasa, “Oral Historian Rosemary Sayigh Records Palestine’s Her-Story in Voices: Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement,” September 20, 2011, W4, https://www.w4.org/en/wowwire/palestinian-women-narrate-displacement-rosemary-sayigh/.
63. Isabelle Humphries and Laleh Khalili, “Gender of Nakba Memory,” in Nakba, 209.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 223.
66. Sayigh, Voices: Palestinian Women.
67. Fatma Kassem, Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gender Memory (London: Zed Books, 2011), 1.
68. Ibid., vi.
69. Sayigh, The Palestinians.
70. Sayigh, Voices: Palestinian Women.
71. Abu Sitta, Mapping My Return, 155.
72. For more details, see Ghada Ageel, “Where is Palestine’s Martin Luther King?”
73. UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (UN Human Rights), The UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 Gaza Protests, UNOHCHR, February 28, 2019, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24226&LangID=E.
1 CHILDHOOD DAYS
1. The annotations in this and the following chapters have been provided by the editors to add context to the story and are not the narrator’s words. In addition, although the narrator’s story has been translated, her thoughts and opinions herein are her own and are expressed in her words.
2. In August 1897, the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland issued the Basel Programme “to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.” It also established the World Zionist Organisation to work to that end. For more details, see Mahdi F. Abdul Hadi, ed., Documents on Palestine, Volume I, From the Pre-Ottoman/ Ottoman Period to the Prelude of the Madrid Middle East Peace Conference (Jerusalem: Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, 1997), 11–14.
3. On July 24, 1922, the League of Nations Council approved the Mandate for Palestine, and on September 29, 1923, the British Mandate for Palestine came officially into force. See Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), 573; Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948 (Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1982).
4. For details, see Roza I.M. El-Eini, Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine, 1929–1948 (London: Routledge, 2006); Sayigh, The Palestinians.
5. Al Azhar Al Sharif (or Al Azhar) is one of the world’s oldest universities. It was founded in Cairo in AD 970 by the Fatimid Dynasty. For over a millennium, it has been a highly respected centre of Islamic and Arabic language learning. Other old Arab universities include Al Zaytounah (Tunisia, 734 AD), the Qarawiyyun in Fez (Morocco, 859 AD), and Al Mustansiryah (984 AD) in Iraq.
6. Formally Bir Al Saba’, it was renamed Beersheba after the State of Israel was created in 1948.
7. Unlike in Beersheba, where the population was mostly Bedouin, most Palestinian women in villages and cities didn’t cover their faces.
8. The title “Sheikh” is used to refer to Muslim scholars with a high level of Islamic knowledge and to those scholars who graduated from Al Azhar University.
9. Tawb refers to a traditional long embroidered gown with long sleeves worn by Palestinian women. Each Palestinian village had a particular embroidery pattern that distinguished it and its people from other villages.
10. Shash refers to a traditional Palestinian women’s long headdress, which covers the upper body to the waist. It is sometimes twisted and tied at the waist of a tawb like a belt.
11. Martyr, Al Shahid in Arabic, refers to someone who was killed or sacrificed his life for his country or for just causes.
12. The 1930 invasion of a plague of locusts in Palestine (covering an area one mile wide and fifteen miles long) is well documented. Trenches, pits, flame throwers, and a small army of soldiers were used to combat the invasion and to save orange and cotton crops. The eradication effort closed with a feast that included camel racing and celebrations. For images that document the feasting, see the article by Stefanie Wichhart, which discusses both the 1915 and 1930 locust plagues. “The 1915 Locust Plague in Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly 56 & 57 (2013): 29–39, Columbia University, Center for Palestine Studies, https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/JQ%2056-57%20The%201915%20Locust.pdf.
13. By the mid-1930s, the British Mandate had allowed in an alarming number of European Jewish immigrants (comprising about 30 percent of the population in 1936 compared to 9 percent in 1917), which laid the groundwork for the great Arab Revolt that lasted from 1936 to 1939. When the general strike, which lasted for six months, was declared at the start of the Arab Revolt, national committees were formed in every region of Palestine to fight the British and the Zionist militia groups, in order to stem the flood of Jewish immigrants, which threatened the survival and independence of the Palestinian people. By 1939, the British had quashed the revolution. For more details, see Abu Sitta’s book, Mapping My Return, 42; Rawan Damen’s 2008 documentary film, “Al Nakba,” Aljazeera, https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/palestineremix/films_main.html; and Khalidi, All That Remains, 574.
14. For details, see ’Abd al-Wahhab Kayyali, Wathā ’iq al-Muqāwama al-Filastīniyya al-’Arabiyya did al-Ihtilāl al-Britānī wa al-Zioniyya, 1918–1939 [Documents of the Palestinian Arab Resistance against the British and Zionist Occupation] (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1967).
15. This occurred throughout Palestine. See John Loxton, typescript memoirs in Private Papers Collection, Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, cited in A.J. Sherman, Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine, 1918–1948 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 119.
16. The Al Mawasi area (two kilometres from Khan Younis) is a strip of land one kilometre wide that extends along the Gaza coastal road for a distance of twelve kilometres, from Deir Al-Balah to Khan Younis, all the way to Rafah. Among the agricultural sectors in the Gaza Strip, Al Mawasi is considered one of the most important, as the residents depend on agriculture as their only source of livelihood.
17. This story was recorded before the redeployment of Israeli settlements/colonies in the Gaza Strip in September 2005.
18. Al Hamidiyah is the most famous and oldest market, or souk, in Damascus. It was built in 1780 under the rule of the Umayyad Sultan Abdul Hamid, from whom the name of the market was adopted. Prior to the 2011 uprising, many world leaders visited the souk, including former president Bill Clinton, King Abdullah of Jordan, and the then Turkish prime minister (now president) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The past nine years of warfare, destruction, and displacement have shattered both Syrian society and the economy and slowed activities in the souk, which currently depends on the locals and some Arab visitors.
2 SCHOOL DAYS
1. On May 15, 1948, the British Mandate ended, and the declaration of the State of Israel came into effect, leading to the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the destruction of Palestinian society. See Khalidi, All That Remains, 577.
2. For more details, see Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Ilan Pappe, The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis, 1700–1948 (London: Saqi Books, 2010); Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon, 2006).
3. Refers to the proposal by UN mediator Count Bernadotte, on September 16, 1948, for a new partition of Palestine: an Arab state to be annexed to Transjordan and to include Negev, Al Ramle, and Lydda; a Jewish state in all of Galilee; the internationalization of Jerusalem; the return of or compensation for refugees. This was rejected by the Arab League and Israel. See Khalidi, All That Remains, 578.
4. From December 22, 1948 to January 6, 1949, the Israelis launched Operation Horev to drive Egyptians out of the southern coastal strip and Negev. Israeli military forces moved into Sinai, until British pressure forced their withdrawal. An Israeli attack on Rafah ended by ceasefire on January 7th. See Khalidi, All That Remains, 579. For more details on the December 25th battle, please see Abu Sitta, Mapping My Return, 91.
5. United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, established by the UN General Assembly, based on Resolution 302 of December 8, 1949, to assist Palestinian refugees. See also, Abdul Hadi, Documents on Palestine, Volume I, 195 and 373.
3 MARRIAGE
1. The remains of a caravanserai built during the Mamluk period by the Arab Younis to rest his army, while travelling from the south to the north of Palestine to fight in the Crusades. Khan Younis is named after him.
2. On August 31, 1955, Israelis attacked the Khan Younis police station with orders to “kill as many enemy soldiers as possible.” They killed seventy-two and wounded fifty-eight. See Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 350.
4 MASSACRE
1. On November 2, 1956, Israelis occupied Gaza and most of the Sinai, attacked Qalqilya in the West Bank, and massacred villagers from Kafr Qassem. On March 8, 1957, Israel withdrew from Gaza and Sinai, and the United Nations Emergency Force moved in. See Abdul Hadi, Documents on Palestine, Volume I, 374.
2. The story was recorded in 2001.
3. See Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians (London: Verso, 2003), 55.
4. See Meron Rapoport, “Into the Valley of Death,” Haaretz, February 8, 2007, http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/into-the-valley-of-death-1.212390; Martin Cohn, “An Israeli General Reopens Old Wounds with Revelations About the Massacre of Egyptian PoWs,” Toronto Star, October 8, 1995; Richard H. Curtiss and Donna B. Curtiss, “Israel’s Hush-Up Machine in Action: Denying Story Israel Executed Egyptian Prisoners,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May–June 2007, 28–29; Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (London: Fourth Estate, 2005), 1132.
5. See Anis F. Kassim, ed., The Palestine Yearbook of International Law, 1998–1999, Law Volume 10, (Netherlands: Kluwer Law International, The Hague, 2000).
6. See Muhammed Magdy, “Egyptian Court Issues Verdict to Prosecute Israel,” Almonitor, February 3, 2017, http://al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/02/egypt-court-order-israel-soldiers-torture-wars-1.html and http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/21/world/egypt-says-israelis-killed-pow-s-in-67-war.html.
7. The Israeli army withdrew from Beit Hanoon in the Gaza Strip after it was occupied in 1948. See Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (London: Yale University Press, 2008); Ramzy Baroud, “For the Love of Egypt: When Besieged Palestinians Danced,” Global Research, March 3, 2011, https://www.globalresearch.ca/for-the-love-of-egypt-when-besieged-palestinians-danced/24078.
8. For more details, see H.F. Ellis, “Reflections on Suez: Middle East Security,” in Suez 1956: The Crisis and its Consequences, William Roger Lewis and Roger Owen, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 347–63; Peter L. Hahn, Caught in the Middle East: US Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1945–1961 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Fisk, The Great War, 1127–38.
9. See Yazīd Sāyigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1997), 66.
5 OCCUPATION
1. Madeeha, the narrator, told us this story while we sat in this house with her in 2001.
2. See William B. Quandt, Fuad Jabber, and Ann Mosely Lesch, The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism (London: University of California Press, 1973).
3. On August 2, 1952, the Israeli Law of Nationality affirmed the Israeli Law of Return and legislated that resident non-Jews could acquire citizenship only on the basis of residence if they could prove they were Palestinian, or by naturalization. Palestinian Arabs remaining under Israeli occupation literally became foreigners in their own country, as proving residence was, in practice, often impossible to fulfil. Most Arab residents had no proof of citizenship, having surrendered their identity cards to the Israeli Army during or after the war. Abdul Hadi, Documents on Palestine, Volume I, 373.
4. On June 5, 1967, Israel began its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip of Palestine, Sinai of Egypt, and Golan Heights of Syria. See Abdul Hadi, Documents on Palestine, Volume I, 375.
5. For more details, see Abu Sitta’s book, Mapping My Return, 257–58.
6 BLACK SEPTEMBER
1. Black September was a bloody confrontation that took place in late September 1970 between the Jordanian army and the Palestinian resistance movement led by the PLO. The fighting lasted a week, until a truce was brokered under the leadership of Abd Al Nasser, who died shortly after, on September 28, 1970. See Said K. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 227; Christopher Dobson, Black September: Its Short, Violent History (New York: Macmillan, 1974).
2. See John Bulloch, The Making of a War: The Middle East from 1967 to 1973 (London: Longman, 1974), 67.
7 1973 WAR
1. The October War began on October 6th, when Egypt and Syria fought to regain the Arab territories occupied by Israel in 1967. See Abdul Hadi, Documents on Palestine, Volume I, 376.
2. A fortification line built along the eastern coast of the Suez Canal after the 1967 war to control the area, based on the idea of then Israeli Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev. See Kimmerling, Politicide, 60.
3. On October 22nd, the UN Security Council (UNSC) adopted Resolution 338, calling for a cease fire and an immediate end to the fighting between Israel and the Arab countries. The following day, on October 23rd, the UNSC issued Resolution 339, confirming the ceasefire and directing that UN observers be dispatched to the front. On October 24th, the UNSC issued Resolution 340 to confirm the ceasefire—its third in less than four days. This was followed by shuttle diplomacy.
8 WAITING FOR THE CURTAIN TO RISE
1. This refers to the Palestinian–Israeli Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Authority (DOP), also known as the Oslo 1 Accord, signed in Washington on September 13, 1993. See Abdul Hadi, Documents on Palestine, Volume II, From the Negotiations in Madrid to the Post-Hebron Agreement Period (Jerusalem: Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, 1997), 145.
2. The Druze are a monotheistic, esoteric, ethno-religious group that originated in Western Asia. They are now found primarily in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, with small communities in Jordan and elsewhere.
3. For details, see Alexander Mikaberidze, Atrocities, Massacres and War Crimes: An Encyclopaedia, Volume I (California: ABC-CLEO, Library of Congress Catalogue, 2013), 545; Kimmerling, Politicide, 156–57; David Harb, West Meets East: A Primer into the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict (US: Xlibris Corporation, 2010); Human Rights Watch, “Israel: Ariel Sharon’s Troubling Legacy: Evaded Prosecution Over Sabra and Shatilla Massacres,” January 11, 2014, https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/01/11/israel-ariel-sharons-troubling-legacy.
CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS IN PALESTINE
1. The following works were consulted when compiling this chronology of events in Palestine: Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Mahdi F. Abdul Hadi, ed., Documents On Palestine, Volume I: From the Pre-Ottoman/Ottoman Period to the Prelude of the Madrid Middle East Peace Conference (Jerusalem: Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, 1997); Said K. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); PASSIA Diary 1999 (Jerusalem: Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, 1998); PASSIA Diary 2001 (Jerusalem: Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, 2000); Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006); Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); Linda Butler, “A Gaza Chronology, 1948–2008,” Journal of Palestine Studies 38, no. 3 (2009): 98–121, doi:10.1525/jps.2009.XXXVIII.3.98; “A Lot of Process, No Peace: A Timeline of 20 Years of Post-Oslo Meetings, Agreements, Negotiations and Memorandums,” Perspectives: Political Analyses and Commentary from the Middle East & North Africa 5 (December 2013), 5–8; Amira Hass, Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014); PASSIA Diary 2018 (Jerusalem: Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, 2017); “Palestine: What Has Been Happening Since WWI,” Al Jazeera, May 14, 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/focus/arabunity/2008/02/20085251908164329.html; Eóin Murray and James Mehigan (eds.), Defending Hope: Dispatches from the Front Lines in Palestine and Israel, (Dublin: Veritas Books, 2019); Chloé Benoist, “‘The Deal that Can’t be Made’: A Timeline of the Trump Administration’s Israel-Palestine Policy,” Middle East Eye, January 28, 2020, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/deal-cant-be-made-timeline-trump-administrations-israel-palestine-policy; Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020).