© AP Photo/S.Madver, UNRWA Photo Archives
Palestinian refugees walk through the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon in 1952
Palestinian refugees walk through the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon in 1952
Comment: In addition to flight, expulsion and dispossession, the Guardian should have added mass murder. The Jewish immigrants not only kicked the Palestinians off their land, they slaughtered entire villages. But that might bring the analogy to the Nazi slaughter of Jews too close to home.
In the heat of the recent controversy in Britain over Zionism and anti-semitism, relatively little attention was paid to the Palestinian side of this ever controversial story. Europe's Jews were the victims of racism, persecution and extermination on a massive and unprecedented scale during the Nazi era. Palestinians, in their turn, in a different way, were victims too.
Salman Abu Sitta's autobiography is a vivid and angry reminder of that. It tells the story of just one of some 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees in the war that followed the UN decision to partition the country in 1947. When he was growing up near Beersheba in the final decade of the British mandate, Jews were first a distant then a closer and menacing presence, well-organised foreign immigrants with guns and detailed maps. Their motives and experiences were remote and unfamiliar.
Abu Sitta takes on board much of the "new history" largely written by Israelis who punctured the older myths of the war, emphasising the military superiority of Zionist forces and the weaknesses and rivalries on the Arab side. He also provides fascinating glimpses of the Palestinian fedayeen - "infiltrators" and "terrorists" to the Israelis - who crossed the border after 1948 not only to "defeat the invader" but to visit abandoned homes and fields on which new settlements were being built.
Comment: It took one brave man to help change the trajectory of the US over 90 years ago: Smedley Darlington Butler. Today, given how far the banking interests have entrenched themselves, we'd probably need a thousand who had Butler's kind of influence and integrity.