My Father Was a Freedom Fighter

Ramzy Baroud

Description

This book is a personal account of the daily lives of the people of the frontline of the Palestine / Israel conflict, giving us an insight into the deadly, seemingly never-ending rounds of violence.



Ramzy Baroud tells his father's fascinating story. Driven out of his village to a refugee camp, he took up arms and fought the occupation at the same time raising a family and trying to do the best for his children.



Baroud's vivid and honest account reveals the complex human beings; revolutionaries, great moms and dads, lovers, and comedians that make Gaza so much more than just a disputed territory.
Acknowledgments

Foreword Dr. Salman Abu Sitta

Preface

Map

1. Happier Times

2. Born into Turmoil

3. Taking Flight

4. A World Outside the Tent

5. Lost and Found

6. Zarefah

7. Al-Naksa: The Setback

8. An Olive Branch and a Thousand Cans of Tomato Sauce

9. Strange Men at the Beach Casino

10. Intifada: … and All Hell Broke Loose

11. Oslo on the Line

12. The World as Seen From the Stone Staircase

13. Dying, Again

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Political Advocacy
• Political Process
• Political Science
• Activism
• Palestine

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 09 décembre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783714124
• Langue: English

Extrait

My Father was a Freedom Fighter
Cairo, Egypt: Mohammed poses in his favorite café, “Merry Land”, 1975.
(Photo courtesy of the author)
MY FATHER WAS A FREEDOM FIGHTER
Gaza’s Untold Story
Ramzy Baroud
First published 2010 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Ramzy Baroud 2010
The right of Ramzy Baroud to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN    978 0 7453 2882 9    Hardback ISBN    978 0 7453 2881 2    Paperback ISBN    978 1 8496 4424 2    PDF eBook ISBN    978 1 7837 1413 1    Kindle eBook ISBN    978 1 7837 1412 4    EPUB eBook
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Sidmouth, England
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe in England, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
Contents

Acknowledgments
Foreword Dr. Salman Abu Sitta
Preface
Map
1
Happier Times
2
Born into Turmoil
3
Taking Flight
4
A World Outside the Tent
5
Lost and Found
6
Zarefah
7
Al-Naksa: The Setback
8
An Olive Branch and a Thousand Cans of Tomato Sauce
9
Strange Men at the Beach Casino
10
Intifada: … and All Hell Broke Loose
11
Oslo on the Line
12
The World as Seen From the Stone Staircase
13
Dying, Again
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
To my parents, Zarefah and Mohammed
Acknowledgments

This book would have never been written without the help, support and encouragement of many individuals, friends, relatives, scholars and activists, to whom I am sincerely grateful and eternally indebted.
Thank you to Um Adel Baroud and Um Mohammed Yazouri, two refugee women and fantastic mothers and grandmothers from Gaza, whose input and personal testimonies were of immense help. A special thank you to Tom Hayes, a scholar and filmmaker, whose assistance in obtaining important testimonies which he has collected throughout the years, allowed me to weave together important events that were otherwise overlooked.
I would also like to thank Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, a leading Palestinian scholar on Palestinian refugees and the Palestinian Nakba of 1948. His intricate research, which he kindly made available to me, made my job of unearthing neglected history much easier. His guidance and support throughout the process of writing this book were invaluable.
My unending gratitude to Rafique Kathwari, an inspiring Kashmiri-American writer, photographer and friend. His poignant suggestions, and thorough proofreading and editing accompanied me to the last paragraph of this book.
I wish to also thank Dr. Roger van Zwanenberg, the Chair and Commissioning Editor at Pluto Press. Thank you, Dr. Zwanenberg, for giving Palestine an important share in the books published by Pluto. Your company has played a major role in enriching libraries and bookstores around the world with a Palestinian narrative that otherwise would have been missing. Also, thank you for supporting me throughout the writing of this book, and for allowing me to tell the story of Gaza, and the story of my father.
Thank you to Zoriah, a world-class war photographer, for so generously making his images available to me. His important work on Palestine, and other areas of conflict and despair throughout the world is truly unparalleled by any standards.
Thank you to hundreds of readers of all backgrounds and all over the world, who sent me messages of support and were eager to read this book. A growing email file with all of your messages kept me going strong as the process lengthened and whenever my enthusiasm weakened.
Thank you to my family, in Gaza and elsewhere for helping me, whether in the research process or in sharing stories, memories and photos, which allowed me to put a complete story together. Thanks to my sister, Dr. Suma Baroud in Gaza, my brother Mustafa in the US, my uncle Farid in Libya and my cousin Maisara in Egypt.
Once again, I stumble before thanking my wife, Suzanne. A simple thank you cannot possibly suffice. She has been my friend, my editor, my proofreader, and at times, my co-writer. Without her, this book could have never actualized. Thank you.
To my children, amazingly beautiful in every way: Zarefah, ten, Iman, eight, and rabble-rouser Sammy, three—thank you, kids, for putting up with me as I shut myself in my office for many months to write this book.
And finally, to all Gazans, whose story I am attempting to narrate, thank you for holding onto your rights, for your tenacity, your resilience, and for preserving your humanity when many others have lost theirs.
Finally, to all of those who have supported me and my efforts, in any way, to convey a Palestinian narrative—not tainted by politics, not crowded with factionalism and not compromised for any reason—from the bottom of my heart: I thank you.
Foreword

Salman Abu Sitta
“Not one refugee will return. The old will die. The young will forget.” Thus uttered Ben Gurion in June 1948, when he had completed the major part of his ethnic cleansing plan to depopulate Palestinians from their villages and replace them with Jews from 110 countries.
By the time he announced the establishment of the state of Israel on Palestine’s land in the afternoon of May 14, 1948, the Zionist militia had already succeeded in depopulating 212 villages and three major towns of their Palestinian inhabitants.
Thus over half (56 percent) of all Palestinian refugees became homeless by that day. The Palestinians were supposed to be protected by the British Mandate authority which had been entrusted with carrying the torch of “the sacred trust of civilization” by the League of Nations 28 years earlier.
The British Mandate also did not protect them from half of about 70 massacres in 1948, which occurred during the Mandate to expedite the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. The infamous Deir Yassin is but one of these massacres, but there were many others, surpassing Deir Yassin in enormity and atrociousness.
When Ben Gurion and company committed these crimes, and declared the state of Israel, there was not a single Arab regular soldier on Palestine soil. Thus the myth of self-defense, or the desperate fight of David against Goliath, which was fed to western audiences for decades, should be laid to rest.
Arab soldiers came to defend the remaining Palestinians after May 15, 1948, but they were outnumbered by the Israelis, had no unified command and no knowledge of the country. They failed to save what was left of Palestine.
When Ben Gurion stood before the representatives of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine in mid-May to announce his state, he in fact announced the victory of 65,000 well-trained Haganah soldiers, led by World War II officers, over defenseless Palestinian villagers who had tilled their fields and lived on their land for thousands of years.
Beit Daras is one of those villages that fell victim to Ben Gurion’s ethnic cleansing. Like others, it desperately fought for its existence. It bore the brunt of a devastating attack. It suffered the horrors of a massacre. It defied Ben Gurion’s wishful thinking: The old fought with all their means until they died; the young did not forget, and persisted.
Here is one of them. Ramzy Baroud, of the second or third generation of refugees, recalls the odyssey of the people of Beit Daras.
Ramzy is a gifted writer; he eloquently unearthed the recent history of Beit Daras by tracing the life of his father and family from their exodus to their continuous struggle for survival in exile, for fighting back their enemy, for trying to earn a decent living outside Palestine and for their legendary endurance under the siege and bombardment of Gaza until this day.
Gaza is often portrayed correctly as the most crowded place on earth. No one bothers to say why and how. Gaza is the place of refuge for the people of 247 villages, which were entirely depopulated in 1948. Today, Gaza’s population is the same size as the total population of Palestine was in 1948, but with one difference: the Gaza Strip is only 1 percent of Palestine’s historic landmass.
This is not a tragedy of World War II, committed in the heat of battle. This is a constant tragedy, which has lasted 61 years so far and is splashed on our television screens every day. No one has the luxury, or the excuse, to hide behind the saying “I did not know.”
Ramzy has laid bare this tragedy, true and simple. Its tragedy strikes you as if it was yesterday. And yesterday is today because the tragedy is still here; looking you in the eye, as a still photograph, not a running movie.
Ramzy collected Palestinians’ stories and testimonies, a great source for the tragedy of al-Nakba , an event ridiculed by the Zionist spin as a product of “oriental imagination,” but now gradually accepted by new historians, as these stories correlate with declassified Israeli files.
What is the point now, after 61 years of exile, of Palestinians saying “we told you so”? The point is that Ben Gurion’s utterance in 1948 portrays a racist doctrine that still prevails in the Middle East, sowing the region with death and destruction to this day. It is about time that the residents of the English-speaking worl