BOOKS | PALESTINE
Eyewitness Account of the Palestinian Nakba and its Aftermath
Review of Mohamed Rabie’s autobiography (Arabic Language), Zikrayat Ta’ba al-Nasayan vol. 1 — al-Shatat ذكريات تأبي النسيان: الشتات
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Mohammad Rabie was nine years old when the Nakba befell Palestine, forcing his family away from their village home in Yazur to a life of exile and dispossession. On these pages unfolds a multicolored tapestry of the author’s experience. His poetic portrait of life in Yazur betrays a deep love of nature as he muses about smell of citrus blossoms and the birds and the butterflies pervading the idyllic village on the outskirts of Palestine’s largest city, Yafa. With a wealth of details, Rabie recreates his house, his family, life in the village, and the complex relations between Yazur’s residents and the neighboring Zionist settlements.
By early 1948, the Zionist militias targeted Yazur, one of their shells landing on the neighbors’ house. Rabie takes us along on his family’s suspenseful exodus, first to the village center in the middle of the night, then from village to village up the hills of the West Bank, until they end up in a newly-formed refugee camp near Jericho.
