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More than 400
Palestinian villages were destroyed --in its entirety or partially--
by Zionist
gangs as part of a
programmed plan of uprooting native Palestinians from their
homeland,
Palestine, and breaking
new ground for a bizarre colonial project called Israel, which the
days of its first stage
were closing in on that awful year of 1948.
Few researchers, and
historians, Palestinians and Israelis, have attempted to document
this tragic chapter of
al-Nakba (catastrophe). Among Palestinians were Aref El-Aref who
prepared shortly in the
aftermath of 1948 war a list of villages occupied and its Arab
citizens were forced to
leave in the course of battles. He published few years later a
six-part volume about
1948 war under the title al-Nakba (1956-1960). The historian Mustafa
Dabbagh published an
eleven-part volume titled “Our Land Palestine” (1972-1986). A
thorough description of
the destroyed villages or otherwise was included in the book.
Other writers followed
suit including the late Palestinian geographer Bashir Najm who
coauthored with Engineer
Bsharah Muammer comprehensive tables of statistics covering
the people and the land.
On 1987, Abdul Jawad
Saleh and Walid Mustafa published a booklet concerning the mass
destruction of the
Palestinian villages.
At last the Israeli
historian Benny Morris published on 1989 his important book “ The
Birth
of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem 1947-1949”.
All in all, 418 villages
were destroyed, depopulated or simply taken over by Zionists for
various purposes. Others
were utilized as sites for building Zionist settlements.
Recently, the
distinguished Palestinian historian, Walid Khalidi, author and
editor of many
valuable publications,
books and researches, narrating the untold story and history of the
Palestinians before and
after their Nakba (catastrophe), a paramount referential research
work titled “ All that
Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by
Israel in 1948”. Its
Arabic version appeared on November 1997.
In addition to these
major works, a group of researchers prepared a list of names for
destroyed villages --
among them was Israel Shahak, president of Israeli Human Rights
group who published on
1973 somehow modified text of Aref Al-Aref list.
Shahak based his work on
Al-Aref list of 399 occupied villages, omitting from it the
undestroyed
villages—reducing the figure to 383 villages.
The Palestinian
geographer Kamal Abdul Fattah classified on 1986 another list in
preparation for the
forthcoming list of Ber Zeit University.
But Christoph Uehlinger
from the Swiss “Association for the reconstruction of Emmuas”
village prepared a list
based on Al-Aref-Shahak list, and to the preliminary list of Kamal
Abdul Fattah
(1983)—adapting it to the Israeli maps.
Although the Israeli
authorities failed to issue a list of the destroyed villages, it
republished
on 1950s topographic
maps --originally prepared by British Mandate –giving Hebrew
names to the places
printing over the destroyed villages the Hebrew word “Hrous” –
meaning: destroyed.
Barring Dabbagh’s book
(Our Land Palestine) and the Palestinian Encyclopedia, none of
these works has referred
to the destroyed village with more than a name and few
statistics—merely as a
single element amid general sight of destruction.
General Moshe Dayan
stated in 1962:
We came to this country,
which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing
a Hebrew, that is, a
Jewish State, here. Jewish villages were built in the place
of Arab villages. You do
not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not
blame you, because those
geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books, not
exist, the Arab villages
are not there either. Nahal arose in the place of Mahalul; Gevat in
the place of Jibta;
Sarid in the place of Tell Shaman. There is not one place built in
this
country that did not
have a former Arab population.
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