By Nadia Oehlsen
Mai Khader and Mahasen Nasser-Eldin, the film’s chief researchers, are both Palestinians and recent graduates of North Park University. Khader had helped one of her professors gather stories about 1948 from Palestinians who’d spent 50 years in refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank. “In a refugee camp, let’s say the Dheisheh camp around the Bethlehem area, people would just grab us from the streets if they knew that we were doing a project on ’48,” Khader says in the documentary. “They would just grab us from the street–they wanted to tell us their story.” So she was surprised to find that many Palestinians in Chicago were reluctant to be interviewed. “One guy was really hesitant,” she says. “I felt like he had a story, but he seemed afraid to say it. He would tell us, ‘It’s over. We don’t need to talk about this.’ He kept saying, ‘I’m not political, I’m not political. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The state of Israel was born in 1948 when Britain was giving up its World War I mandate to control Palestine. Most Palestinian Arabs call the upheaval they suffered al-nakbah, which means “the catastrophe.” In early April of that year news spread quickly via Jewish, Arab, and international media that Zionist soldiers had attacked Deir Yassin, an Arab village on the western edge of Jerusalem that lay outside the UN-proposed borders of a future Jewish state, killing a third of its 750 residents and expelling any of the rest who hadn’t already fled (historians now think there were probably about 110 casualties). It had been considered a peaceful neighbor by the Jewish communities that surrounded it, but it was targeted because no one expected much resistance and it was on high ground in a strategic corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The stories of the massacre frightened many Palestinians into fleeing for their lives, and they were encouraged by members of Haganah, the official army of the Jewish Agency, who drove sound trucks through Arab areas, warning residents to leave or face the fate of Deir Yassin. Most Arab communities that refused to evacuate were forcibly expelled by Haganah soldiers. Deir Yassin wouldn’t be the last or worst massacre by Zionist soldiers in Arab communities, but among Arabs it came to symbolize the pivotal and most horrifying event of al-nakbah.
Many refugees later emigrated to other countries, including the U.S.–though there are still some three million exiles and their descendants crowded into the refugee camps. Chicago is one of the largest outposts of the Palestinian diaspora; the Arab American Action Network and the Chicago Commission on Human Relations estimate some 85,000 Palestinians live in and around the city.
Matuk Rantisi, a retired mechanical engineer, sits in his living room in Wood Dale and recalls his peaceful childhood in the Mediterranean city of Jaffa: “Going to school in the morning, going to the beach in the afternoon, swim and catch a few fish and eat them, roast them right on the beach, or just in the coffeehouse where we used to sit. It will never, never be replaced.” He was 19 when his family sent him away with his pregnant older sister and her husband the day before the British mandate ended, on May 15, 1948. Jewish soldiers shot at their truck as they left, but they made it to Bethlehem. For three months they didn’t know what happened to the rest of the family; as it turned out, they had soon tried to follow, but the highways were closed. “They went to the seashore,” Rantisi says. “They took a boat and went to Tyre, in Lebanon. They fled Jaffa because there was no way for them to sit under bullets all night.”
After 1948, Khuri says, “There was a lot of misinformation, a lot of broken promises, and the Palestinians never got together to do something about it. We were scattered and spread every which way….There was no cohesive force to get us together until the 60s, when the Palestinian movement came about….We were emotionally devastated, and then we were hopeful, and then devastated, and hopeful, and devastated. After a while [when] there is something hopeful, you don’t really attach yourself to it, because you don’t want the disappointment of losing it.”
Not everyone is as open. Khader recalls that one night she was studying with a friend in her dorm and a man struck up a conversation, asking where they were from. “He’s like, ‘That history did not exist. You Arabs are full of it. You just want the world to support you.’”
