The Nakba: Jaffa’s erasure is a warning to Gaza – but history is yet to be written
My grandfather, Ismail Abou Shhadeh – known to most as Abu Subhi – never spoke to us about the Nakba. He talked about everything else but had always avoided describing what happened in 1948.
It was only through interviews he gave to various media outlets that we came to understand what it meant to live through the catastrophe of 1948 in what was then one of Palestine‘s most prominent cities, Jaffa (Yafa in Arabic).
And it was only through one interview in particular, with Al Jazeera, that we learned how his father, Haseen Abou Shhadeh, died.
Haseen was born during the Ottoman era, when land was often seen as belonging to those who worked it – a principle that had shaped generations of Palestinian agricultural life, even as formal land ownership laws changed.
In 1948, Zionist militias exploited that deep sense of rootedness and security, catching unsuspecting Palestinian villagers off guard and using terror to drive them from their homes and seize their land and property.
