o/ my family is from Tantura, one of the northern coastal towns which the zionist roving armed militias massacred in 1948 at what's often named the "start" of the Nakba. The alexondri brigade came, following the commands of Ben Gurion, and spontaneously massacred as much of our village as they could. There was not a fight or battle for the village. They simply came into our town, rounded up every man or boy they could get their hands on, lined them up on the beach, and began executing them. Others raped anybody they felt like as their friends shot anybody who tried to stop them. People tried to flee and they shot who they could too to try to ensure we didn't move elsewhere in Palestine. Out of the 1,250 person town, just one pile on the beach consisted of 250 dead. They forced us to stay and wait, at gunpoint.
Because, they had a plan to ensure we wouldn't stay in Palestine. They force-marched us, Trail of Tears style, to a distant zionist settler colony.
They had film crews from MGM, the American movie company, already on site. They had busses prepared at the ready. They recorded a stupid little media moment, "helping the refugees from the violence move to safety 😔", as they forced us to board their busses.
And without telling anybody anything, they drove those busses of captives as far as they could. Out of the Levant. And they dumped us in random distant cities.
My grandma & grandpa, both children at the time, were both dumped in Baghdad, Iraq. My father was born there.
My grandma, like many other survivors of it, refused to talk about what she experienced those few days. She took what she saw to the grave. It took serious investigation by my dad for us to find somebody else who was there and could talk about it. It took an Israeli settler doing interviews of those alexondri brigade brigands, decades later, for us to hear more of their plans. Turns out that media crew was brought back to our town for them to film a fake little fighting video, throwing grenades into & getting into gunfights with empty houses. Sound familiar? The settler who did that research was turned into a pariah and tortured to "confess" he made up all those interviews, which he recanted the instant he was no longer being tortured.
To this day it is hard to find Palestinian cultural heritage from the area we're from. Because they deliberately sent us as far as they could to random spaces, we weren't part of the same areas of super dense Palestinian refugees like in Jordan & Lebanon. So Much of what we do have preserved is from the southern & Central regions. For example, as I learn tatreez, I'm trying to get access to early pictures of my grandma, because that's the only way I'll be able to learn what tatreez motifs & thobe constructions were worn in Tantura.
The whole thing was very deliberate and premeditated. You kill a person, but you genocide a people-- and they came equipped with American and British support, and with the commands of their own leaders echoing in their ears, to commit a genocide.
janainaart
kaledo-art
stormborns
gummygunk
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snowghoul
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