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<div class="header reader-header" style="display: block;"
dir="ltr"> <font size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/15/my-home-is-beit-daras-our-lingering-nakba/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/15/my-home-is-beit-daras-our-lingering-nakba/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">My Home is Beit Daras: Our Lingering
Nakba</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/cet6s/"
rel="nofollow">Ramzy Baroud</a> - May 15, 2018</span></div>
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<div itemprop="articleBody">When Google Earth was initially
released in 2001, I immediately rushed to locate a village
that no longer exists on a map, which now delineates a
whole different reality.
<p>Although I was born and raised in a Gaza refugee camp,
and then moved to and lived in the United States,
finding a village that was erased from the map decades
earlier was not, at least for me, an irrational act. The
village of Beit Daras was the single most important
piece of earth that truly mattered to me.</p>
<p>But I could only find it by estimation. Beit Daras was
located 32-kilometers northeast of Gaza, on an elevated
ground, perched gently between a large hill and a small
river that seemed to never run dry.</p>
<p>A once peaceful village, Beit Daras had existed for
millennia. Romans, Crusaders, Mamluks and Ottomans ruled
over and, even tried to subdue Beit Daras as in all of
Palestine; yet they failed. True, each invader left
their mark – ancient Roman tunnels, a Crusaders’ castle,
a Mamluk mail building, an Ottoman khan (Caravanserai) –
but they were all eventually driven out. It wasn’t until
1948 that Beit Daras, that tenacious village with a
population of merely 3,000 was emptied from its
population, and later destroyed.</p>
<p>The agony of the inhabitants of Beit Daras and their
descendants lingers on after all of these years. The
tragic way that Beit Daras was conquered by invading
Zionist forces has left behind blood stains and
emotional scars that have never healed.</p>
<p>Three battles were bravely fought by the Badrasawis, as
the dwellers of Beit Daras are called, in defense of
their village. At the end, the Zionist militias, the
Haganah, with the help of British weapons and strategic
assistance, routed out the humble resistance, which
consisted mostly of villagers fighting with old rifles.</p>
<p>The ‘massacre of Beit Daras’ that followed remains a
subdued scream that pierces through the hearts of
Badrasawis after all of these years. Those who survived
became refugees and are mostly living in the Gaza Strip.
Under siege, successive wars and endless strife, their
Nakba – the catastrophic ethnic cleansing of Palestine
in 1947-48 – has never truly ended. One cannot dispel
the pain if the wound never truly heals.</p>
<p>Born into a family of refugees in the Nuseirat Refugee
Camp in Gaza, I took pride in being a Badrasawi. Our
resistance has garnered us the reputation of being
‘stubborn’ and the uncorroborated claims of having large
heads. We truly are stubborn, proud and generous, for
Beit Daras was erased but the collective identity it has
given us remained intact, regardless of whichever exile
we may find ourselves.</p>
<p>As I child, I learned to be proud from my grandfather:
A handsome, elegant, strong peasant with unshakable
faith. He managed to hide his deep sadness so well after
he was expelled from his home in Palestine, along with
his entire family. As he aged, he would sit for hours,
between prayers, searching within his soul for the
beautiful memories of his past. Occasionally, he would
let out a mournful sigh, a few tears; yet he never
accepted his defeat, or the idea that Beit Daras was
forever gone.</p>
<p>“Why bother to haul the good blankets on the back of a
donkey, exposing them to the dust of the journey, while
we know that it’s a matter of a week or so before we
return to Beit Daras?” he told his bewildered wife,
Zeinab as they hauled their children to navigate an
endless exile.</p>
<p>I cannot pinpoint the moment when my grandfather
discovered that his “good blankets” were gone forever,
that all that remained of his village were two giant
concrete pillars, and piles of cactus.</p>
<p>It isn’t easy to construct a history that, only several
decades ago, was, along with every standing building of
that village, blown to smithereens with the very intent
of erasing it from existence. Most historic references
written of Beit Daras, whether by Israeli or Palestinian
historians, were brief, and ultimately resulted in
delineating the fall of Beit Daras as just one among
nearly 600 Palestinian villages that were often
evacuated and then completely flattened during the war
years. It was another episode in a more compounded
tragedy that has seen the dispossession and expulsion of
nearly 800,000 Palestinians.</p>
<p>But for my family, it was much more than that. Beit
Daras was our very dignity. Grandpas’ calloused hands
and leathery weathered skin attested to the decades of
hard labor tending the rocky soil in the fields of
Palestine. It was a popular pastime for my brothers and
I to point to a scar on his body to hear a gut-busting
tale of the rigors of farm-life.</p>
<p>Later in life, someone would give him a small hand-held
radio to glean the latest news and he would, from that
moment, never be seen without it. As a child, I recall
him listening to the Arab Voice news on that battered
radio. It once had been blue but now had faded to white
with age. Its bulging batteries were duct-taped to the
back. Sitting with the radio up to his ear and fighting
to hear the reporter amidst the static, grandpa listened
and waited for the announcer to make that long-awaiting
call: “To the people of Beit Daras: your lands have been
liberated, go back to your village.”</p>
<p>The day grandpa died, his faithful radio was lying on
the pillow close to his ear so that even then he might
catch the announcement for which he had waited for so
long. He wanted to comprehend his dispossession as a
simple glitch in the world’s consciousness that was sure
to be corrected and straightened out in time.</p>
<p>But it didn’t. 70 years later, my people are still
refugees. Not just the Badrasawis, but millions of
Palestinians, scattered in refugee camps all across the
Middle East. Those refugees, while still searching for a
safe path that would take them home, often find
themselves on yet another journey, another dusty trail,
being pushed out time and again from one city to the
next, from one country to another, even lost between
continents.</p>
<p>My grandfather was buried in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp
cemetery, not in Beit Daras as he had wished. But he
remained a Badrasawi to the end, holding so passionately
onto the memories of a place that for him – for all of
us – remain sacred and real.</p>
<p>What Israel still fails to understand that the ‘Right
of Return’ for Palestinian refugees is not merely a
political or even a legal right to be overpowered by the
ever-unfair status quo. It has longed surpassed that
into a whole different realm. For me, Beit Daras is not
just a piece of earth but a perpetual fight for justice
that shall never cease, because the Badrasawis belong to
Beit Daras and nowhere else.</p>
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<p> <em><strong>Dr. Ramzy Baroud</strong> has been writing
about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an
internationally-syndicated columnist, a media
consultant, an author of several books and the founder
of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father
Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press,
London). His website is: ramzybaroud.net</em> </p>
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