Helping Those Passing Through


	Jaffa from Hotel du Parc (Library of Congress/American Colony (Jerusalem) Photographer.)

MY FATHER, Mohammad Najjab, was 16 years old in 1948 and was attending high school in the town of Al-Bireh, adjacent to Ramallah, in what is now the West Bank. The fighting that year was distant—in that he could hear daily the firing of rifles in the far off hills—while at the same time very close, because of the constant pouring of refugees into the town. His father—my grandfather, Rashid Najjab—would come to town from their village of Jibya for business or just to see his children.

My grandfather worked as a caretaker of a large forest of mostly pine trees in Palestine during the British Mandate. He invested his money wisely in land, and by 1948 was a prosperous olive farmer. Later, in 1982, the forest would be seized by Israeli settlers with the blessing and aid of their government and Palestinians would be forbidden to wander about and enjoy that splendid place.

My father always spoke of his father’s kindness to those unfortunate people who had lost so much and now were wondering if they would ever go back to their former lives. Rashid was constantly asking how he could help them and always showed compassion.

He had done the same during World War II, when he and my father had come upon a group of Polish Jewish refugees in Lydda escaping the Nazis. He knew something of their plight by way of his Jewish colleagues in the forestry who would spend Fridays at my grandfather’s house in the country and tell him of the horrors that were occurring in Europe. My father said my grandfather attempted everything in his power, mostly by way of hand gestures, to convey to these people his sadness for what they had been through.

Now in 1948, my grandfather was again trying to help refugees—but this time he knew their language. Many of those displaced individuals would settle in the Al Jalazon refugee camp near Al-Bireh, and my grandfather, who was now a friend to the vast majority of them, would visit and buy goods from them for the next 30 years.

During the heaviest fighting of that year, my father, approaching the town of Bir Zeit on foot, came upon a man he had never seen before sitting on the ground with a rifle and a sad look on this face. When my father asked the man what was troubling him, he told my father that he was from Tunis and that he had come from his homeland in the hopes of defending Jerusalem. He repeated over and over again, “If they would just allow me to fight.”

He buried his face in his hands and his tears dropped between his fingers onto the ground.“Instead,” he continued, “they have left me sitting here.”

My father would tell me that story some 30 years later with such pity and helplessness in his voice for that man—a helplessness they all must have felt at that time.

—By Jamal Najjab, Washington, DC