Palestine : Memories of 1948 (9781843919483) by Conti Chris; Alcantra Altair (PHT)

Author:Conti, Chris; Alcantra, Altair (PHT)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

The consequences are disastrous and affect our whole lives. For example, when I bought some land in 1996 and built a house on it,39 I was not able to register it in my name, nor in that of my wife: my property remained in the name of the seller; if he had died, his family would have inherited “my” land. Luckily, in May 2009, my daughter married a Palestinian from the West Bank and got Jordanian nationality by marriage, and I was able to put the house in her name.

Many professions are forbidden to refugees from Gaza. The laws that apply to foreigners are applied to Gazans: that is how it is.40 We are not allowed to own a car or a truck if we use it to make a living. The result is that many people work on the black market and, if they get caught, they get a warning or have to pay a fine. Sometimes, however, the authorities take pity on us: even if, as a Gazan, we have to pay to be treated in the clinics and public hospitals, we can ask for the treatment to be taken care of by a special fund from the royal court. My wife, Allah yerhamha, God rest her soul, was able, thanks to a doctor who took pity on her, to have an eye cancer treated at the King Hussein Medical Centre, but she did not survive a relapse in 2017. Today, access to this centre is extremely rare, except in very serious cases and the sick are generally sent to the public hospital, Al Bashir, where patients buy their medicines themselves in private pharmacies. How do they cope when they have no money? The only thing left is the zakat41 or charitable organizations to help them.

Seen from the Gaza Camp, where I have been living for 15 years, the peace accords signed in Camp David in 1978, and in the Wadi Araba in 1994,42 did not look serious. I never believed in them, and from the top of my minbar, on Fridays, I said so: the Israeli government has never intended to stop settlements, they do not want to live with us, they want our lands, but empty of its inhabitants. They do not want us Palestinians to exist beyond the boundaries that they set for us. Moreover, they pay no attention to international laws and continue to occupy and create settlements in Palestine. Whether one is for or against it, it is reality. We can only hope that an educated and humanitarian man will appear, to find a real and just solution, like Saladin the Kurd43 did in the twelfth century.”

The teacher and his pupils, 1933

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