November 8, 1966: Military Rule on Israeli Arabs Lifted
In my mind’s eye I see my parents and grandparents - the Palestinians who survived the destruction of their society following Israel's creation - in those days as helpless children abandoned to an abusive father.
In Emile Habibi’s book “The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist,” when the protagonist Saeed argues softly with his wife, they are told off by their little son in an even softer voice to keep quiet or the neighbors will hear. The son is called, to be on the safe side, “Wala’a” (“faithful” in Arabic). This is what is deeply etched into our consciousness. We are the generation born around the time of the Nakba (in Arabic, “the catastrophe,” the Palestinians’ term for what happened to them when the state was founded in 1948), for whom even the walls have ears and it’s impossible to trust anyone. And exactly at this difficult moment, the military administration pressed upon the wound with full force to persuade those who had remained – a branch of an uprooted tree – that they were a nation of informers with a traitorous leadership.