Free The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé Page B

populations. Hence, from now on, the military commanders were given strict orders to leave the selection process that was to determine who could stay and who could not to the intelligence officers. 9 The Druze were now fully collaborating with the Jews, and in villages that were partly Druze, Christians were generally spared expulsion.
    Saffuriyya was less fortunate. All its inhabitants were evicted, with soldiers shooting over their heads to hasten their departure. Al-Hajj Abu Salimwas twenty-seven, and the father of one beloved daughter, when the village was taken. His wife was expecting another baby and he recalls the warm family home with his father, a kind and generous man, one of the richest peasants in the village. For Abul Salim, the Nakba began with the news of other villages surrendering. ‘When your neighbour’s house is on fire, you begin to worry’ is a well-known Arab saying that captures the emotions and confusion of the villagers caught in the midst of the catastrophe.
    Saffuriyya was one of the first villages Israeli forces bombarded from the air. In July many more would be terrorised in this way, but back in June this was a rarity. Terrified, the women took their children and hastily sought shelter in the ancient caves nearby. The young men prepared their primitive rifles for the inevitable attack, but the volunteers from the Arab countries took fright and escaped from the girls’ school where they had been stationed. Abu Salim stayed on with the men to fight although, as he remembered many years later, ‘The officer of the ALA advised me and others to run away,’ which, he admits, seemed to make sense. But he stayed put and so became a crucial eyewitness to the events that followed.
    After the air bombardment came the ground attack, not only on the village but also on the caves. ‘The women and children were quickly exposed by the Jews and my mother was killed by the troops,’ he told a newspaper fifty-three years later. ‘She was trying to enter the Church of Annunciation, and the Jews dropped a bomb that hit her in the stomach.’ His father took Abu Salim’s wife and fled to Reina, a village that had already surrendered. There they took refuge with a Christian family for a few months, who shared their food and clothing with them. They worked in the family’s orchards and were well treated. As they had been forced to leave their own clothes behind in the village, villagers tried to return in the dead of the night to smuggle them out. Israeli troops caught several of them and shot them on the spot. In 2001, Abu Salim, now eighty years old, concluded his story by stating that he was still willing, as he had been in the past, to buy his old house back with good money. What he cannot rebuild is his family. He has lost all contact with his brother, whom he thinks has children somewhere in the diaspora, but he has been unable to track any of them down.
    Like many villagers in the vicinity of Nazareth, the people of Saffuriyya fled to the city. Today sixty per cent of Nazareth’s residents are internal refugees. The decision of the local Israeli commander who occupiedNazareth the following month not to drive out its inhabitants meant that many of the expelled villagers around Nazareth were spared the fate of a second eviction. Along with many of the survivors of the other villages, the people of Saffuriyya put up new homes in a neighbourhood that faced their old village, today called Safafra. This meant another traumatic life experience: they actually watched as the Jewish settlers began emptying their houses, occupied them and slowly turned their beloved village into an Israeli moshav – a collective agricultural settlement – that they called Zippori, which Israeli archeologists quickly claimed was the name of the original Talmudic city.
    In other neighbourhoods in the city of Nazareth today you can come across survivors of Malul and Mujaydil, who settled in the southern part of the city as near