Friday, August 09, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
From the Buddhist magazine Tricycle:
From an early age, I was aware of the ancestral scars I inherited at birth, and growing up, I often heard stories about how my relatives lost their homes and happy lives.
My illiterate grandparents, Ahmad and Amni Fakhoury, had worked hard to establish a thriving farm in the village of Irtah, Palestine. But their good life ended in the aftermath of World War II, when the British military stripped away my family’s land and belongings—even killing some of my relatives—to make way for Jewish settlers from Europe. They became unable to support themselves in their own homeland.
Because the Palestinian schools were shut down, my father and his eight siblings were spread across the globe so that they could continue their education, all the while enduring poverty and discrimination in foreign countries.
Remaining Palestinians were not so fortunate. Those who resisted losing their homes were killed or imprisoned, and others were sent to live in inhumane encampments.
The author, Ronya Fakhoury Banks, goes on to describe how her parents moved from Kuwait to the US where she rejected her Palestinian heritage, became a mess, learned about meditation and got her act together.
Even though she ends off her article "May we stop living in fear and begin living in peace and love, and see how we are all one in heart," the quoted piece above shows that she is not exactly practicing what she preaches.
Irtah was a small village south of Tulkarem. Jews never lived there. The British never kicked Arabs out of their houses to make way for Jews. If Ahmad and Amni Fakhoury lived there before World War II, they could have stayed after WWII and after 1948 when Jordan annexed it.
They would have become Jordanian citizens. There was no reason for "Palestinian schools" to have been shut down from Israeli or British actions/
It is possible that her family's land was turned into a no-man's zone in 1948, as Irtah is very close to the 1949 armistice lines. It is more likely that with the influx of refugees, resources became harder to come by and her family decided to move elsewhere in the Arab world voluntarily, as Arabs have for centuries.
Or Banks' family has been lying to her about why they left Palestine/Jordan.
Tulkarem grew and now contains Irtah as a neighborhood.
Palestinians were not "killed or imprisoned" for resisting losing their homes on either side of the Green Line.
This story is nothing less than an attempt to inject anti-Israel hate in an otherwise harmless article about meditation.
(h/t RedwoodAtDawn)
