The writing has all the hallmarks of propaganda, heavy on emotion and with the authors almost certainly telling their interviewees what to say:
Abu Kefah Qadih, is an 81-year-old Palestine Refugee from Khan Younis. He has weathered forced displacement not once, but twice in his lifetime. As a child, he endured the horror of the Nakba – the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Now he has been forced to witness the dispossession of his own grandchildren. Together they are currently living through the same ordeal he knew too well as a child. This heart-wrenching reality leaves the elderly man profoundly shaken, shattering any hope he may have held that his family could be spared such a cruel fate."The scenes I witnessed as a child are being repeated with my own grandchildren," he laments, his voice trembling with raw emotion. "Watching helplessly as people flee from death, forced to live in tattered tents, clinging to the desperate hope of one day returning home - it shatters my heart to witness this horrific cycle unfolding all over again, this time impacting my own family," Abu Kefah says.
His aged eyes reflect the weariness of a lifetime burdened by unrelenting displacement and loss. "Many have been killed, their homes reduced to rubble, but still we remain steadfast, accepting God's will," he affirms as a tear escapes from his eye, a potent testament of the profound sorrow etched into his weathered face.
Does any normal person speak this way?
But the next "witness" is even more unlikely:
Hajjeh Zainab, 88, is another al Nakba survivor from Beersheba. Her family fled the once peaceful grazing land they called home for the Maghazi area of southern Wadi Gaza in 1948.Before the Nakba, her family cultivated the land and lived off the livestock they raised, such as sheep, goats, and camels. Hajjeh Zainab recalls, "We used to honor guests and welcome them into our homes and on our lands from which we were forced to flee. We always used to say, 'May God grant us a guest before the sun sets,' such was our love for honoring guests. These are the traditions of the Bedouins in the tribes of Beersheba, and we, the good people of this land, lived a simple life filled with love, harmony, and happiness,” she says. “But in one night and one day, gangs attacked us, killed us, slaughtered our children, families, and men, and forced us to leave our homes under the threat of fire, killing, and massacres,” she laments.
While I see that Benny Morris describes how Zionist troops did expel residents of Beersheba in October 1948 as part of Operation Yoav against the Egyptian fighters embedded there, most of them fled beforehand. I cannot find any description of a massacre of women and children near Beersheba in 1948. (I see reports of one alleged massacre of fourteen farmers in Al Araqib in September 1948, all of them adult men.)
This old lady is saying what she wants us to hear, not what actually happened.
And UNRWA, with a budget paid for by our taxpayer dollars, is not publishing what actually happened in 1948, but antisemitic lies about Jews deliberately massacring innocent men, women and children - to promote the lie that this is what is happening now as well.
