2023-10-07 06:39:29
Eid Haddad’s parents were teenagers when they witnessed the force used by British troops in Palestine in 1938. “They saw how the troops came in and attacked the people. My father told me that they hit a man on the head with a wooden hammer used for grinding meat that they call (in Arabic) modakah, and he died,” Haddad recalls.
“Another man and his son were hanging tobacco leaves to dry. They just shot them in the back,” he continues. “It was chaos.”
His parents lived in al-Bassa, a Palestinian village that was subjected to collective punishment by British forces, who at the time described their actions as “punitive measures.” The British They attacked entire towns if his troops were attacked by armed rebels operating in the hills.
Haddad recounts the atrocities his family experienced in a new radio series produced by the BBC, examining how British and French control of the Middle East a century ago shaped the region in ways that still resonate today.
Eid Haddad shared the story of his childhood in Lebanon and the bloodshed his family witnessed
I first came into contact with Eid Haddad last year when I was covering a Palestinian-led attempt to receive an apology for alleged war crimes committed by Britain during its control of Palestine between 1917 and 1948.
He told me the story of his own childhood in Lebanon in the middle of the bloodshed witnessed by his family, who had been displaced from their homeland.
His parents’ early lives unfolded at a time when British and French rule was causing years of conflict and sectarian unrest in the region.
His childhood occurred amid the bloody instability that gripped the Middle East in the decades that followed after European powers abandoned the region.
Eid Haddad’s parents (pictured with their grandchildren) lived in a village that was subjected to collective punishment by British forcesEID HADDAD
According to one historian we interviewed, the history of the Mandates is so fundamental that it is effectively “a history of the present.”
During World War I, when Britain invaded and captured the territory of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, it turned to forces of national self-determination.
London did conflicting promises over pieces of the territory that he offered both to the Arabs, who sought independence throughout the region, and to the Zionist movement that sought a Jewish home in Palestine.
The British and French consolidated their control with the so-called “Mandates” of government given to them by the newly founded League of Nations, a body dominated by the two imperial powers.
In Palestine, London set rival national movements on a collision course before launching a brutal crackdown on an Arab uprising in the late 1930s.
British forces would later face a rebellion by Zionist militias, amid a series of chaotic political changes in which the United Kingdom reneged on its promises of immigration and turned back ships carrying holocaust survivors who had escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe.
“The British didn’t know how to manage these things,” says Israeli historian Tom Segev. “They treated Palestine like one would treat an adorable pet. It’s nice to have it, but really shouldn’t cause us too much trouble“, Add.
Eid Haddad at his first communion in a refugee camp in Lebanon
Meanwhile, the French Mandate separated Lebanon from Syria to create a strategic “beachhead” and imposed new borders across the territory in the early 1920s, before an Arab rebellion that it also ruthlessly suppressed.
They divided areas by ethnicity and religion in what historian James Barr describes as a “very direct and cynical” attempt to divide and rule.
In the years after World War II, the United Kingdom and France withdrew. In Palestine, London knew that its withdrawal would turn a territorial conflict into a regional war, when the State of Israel was declared and Arab armies invaded.
Haddad’s parents fled al-Bassa when the village was destroyed by Jewish paramilitary forces. During the conflicts of 1947 and 1948, at least 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to abandon their homes in what Palestinians call the “Nakba” or “catastrophe.”
Haddad was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in neighboring Lebanon.
The fragile sectarian climate between Christians and Muslims that remained after the French rule of Lebanon was destabilized by the arrival of Palestinian refugees. The situation was further aggravated during the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the armed group that launched attacks against Israel.
The country also had powerful officials who still favored a pan-Arab regional alliance with Syria and Egypt, a movement that had its roots in the rebellion against the Mandates and even before.
Lebanon subsequently descended into a sectarian civil war. Haddad, whose family is Palestinian Christian, describes how his 16-year-old brother was shot dead by Lebanese Christian ultranationalists (Phalangist militias) who attacked the Palestinians and their refugee camp north of Beirut in 1975.
The following year, he survived a massacre, escaping from gunmen by hiding in a closet. He describes the horrific and barbaric humiliation of the survivors by the militias.
Rashid Haddad was shot dead when he was only 16 years oldEID HADDAD
Haddad says he was scarred for life with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which he says date back to what he experienced as a child.
“My parents… I think they also suffered from PTSD because they also saw a lot of things when they were children. And imagine my father, he was about to be taken away by British troops for interrogation,” he says, explaining that the British separated the women from the men who were detained during the atrocities in the village of al-Bassa in 1938.
Haddad says that his father, then a teenager, was taken to where the women were by a villager who disguised him as a girl. “They just covered him, covered his head with a scarf and gave him a dress. AND In this way they saved him from being tortured”, he adds.
The UK government has never acknowledged the atrocities committed in al-Bassa, where British troops are believed to have killed more than 30 people.
From Europe, Haddad now describes how he has never been able to return to the land of his ancestors. “I feel like a big part of me is missing. “I feel like an island in an ocean that is totally foreign to me,” he concludes.
Conocé The Trust Project
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