This past Thanksgiving, I got to spend some time with my grandmother. I asked her about her family’s story in 1948.
For those who don’t know, 1948 marked the year of the Nakba for Palestine. In Arabic, "Nakba" means "crisis," and it was a day that changed our country forever.
Millions of Palestinians lost their homes, possessions, and lives as Zionist militias forced people out or killed them.
That year, the apartheid State of Israel was founded.
My grandmother told me her family was originally from Haifa. Her father, my great-grandfather, worked in a factory there.
A few months before the Nakba, a Jewish friend of his warned him of what was coming and advised him to leave to keep his family safe.
They moved to the Ramallah area and built a new life. They were luckier than many others who faced tragic events firsthand, but they still suffered deeply and had to start over.
My other grandmother has a different story. She wasn’t able to avoid the Nakba. All she remembers was how much they walked, and how tired she was as a little girl who didn’t understand what was happening.
At one point, she asked her mother, “When are we going to get home?” She was never going back to her home. Jewish settlers had come and given her family a choice: leave or be killed.
They left. That long walk was them leaving everything behind. They eventually reached Jerusalem and had to start a whole new life.
Imagine someone showing up to your home today and telling you that you have to leave or they will kill you. That’s what millions of Palestinians went through on May 15, 1948, and what many are still experiencing to this day.
Both of my grandmothers are older than the “State of Israel.”
Then there’s my grandfather, who I was named after—Raja Salti.
His father, my great-grandfather Jeryis Salti, went through a lot as a dad in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
My grandfather grew up in Jerusalem, where his dad owned an iron store. Their neighbourhood went from being full of Palestinian families to a ghost town after 1948.
Many fled to nearby cities and countries, but Jeryis chose to stay.
My grandfather’s family remained confined to their home, with no access to work or school, scarce food and water, restricted freedom of movement, and a constant sense of uncertainty about their future.
My great-grandfather’s business was completely seized by the Israeli government. Taking away his property and inventory worth about $100,000.
He was one of the first people to ever sue the Israeli government and win, but they ended up paying him a fraction of what he lost.
Jeryis sent his older sons to Jordan for a fresh start, while my grandfather stayed with him in West Jerusalem until Jewish settlers overwhelmed the Arab population and took over all homes that Palestinian families were residing in.
Eventually, my grandfather was forced to leave as well and was kicked out of his hometown Jerusalem to start a new life in Ramallah, where I grew up for the first 11 years of my life.
This is just a microcosm of what the Palestinian people went through during the forced establishment of the state of “Israel.”
It was a country established on the premise of terrorizing an entire population that had lived there for generations.
My family went through this in 1948, millions of Palestinians have gone through this since 1948, and Palestinians continue to go through this to this day.
The picture below is my family tree that goes back all the way to the 1500s. Each person on that tree lived on this land that’s now part of modern-day Israel and Palestine.
The truth is that no Jew living in “Israel” now can show you the same and provide proof of their ancestors living on this land for more than 100 years.
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