The Genocide in Gaza reported in pictures and around the world alerted the good people in the world to the crimes committed against the Palestinians, not only in the last two years but the story of the Nakba and thereafter in the last 77 years. The blood of hundreds of thousands of women and children, killed, injured, starved or displaced became the ink of which their history has been written and concealed all these years. If the blood has a price, it will be the revelation about the history long concealed by the criminals who created it. 

The stories of this tragedy are many. 

Here is a story of two journeys:  one to kill and another to survive. The two journeys are linked to one place Beer Sheba my native town.  It was the origin of one story and the destination of another. 

In October 2019, my speaking tour took me to the furthest east place ever, to Auckland, New Zealand. I spoke to about forty of the Palestinian community there. One young man, Nabil (who called himself Billy) took me to his home. On the way, he told me he was born in Kuwait but his father was born in Beer Sheba, Palestine in 1934. 

The place name struck me. His father must have been to Beer Sheba school, where I too was a student in the late 1940s. 

Like many of us, his father was expelled from his home town, Beer Sheba, when it was attacked and depopulated by Israel on 21 October 1948. The Israeli soldiers entered the city and started killing the defenders and the civilian people they found. Some survivors were found hiding in the mosque built in 1906. This did not save them. They were put in buses and carted........

© Middle East Monitor