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A Note from the Editors
Sami Hadawi's life (1904-2004) mirrors that of many Palestinians of his generation. He grew up in Palestine during the British Mandate years and was forced out in 1948, never to be allowed to return. He lived in exile the rest of his life and devoted his energy to the cause of Palestine. He became a well-known scholar of the Nakba, devoting his life to researching and documenting its effects on the Palestinians, in particular the refugees. Hadawi's memoirs were circulated privately in English in 1996 in two volumes. In Jerusalem Quarterly 53, we published a selection from these memoirs about his early childhood in Jerusalem, titled "Sodomy, Locusts, and Cholera." Below we publish a section dealing with the destruction of Palestine in 1948.1 The text reprinted here deals primarily with the memories of the author during May 1948, the same month in which Israel was declared a state over most of Palestine, while Jordan annexed the eastern part of the country as the kingdom's West Bank and Egypt took over the administration of the Gaza Strip. The text below is faithful to the original with two exceptions: spelling, punctuation, and capitalization have been regularized; and we have added a few explanatory notes. For more on Sami Hadawi, see the introduction to the excerpt republished in Jerusalem Quarterly 53.
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The Union Jack over Government House came down after thirty years of British administration, and the British High Commissioner with his staff left Jerusalem on the morning of 14 May 1948. With this, Palestine as a country ceased to exist
officially in the eyes of the political world. The effect was more catastrophic for the country than any of the other foreign occupations to which it was subjected throughout its history, not only for the indigenous Moslem and Christian inhabitants of the land, but also for the peoples of the entire region.
This infamous era began in 1920 with unfulfilled promises and broken pledges given to the Arabs in 1915 of freedom, liberty, and independence from the 400-year-old yoke of the Ottoman Regime,2 and ended with the British Government forsaking the responsibilities it freely assumed under the Mandate of the League of Nations to safeguard and uphold the rights and...