Name: _______________________________________________

Class Period: _____

Marek Edelman, Jewish leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto

Uprising
I was 20 years old when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. The Germans rounded up 400,000 Polish
Jews and sealed them inside the Warsaw Ghetto, where we died by the thousands, from
starvation, disease and violence. In 1942, the Nazis began mass deportations from the ghetto,
packing thousands of Jews into train cars to be carried away to death camps. This took place
across Europe, but in Warsaw, we were able to organize a mass armed resistance. As an
organized socialist, I helped pull together an underground network inside the Ghetto of socialists,
trade unionists, and Jewish youth groups. As deputy commander of the Jewish Combat
Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto, I fought for three solid weeks and even after the ghetto fell I
continued to fight in the general Polish uprising in Warsaw to preserve as many lives as possible.
I was a member of the Jewish Bund, an anti-Zionist Jewish socialist organization. We were
opposed to Zionism because we thought Jews should stay and fight anti-Semitism here in Europe
rather than emigrate to Israel. Even after the creation of the Israeli state, I refused to emigrate
and I spoke up in defense of Palestinian resistance.
Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/marek-edelman-last-surviving-leader-ofthe-1943-warsaw-ghetto-uprising-against-the-nazis-1798644.html
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

David Ben-Gurion, the First Prime Minister of Israel

I was the leader of the Zionist movement from the mid 1920s until well into the 1960s. I was
born in Poland and emigrated to Palestine in 1906. When the British offered the Jewish
community a state in 1937 over a much smaller portion of Palestine than we wanted, I accepted
the proposal as a good start, but I began a discussion amongst Zionists about how to achieve a
purely Jewish state. I believed that ultimately, the Arabs will have to go! but I knew we needed
to wait for the opportune historical moment to deal with them militarily. In 1947, the UN passed
resolution 181 which granted 54% of Palestine to the Jews, who at the time comprised 30% of the
population. I accepted the plan and rejoiced in the acceptance of a Jewish state, but also felt that
the plan didnt go far enough. I understood that the borders of the Jewish state would be
determined by force and not by the partition resolution. I oversaw the Jewish military in the
Israeli War of Independence. In the midst of the war, I helped draft Israels declaration of
independence that justified our claim to the land as the birthplace of the Jewish people where
our spiritual, political, and religious identity was shaped.
Source: Ilan Papp, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Taha Muhammad Ali

I was born in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya. It was destroyed during the 1948 war. I was the
owner of a souvenir shop in Nazareth. My experience left me with much to share. I became the
author of five books of poetry in Arabic. I wrote this Poem about leaving my home:
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There Was No Farewell

WE DID NOT weep
when we were leaving
for we had neither
time nor tears,
and there was no farewell.
We did not know
at the moment of parting
that it was a parting,
so where would our weeping
have come from?
Source: http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/poems-week-2008%E2%80%932009/twopoems-2#sthash.K8N1E9Ph.dpuf
________________________________________________________________________________________________

Twefik Abilhuda, Foreign Minister of Trans-Jordan

Im a member of the government of Trans-Jordan (today my country is named Jordan), a neighbor
to Palestine and Israel. During the 1948 War, which Arabs call the nakba or catastrophe, I
witnessed unspeakable acts of cruelty by Zionists. In July 1948 I saw gangs of Zionists brutally
attack Arab villages and force the villagers to flee. I couldnt let these acts go unnoticed by the
United Nations so I wrote the following letter:
Zionist bands violated the truce [agreement to stop fighting] forced by the Security Council on
the Arab States. These bands attacked on the 25th July [1948] Arab villages - Itjiti-im and Jaba
and Ain Gazel - and shelled [shot at] these villages violently and continuously treating brutally
the Arab population, who were subjected to savage treatment of the cruelest kind known to
humanity. Masses were later forced to evacuate their homes in terrible conditions.
We strongly protest against these deeds and draw your attention to the necessity of putting an
end to these atrocities for the sake of maintaining peace and security.

Source: http://nakbaeducation.com/wp-content/uploads/Complaint1.pdf
________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ali Hamoudi, a Palestinian refugee from Ayn Ghazal

I was in a big family. We were seven children, three brothers and four sisters. We lived in a two
story house in Ayn Ghazal, which had several stores and a cafe. In 1948 they started bombing
the city center and young people took up weapons and stood guard throughout the night. It was
Ramadan. Every afternoon bombs fell, when people wanted to eat. And what weapons did we
have? It was useless. They would shoot at a distance of maybe six meters. And how many rifles
did we have here for defense? Maybe 25 rifles. We were not at all ready for war.

They attacked us all day, for about a week. Down there about 15 of us were killed. All of them
young. There was a tank at the entrance of the village. Maybe the Israeli Soldiers took it from the
British. Maybe there was an understanding between them that theyd take the tanks to fight
with. After three days, they started to attack Ayn Ghazal more forcefully, in the morning and the
evening, for three days. And so everyone started to flee from there.
We hid in a nearby cave. I asked my mother, What happened? My mom told me that they
wanted to take our lands. We slept in the cave for four days without leaving, during the time they
were attacking us. Eventually, we escaped and arrived at a Jewish town. We crossed the
mountain and I was a little barefoot nine year old when we arrived at the village named Qannir.
In Qannir, Jewish soldiers caught us and gave the children something to eat. They would take
everyone man over the age of 17, put him to the side and kill him. If I had been 17, I would have
been killed. They buried them on the spot. Afterwards they brought us to Fureidis. To each of us
they asked, Where do you want to go? To Abadallah? Some preferred to go to Jordan, but we
stayed. My mother stayed here because she has an aunt in Fureidis, so we went there. They put
us in a mosque in Fureidis and we slept there three days. Eventually, my aunt gave us a house
under her house.

From: Remembering Ayn Ghazal" booklet at www.zochrot.org/images/aynghazzal.pdf

______________________________________________________________________________________

Count Folke Bernadotte, United Nations Mediator on Palestine

I am a swedish diplomat. I am best known for my negotiations of the release of 31,000 prisoners
from German concentration camps during World War II. After the war, I was chosen to be a
mediator for the United Nations when dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1947-1948. While in
office, I sent five investigating teams to the field. My UN investigators discovered 4000
Palestinian refugees and thousands more Arabs captured and massacred from Israeli attacks. In
my opinion, Israeli military forces are unjustified in their treatment of Arab villagers. They are
not taking negotiations to the fullest effort to resolve the difficulty by peaceful means. In light of
the findings it is my decision that
(1) Right of Return: the Arab inhabitants who were forced to evacuate villages be allowed to
return and to reside in peace.
(2) That the provisional government of Israel shall do everything possible to repair at their own
expense damaged or destroyed homes
I would have liked to continue my negotiations but in 1948 I was assasinated by the militant
Zionist group Lehi while pursuing official duties.

Fayeq Abu Man, a Palestinian Male

I was 20 years old and lived in the city of Lod in 1948. Lod was a quiet city without war. There
were only Arabs here.. Ben Shemen was the neighboring Jewish village and we were their friends.
We had a very good relationship with them. But when the war started the Jewish soldiers came
from Ben Shemen to occupy Lod.
Down in the city there is a mosque. It has a room that people went to to take refuge about 75
people. Someone from Lod took grenades and threw them at the Israeli army and killed a few
soldiers. One of the soldiers, his brother was killed. He then went to the mosque and killed all the
3

people there. Then they told us to go to the mosque and take the corpses out and burn them. We
couldnt lift the corpses by hand, we brought bags and put the corpses on the bags and we lifted
them onto a truck. We gathered everyone in the cemetery. Among them was one woman and two
children. They said burn. We burned everyone.
One day a group from the army came. At that time we were in a single houseforty people in
two rooms. They said to leave for Jordan. We had no choice, what could we do? They came and
told us to leave. I asked an officer what will we do with my mothers grandmother and my
grandmother, two elderly women? How could we take them? They sent the women with my
Uncle to Ramallah and they sent me and the rest of the men to a prison camp.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mahmoud Abu-Sneineh Palestinian first generation male

Before the war, there were good relations with all the Jews. Theres no difference, we spent the
night at their houses, they spent the night at ours. We were more than brothers.
In 1948 I was seventeen years old...but when I was young I would go to the cinema in Tel Aviv.
There was a cinema in Herzliya too, and I would go with Jewish friends. The Jews would speak to
us in Arabic, everyone knew excellent Arabic. They were sabras, from German descent, Polish
descent, and others. My father would tell me, Rukh la-Amek Moussa, rukh la-Abu Daoud [go to
Moshes mother, go to Davids father] they talked about them like they were our cousins.
But these good relations between Jews and Arabs broke down when the Jewish state was created
in 1948. My house, someone came to live in it. I told them, You are allowed to live in my house
and I can go to hell? Why? And he was a good friend of mine from Ijlil, from Arab al-Hayb. He can
come from there and live in my house and I am not allowed to step foot here? And I am a citizen
of Israel with an Israeli identity card...Once I asked him if I could enter the house. I showed him
where every room was and what was in the house. I showed him an identity card, that I am Abu
Sneineh, and there was a stone in the house on which the name of the family was engraved,
Abu-Sneineh.

Hajja Rukayya al-Sanaa Palestinian first generation woman

Under the British our lives were happy. We had a life of comfort, a good life. We reaped and
fertilized our crops and worked, we were satisfied. There were many British police stations in
Palestine , and there were many British soldiers. Not one of them brought their family. But when
the British left Palestine we knew they wanted to transfer her to the Jews.
4

When people started selling lands to the Jews, Hajj Amin al-Husseiniyya came to consult with my
father on how to prevent the sale of land. He brought a large sword and placed the Koran on top
of it and said, Say, I swear not to sell the land and not to betray our honor. And in that way he
had each make an oath, one by one. They asked people not to sell to the Jews and told them,
Tomorrow the Zionists will conquer you.But there were people who sold lands. I know of the first
one to sell his tribes lands, according to what I heard. The people of this tribe always would go
barefoot, and suddenly they started wearing shoes. Suddenly they had money.
Next, the Jews came, took our lands by force, and told us that there was nothing left for us here.
They closed down the mosque and barred anyone from entering. The Arabs did not have
weapons to defend and fight like the Jews did. On the day they conquered al-Seba, my father
went there. He wanted to drink water from a faucet near his house, but the Jew who lived there
would not let him do so. My father said to him, You foreigner, I installed this pipe with my own
hands, and I have documents that prove that these houses are ours. So the foreigner agreed to
let my father drink water. How unfortunate that they took over this country and would not even
let people drink the water from their own houses. Israel wanted lands without people.
The British are the ones who brought the Jews and sold them the land. The Jews would come and
inspect the land, and we thought that they were looking for water. We didnt know that they
wanted the land. They would come to a particular site, put up tents, and then leave. We would
see the markings left by the tents. Only in hindsight we understood that they were planning to
conquer the country.

Harry Truman, President of the United States (1945 - 1953)

I became President of the US when President Roosevelt died in office in 1945. In my first years
as President I have watched as Zionists have struggled to create a new nation for Jews in
Palestine. This part of the world is where Arabs have lived for thousands of years but the region
5

was colonized by the British after World War I. The British left after World War II and the tensions
between Palestinians and Jews increased. And the newly created United Nations was tasked with
coming up with a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
I supported the 1947 United Nations plan to create a new nation of Israel in Palestine. This plan
seemed to be fair and equitable to all parties. But the 1948 War has disrupted this plan and I
have expressed my opinion about what should be done in a letter to David Ben-Gurion, the
founder and Prime Minister of Israel. Apparently Israel said that it will not compensate
Palestinians for the land it captured in the 1948 War and that it will not allow Palestinian refugees
displaced by the war to have the right of return to their homes. I find this unacceptable and
therefore I informed Prime Minister Ben-Gurion that the US is seriously disturbed by the attitude
of Israel with respect to a territorial settlement in Palestine and to the question of Palestinian
refugees. Furthermore, I told the Prime Minister that In the interest of a just and equitable
solution of territorial questions the US Govt...has supported the position that Israel should be
expected to offer territorial compensation for any territorial acquisition. Its just not right to
take someones land and not pay them for it. And when it comes to the refugees, I urged the
Prime Minister to allow a substantial portion of them to return. However, I said that I
understand that a final resettlement of the refugee problem must await a definitive peace
settlement.
I made it clear that the US has great sympathy for Israel, which is based on broad American
interest and principles. Furthermore, The US Govt and people have given generous support to
the creation of Israel because they have been convinced of the justice of this aspiration. The US
Govt does not, however, regard the present attitude of the Israeli Govt as being consistent with
the principles upon which the US support has been based.

Hava Keller First Generation Israeli Female

My job was to sit on top of the watch tower in Ein HaMifratz and observe cars going out from
Acre. We wanted to know approximately how many Palestinians left. Most people did escape
wealthy people, with money and cars, escaped to Safed. I dont remember how many
Palestinians were killed. I know six were killed among the Israeli forces. I witnessed a shocking
view in one of the apartments. The door was open, we entered, and on the table we saw pita
bread and coffee, probably the tenants in the house were in the middle of breakfast, and on the
floor there were tiny shoes of a baby, I guess they didnt have enough time to put his shoes on. A
child needs shoes, and what if his feet are cold? I started crying and shouting: We must find the
child and bring him his shoe, who knows where the child is? Of course there was no chance. But
for me it was a shock. It was the first time I have seen and understood the situation. Till then
everything was a kind of a game. Even though I observed the cars, it was a game.
________________________________________________________________________________________________

Binyamin Eshet, Israeli Soldier

I was an Israeli soldier in the 1948 War. I remember taking towns day after day. When you take
a town you push forward and start shooting - they ran away and we went in. We took Jimzu, Kfar
Daniel and Lod. But in the town of Lod I witnessed something terrible. About 120 people in the
town were hiding in a mosque. They fled to the mosque because they thought that was the
safest place that there they wouldn't kill them. I didn't see the massacre in the mosque. But I
saw the men who pulled out the dead. They wanted me to participate and I didn't go. There
was an incident when they buried these people. They had to bury them. And then those who
buried them that's it, and then They know, the truth is it was a disgrace, what they did, in my
opinion they shouldn't have done it this way. I'm just a regular serviceman, what do I know?
Listen, the senior commanders probably didn't want to talk about all these things either. This
was a traumatic event for me I think because it was the first time we fought in daytime. At night,
whether you shot or didn't, whether you killed or didn't, you're not really sure. In Lod, you saw
what you were doing. For the first time. For me it's a tragedy. But I don't think the war left me
with a trauma. To a certain extent I'm sort of proud, that thanks to me and others like me the
state was established.

Uri Pinkerfeld, Palmach soldier

I was part of an elite group of soldiers in the Haganah, an underground Jewish army. I fought in
the 1948 war. I wasnt in battles where villages were taken, but many of my friends were. They
simply shot the Palestinians until they surrendered or fled. When a village was taken we would
loot it. There was a team, we called it the Dismantling Team, that dismantled roofs, and whatever
else was useful. After the Deir Yassin massacre, where 120 fighters killed roughly 600
Palestinians, it was easier to take villages. In most cases they simply fled due to fear.
_____________________________________________________________________

Ahmad, son of former residents of Lifta

My father and grandfather and the generations before them lived in Lifta. But my family was
kicked out in 1948 and I was born in Jerusalem. We had a home down in Lifta, and one in Upper
Lifta as well, my family build it in 1937. Now you will not see this, they changed the names of
the streets, they removed the Arab names from before 1948.
Before 1948, my father was a farmer; he had olive trees, lemons, things like that. He was
working on his land, my family was living very happily. It was a quiet and peaceful life. Christians,
Jews, and Muslims were living next to each other, there was no discrimination. They respected
you as a human being no matter where you came from, today there is discrimination and war.
After 1948, we were not allowed to visit Lifta for almost twenty years. When we were allowed
everybody went there to show their children where they were born. There were people living in
our house. My father asked them if he could show us the house, they didnt want to let him in.
We had all the papers, but they said they bought the house from the government. They were
from Iraq. Even today, I know how the house looks from the outside, but I have never been
inside.
I love Lifta, its my home. Everybody likes to go back to his home. And this here, this is our land.

Ilan Shtayer, Israeli Child

I am the coordinator of the Coalition to save Lifta. As a teenager I came with the scouts
(Zionists who came to scout which villages they wanted to take from Palestinians), we would go
early in the morning to swim in the pool. There was more water in the pool back then. It makes
people from a lot of different backgrounds feel comfortable, you could sit at the pool and hear
Arabic, Yiddish and Hebrew. Most people in Israel dont want to acknowledge the evil that was
done to the Palestinians in 1948. When the houses were abandoned, at that time they were also
saved because they needed the houses to resettle the Jewish immigrants. People also dont want
to recognise the evil that was done to the Jewish people that came from Arab countries, that ran
away to save their lives. Israel acts like all Jewish people are Zionists, but not all of us came
here as Zionist idealists. Many of use wanted to live peacefully with the Palestinaisns. In this
marvellous, beautiful place there are a lot of memories of terrible things that happened to both
people. Now people are trying to push plans to destroy Lifta because they dont want to have
this picture, of a destroyed village, at the entrance of Jerusalem. But I know that the stones of
these buildings will always be shouting at us. The memories stay even if Lifta is filled up with
8

flags of the Israeli nature reserve. We have to take action to remember the injustice that
happened here so it is not repeated.

Ruth Bondy, Holocaust Survivor

I was born in 1923 in Prague, Czechoslovakia to a large Jewish-Zionist family. In 1939 the Nazis
invaded Czechoslovakia and in 1941 they set up a ghetto for all the Jews. With nearly sixty
thousand Jews inhabiting an area originally designed for only seven thousand -- extremely close
quarters, disease, and lack of food were serious concerns. My mother Frantzi died of blood
poisoning in the ghetto in November 1942. I worked in the ghetto vegetable garden. After three
years, the Nazis began transporting Jews from the ghetto to the death camps. In 1943 I was
included in a transport to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Unlike in other parts of the camp,
where I was sent men, women and children lived together, no selektions took place, and the
prisoners heads were not shaven; however, prisoner numbers were still tattooed into their arms.
I was assigned the number 72430. Living conditions were brutal, and many of those not killed in
the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and
medical experiments. My father died in Dachau, another concentration camp, on February 5,
1945. Four of us came back from the Holocaust: Grandma Herman, my cousin Otta, my sister
Dita, and me. Twenty-five members of my family were wiped out.
In 1944, I was transferred with a group of women prisoners to Hamburg, Germany. A short time
later came the day of liberation. At the age of twenty-two I returned to Prague, alone. There, I
volunteered for a fighting unit made up of young Jews who wished to immigrate to Palestine and
help fight in the War of Independence. In August 1948 I took part in a military training camp and
arrived at the port of Haifa later that year. I feel so lucky to have survived the Holocaust and so
grateful that Jews finally have a homeland where we can be free of the anti-Semitism we
experienced in Europe.

Chaim Weizmann, the First President of Israel

I was born in Russia but in 1905 I moved to England at the age of thirty, and was elected to the
General Zionist Council. During World War I, I gave scientific assistance to the Allied forces,
which brought me in close contact with British leaders. This allowed me to play a key role in
securing a promise from the British to build a Jewish home in Palestine (known as the Balfour
Declaration). I knew that Britain would emerge from the war as a dominant power in the world. I
told British politicians to encourage Jewish settlement to Palestine claiming we could have in
twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there, perhaps more; they would develop the country,
bring back civilization to it and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal." I knew that the
Jews alone were capable of rebuilding Palestine and of giving it a place in the modern family of
nations. I became the president of the World Zionist Organization in 1920 and I continued to
push for Jews to emigrate to Palestine. After all, Palestine i s a country without a people, and, on
the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country. I continued to lobby for
Zionism in Europe and the United States and helped secure the adoption of the UN partition
plan, which granted 54% of Palestine to the Jews, who at the time comprised 30% of the
population. I also played a critical role in getting the United States to recognize Israel. I served as
the first President of Israel until my death in 1952.

Source: Jewish Virtual Library,

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/weizmann.html
9

And Edward Said, The Question of Palestine

Thomas, British Soldier in Palestine

I was a British soldier serving in Palestine after World War II. The British had a Mandate here
since the end of the first World War, which basically meant that Palestine was a colony in the
British Empire. But things had gotten bad there after World War II.
Palestine was a very dangerous place to serve. I fought in World War II. I know the ugliness and
the horrors of war first-hand and was so happy when it was finally over. I never thought I would
be stationed in a place where I was fearing for my life on a daily basis once again. Most of the
attacks come from Zionists, who say that we are treating them like the Nazis treated the Jews.
Its common to be spit on by Zionists! In 1946 I was there when a militant Zionist group
bombed the British offices in the King David Hotel and killed 91 people. Zionists wanted us to
leave because our strict immigration policies made it difficult for them to move to Palestine to
escape anti-Semitism in Europe. They said that we were liars because in 1917 a government
official by the name Balfour wrote a letter stating that the British government supported the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.
But what about the Arabs who already live there? They were also promised an independent state
if they sided with the British during World War I and instead they were colonized. So the Arabs
were also mad at the British government and carried out attacks against us. But these attacks
were not as frequent as the Zionist attacks because the leadership of the Arabs was destroyed
when the British put down a massive Arab revolt in 1936. The Arabs were mostly upset about
the Jewish immigration to Palestine. And the politicians in Britain didnt seem to know what to
doso basically they left and gave this whole mess of a situation to the United Nations to
handle.
There are people in the British government who support the United Nations plan to divide
Palestine and create an independent nation for Jews. I think a lot of these people are in favor of
Zionism just because they are anti-Semitic and dont want the Jews living in Great Britain or
Europe. And I think a lot of people believe that the Holocaust proved that Christians and Jews
will never be able to live in the same country. Still others have great sympathy for the Jews and
want them to have an independent nation because they suffered so much during the Holocaust.
Me Im not sure what I believe. I support the creation of Israel mostly so that I could leave
and dont have to be spit on or to live each day thinking it might be my last.
http://www.britishforcesinpalestine.org/attacks
______________________________________________________________________________

10

Name: _______________________________
______

Period:

Birth of Israel Meet & Greet

What happened in Israel/Palestine in 1948?

Who supports the creation of Israel?

What are their stories?

Who opposes the creation of Israel? What

are their stories?

11

Important Vocabulary
Find someone with an opinion about ZIONISM. Who is this person? What is their story?

Based on the people you met, what is a MANDATE? Why is it important to 1948?

Based on the people you met, what is RIGHT OF RETURN? Why is it important to
1948?
12

 Making Connections: How does what you learned and who you met in
the Meet & Greet relate to the Putting Israel on the Map worksheet and the
Facts of Israel activity?

13