Donald Macintyre
Sitting with Nasser Nawaja and his father Mohammed on the floor of his flimsy wood-framed shack at Susiya, in the rocky, windswept South Hebron hills, you sense how the history of the last 70 years is bound up in their journey here—short though it was by the standards of many Palestinian families. In 1948, Mohammed, then aged two, was carried on his father’s shoulders as they walked four miles north to flee advancing Israeli forces, like over 700,000 other refugees who lost their homes in what is now Israel. Susiya was just across what would become the 1949 armistice line, in the West Bank, which after the first great round of fighting stopped was controlled by Jordan.