Ameen Muhammad Ali, known to everyone in Nazareth as Abu Arab, keeps a shop the width of an alcove in the old city market, hung with sheepskins, copper cauldrons and brass coffee pots, with a bowl of Palestine lira coins that are no longer money. He was thirteen when Saffuriyya, two kilometres away, was bombed from the air during Ramadan in July 1948. His family — including his brothers, one of them the poet Taha Muhammad Ali, and a twelve-year-old sister — hid in the undergrowth and were driven north toward Lebanon the next morning. His sister died of heat exhaustion soon after they reached a refugee camp there. His father decided they had to come back; when they did, the village was gone, the land fenced off as a closed military zone.

Abu Arab is an Israeli citizen who lives in a Nazareth neighbourhood of Saffuriyya refugees, within sight of the pine forest and the Jewish community, Tzipori, built over his village. He describes his own legal status in the Israeli term for it, a “present absentee.” He helped found ADRID, the association of Palestinians internally displaced inside Israel, which has organised an annual march of return for three decades, and he has spent years stocking a museum of the vanished village life with objects from his shop. “The museum is the proof that the Palestinians did exist,” he told Al Jazeera, “and we have a culture and heritage that cannot be erased.”

Sources

• Nakba survivors share their stories of loss and hope — Al Jazeera, 19 May 2016