We left before the killing reached us. People from other villages were fleeing and told stories of what they were running from, so people from the farther villages packed up and fled.
A Gaza elder born before the state of Israel, he fled his village in the Beer al-Sabe area at the age of seven and still keeps the 1938 deed proving his family's land, to pass to his grandson.
Daiffallah Abu Al-Gussain was born around 1940 in al-Shalalah, a village in the Beer al-Sabe (Beersheba) area of the Naqab, where his father and grandfather were also born and farmed more than 500 acres. In 1948, when he was seven, the family fled ahead of the advancing Zionist militias to Gaza, warned by survivors from neighboring villages; their village was destroyed shortly after. He has lived in Gaza ever since.
Interviewed by Mondoweiss for the 74th anniversary of the Nakba, Abu Al-Gussain sat with his fifteen-year-old grandson Abdullah and the family’s old ownership documents. “This is a deed that belonged to my grandfather, and dates back to the year of 1938,” he told him. “I kept these documents to show you the truth so you carry it to your sons and grandsons to keep hold of our rights until you return.” David Ben-Gurion famously said the old would die and the young would forget; Abu Al-Gussain’s answer is that “the young will get Palestine back.”
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