Jerusalem’s forgotten African community has been a pillar of Palestinian resistance. Mahmoud Jiddah, born nine days before the Nakbah, tells his story
Born nine days before the birth of Israel, Mahmoud Jiddah has lived his whole life in Jerusalem. His family was forced to flee to Jordan after the Nakba – ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic – when Israel triumphantly declared itself a state. There he stayed for two years until his family was able to return to Jerusalem in 1950, after Jordan formalised its annexation of the West Bank.
They took up menial jobs cleaning and guarding the holy precincts. “They were the best people to defend the holy sites,” he remembers. Of the different ethnic sub-communities in East Jerusalem, Jiddah says the African group is the most integrated. But everything changed in 1967. It was after the Six-Day War that the Israeli occupation of Palestine began, and life as he knew it would never be the same again.
After serving 17 of those years, he was released early through the Jibril Exchange prisoner swap in 1985. A couple of years later, he was arrested again after joining in the First Intifada, spending another year in prison for what Israel called “renewed activity”. “Israel’s expansion by three-fold has become an irreversible physical, and thus political, reality,” explains author and journalist Ramzy Baroud, who is currently a non-resident scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “All of this created a new reality and allowed Israel to keep much of its gains to this day, despite the fact that it violates international law.”
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