Word: jalazon
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Dates: during 2007-2007
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...radio was wrong. In the camp, the Palestinians could see an army approaching from the eastern hills. "We thought they were King Hussein's soldiers," says Abu Fady. A man from Jalazon ran down to greet the troops, firing his rifle in celebration--and had a surprise. "The first soldier slapped him and took away his gun, and the man cried out, 'Aiiee! They're Jews, not Arabs,'" Abu Fady recounts. Israeli fighters appeared in the skies, strafing Jordanian posts along the Samarian hills, and the family decided to flee. They were not alone; the roads were clogged with thousands...
That little boy, now a man, still lives with his family in Jalazon. His life, with hopes raised and dashed, consumed with bloody and often pointless struggle, parallels the Palestinian experience and explains what lies at the heart of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. And it reveals why, 40 years on, the Six-Day War continues to shape the Middle East...
...more dangerous, framed in the apocalyptic terms of a holy war. The 1967 conflict, says Michael Oren of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, the author of a book on the war, "hastened the downfall of Arab secularism and opened the doors to the new idea of Islamic radicalism." In Jalazon, Omar al-Nakhla...
...meaning disaster--is only a consonant away from their word for disappointment, naksa. That is how, with crushing understatement, Arabs describe the losses of the Six-Day War. For Omar and most other Palestinians, the two words are often interchangeable, and it was no surprise that when I visited Jalazon recently, they were commemorating the nakba and the naksa rolled into one. Indeed, when I press Omar to talk about the war he was born into, his thoughts leap to 1948, as though one event were indistinguishable from the other. He lays down his butcher's knife and shows...
...youths like him had grown impatient waiting for their saviors and launched their own uprising against the Israelis. The spark for the intifadeh, as it became known, was a Gaza traffic accident in which an Israeli driver killed several Palestinian laborers. Revolt spread all over the Palestinian territories, including Jalazon. "We burned tires in the road and threw stones," recalls Omar's friend Ismaeen, who wears a muscle shirt and has the dark, heavy-lidded eyes of an Egyptian pop star. Ismaeen boasts that from age 15 onward, he spent five years inside Israeli prisons. "For throwing stones...