nada’s Reviews > Returning to Haifa > Status Update

November 5*

Manshiyya: Arab residential quarter in Jaffa, the center of strong and well-organized resistance. The Irgun also had forces in the Manshiyya, and in the early months of 1948 armed conflicts took place between the two sides in the district. The British remained in Jaffa for about a week after their withdrawal from Haifa. Wanting to avoid a repetition of the mass panic and exodus that had just taken place there, they sent reconnaissance planes over the Manshiyya to survey the Irgun positions and later bombed them. In the final days of April and the first of May 1948, fierce fighting took place among the three factions, with the result that the quarter was almost completely destroyed. What remained was eventually razed by the Israelis for urban development.

曼希亞（Manshiyya）：雅法的阿拉伯人住宅區，也是抵抗力量強大、組織嚴密的中心。伊爾貢亦在曼希亞部署兵力，1948 年初的幾個月間，雙方曾在區內爆發武裝衝突。

英軍撤出海法後，仍在雅法駐留了約一週。為避免海法剛發生的大規模恐慌與逃亡潮重演，英軍派出偵察機飛越曼希亞，偵察伊爾貢的陣地，隨後加以轟炸。1948 年 4 月底至 5 月初，三方爆發激烈戰鬥，導致這個街區幾乎全毀。殘存的建築最終也被以色列方面以都市開發之名夷平。

The man said to Faris:
“Come in, sit down. We need to talk a little. We’ve been waiting for you* a long time, but we hoped to see you under different circumstances.” 這段話，譯者注：這是作者第一次使用複數「你」

I was just asking. I’m looking for the true Palestine, the Palestine that’s more than memories, more than peacock feathers, more than a son, more than scars written by bullets on the stairs. I was just saying to myself: What’s Palestine with respect to Khalid? He doesn’t know the vase or the picture or the stairs or Halisa or Khaldun. And yet for him, Palestine is something worthy of a man bearing arms for, dying for. For us, for you and me, it’s only a search for something buried beneath the dust of memories. And look what we found beneath that dust. Yet more dust. We were mistaken when we thought the homeland was only the past. For Khalid, the homeland is the future. That’s how we differed and that’s why Khalid wants to carry arms. Tens of thousands like Khalid won’t be stopped by the tears of men searching in the depths of their defeat for scraps of armor and broken flowers. Men like Khalid are looking toward the future, so they can put right our mistakes and the mistakes of the whole world. Dov is our shame, but Khalid is our enduring honor. Didn’t I tell you from the beginning that we shouldn’t come—because that was something requiring a war? Let’s go!