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Nakba survivor Yusif Farsakh.

Yusif Farsakh claims his Nakba story "is not terribly sad." Other Palestinians undoubtedly endured more. Nevertheless, his account details significant individual loss and upheaval amidst the wider dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 when more than 700,000 were driven from their homes by Zionist militias and most of Palestine was seized by the new state of Israel.

Born on July 25, 1926 in Birzeit, a small town nine miles north of Jerusalem, Yusif Farsakh started working for the Arab Bank, just outside Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem, shortly after he graduated from Al-Rashidiyya High School. Life changed dramatically in the summer of 1948 when his bank was taken over by the Israelis. "I was laid off from my job. For more than a year I hardly did anything but watch as Zionist forces seized Palestinian villages and towns. We witnessed the aftermath of the occupation of the Palestinian cities of Lydda and Ramla by the Israeli forces under the command of Yitzhak Rabin, who ordered the evacuation of the cities after gathering and killing many young men. The men were ordered to hand over their money and the women were stripped of their jewelry and all were told to 'go to the hills and see Abdullah,' meaning to leave Palestine altogether and flee to Jordan. Ramla was built by the Arabs in the seventh century and Ben Gurion Airport is built on Lydda's land."

The Mamilla Cemetery, a Muslim site where a companion of the Prophet Muhammad is buried, was close to the Arab Bank where Farsakh worked and across the street from the United States Consulate. "The Israeli government has desecrated the site. A public park with restrooms was built on top of the cemetery." In the 1990s, the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center received strong backing from then-mayor Ehud Olmert to construct the "Center for Human Dignity, Museum of Tolerance," at the cemetery location. Despite strong opposition from the local Muslim community, the $150 million museum is expected to be completed in 2009. "Tolerance and human dignity," Farsakh says, "are mocked by those who seized that land 60 years ago and now today are trampling on a Muslim cemetery."

"I used to live in a rented room in the Arab village of Lifta, which is adjacent to the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Rumeima, but when the area was occupied by Zionist forces I had to get out. The center of my life - although just a renter - was taken from me and I had to return to Birzeit." By comparison, he had friends and family members "who lost everything." He recalls that people from the Palestinian city of Jaffa fled to what became the Jalazon refugee camp near his Birzeit home in the West Bank. "One can imagine how difficult it was in 1948 when people thought they were leaving their homes for a short time."

He vividly recalls the misery endured by those who had no alternative but to flee their homes and property for the relative safety of the West Bank. "People lived under olive trees and hung burlap sacks from the branches to have privacy. For four or five months people were living haphazardly with no protection outside. The people of Birzeit, and the other villages, did everything they could do to help them. It was very difficult when the rains came. Eventually, help came from the United Nations."

After more than a year back in Birzeit, Farsakh gathered himself and departed for Kuwait where he worked for three years before leaving in 1953 for the United States to pursue his education. He went first to the American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts where he earned a BA and then received an MA in Mathematics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He met his wife at this time. After teaching Mathematics at the American University of Beirut, the University of Connecticut and the American University in Washington, DC, the Farsakhs now live in Northern Virginia. They have two grown children. Farsakh expresses frustration that his daughter is prevented by Israeli authorities from traveling to the West Bank on her American passport.

The United States government, he notes, continues to back Israel in its expansion across the West Bank. While he holds little hope for negotiations in the short term, Farsakh does believe that "the two-state idea is no longer possible and that a bi-national state with equal rights for all is the only just solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict."

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The "Nakba" ("catastrophe" in Arabic) refers to the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the exile of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland. It is estimated that more than 50 percent were driven out under direct military assault by Israeli troops. Others fled in panic as news spread of massacres in Palestinian villages like Deir Yassin and Tantura. Nearly half the Palestinian refugees had fled by May 14, 1948, when Israel declared its independence and the Arab states entered the fray.

Israel depopulated more than 450 Palestinian towns and villages, destroying most while resettling the remainder with new Jewish immigrants without regard to Palestinian rights and desires to return to their homes. Israel still refuses to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and to pay them compensation, as required by international law.

Today, there are more than 4 million registered Palestinian refugees worldwide. The Nakba is a root cause of the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel's denial of its expulsion of the Palestinians and seizure of their homes and properties for Jewish use continues to inflict pain and to generate resistance among Palestinians today.

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