A Palestinian family piles into a truck, during the Nakba - or catastrophe - in 1948. (UNRWA)

Sixty years ago in Battir, my small hillside village near Jerusalem, I witnessed the chaotic collapse of the British administration in Palestine and the beginning of Al Nakba.

The previous months had been decisive for the fate of Palestine, although we did not yet know it. The Jews, fed up with British procrastination in fulfilling Balfour's promise of letting them transform our homeland into their "national home" launched a bloody campaign of terror both against the British and the Arabs.

The Jewish militias targeted the British to speed up their departure from Palestine, and hit the Arabs to quell the rising resistance to Zionist colonisation.

Violence broke out early in 1947, after the British announced that they would leave Palestine by May 15, 1948. When the United Nations passed its partition resolution on November 29, 1947, the violence began to turn into full-scale war.

Battir's 1,200 inhabitants were wracked by uncertainty. There were hopes that things would turn out alright, but fear dominated as the atmosphere became bleaker by the day. I vividly remember the stories of horror which haunted the people of Battir, such as the attack on the railway station in Jerusalem on October 21, 1946. The train was their lifeline to the city where they marketed their produce and bought their supplies, and that station was their daily stop in and out of the city. People also walked to Jerusalem and often travelled by car on the unpaved road that ran parallel to the railway line, though that was much harder.

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A few months earlier a Jewish bomb attack on Jerusalem's King David Hotel, which served as the British headquarters, killed 91 people and injured dozens. Later, after the partition vote, when the Zionist forces began their armed campaign to seize Palestine, fighting erupted between Arabs and Jews in the land they both claimed.

The gunfire and chaos edged ever closer to Battir, a village that traces its roots to the second century and which now found its peace and tranquility under threat. Young men with light and old rifles roamed the edges of the village at night to keep watch, expecting a Jewish attack any moment. Every day there was news of an attack on a neighbouring village and of victims. We were in constant fear.

Apart from the home just up the hill, the centre of my life was the elementary school for boys that I attended and that lay at bottom of the valley that Battir overlooks. Just next to the school was the railway station which was the first stop on the railway line from Jerusalem to Jaffa. The station and the school, with its small football field, formed a sort of campus at the edge of the village, surrounded by tall pine and citrus trees providing ample greenery and shade on hot summer days. For us, children, it was the perfect place to play and loiter in and out of school hours.

I remember these as the lively, busy places they once were with schoolchildren, the station staff and at one point a British military garrison. Families would take the train down from Jerusalem to enjoy weekly picnics in the romantic rural atmosphere of our village and they would be joined by local people doing the same. At school, we experimented with practical agriculture, which was part of the curriculum; this included keeping beehives for honey and breeding chickens.

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