Pal Poet remembers the Babylonian Nakba

This is from a website called PNN, the Palestinian News Network. The article, entitled "Al Nakba: some of us left without our shoes," is pretty poor in quality, even as Israel-bashing, but the sudden veer into the topic of Babylon is interesting:

In the southern West Bank, refugee Abu Yasser from Deheisha Refugee Camp talks about his experience being driven from Telasafi, now within Israeli boundaries, in 1948. He is a poet and grinds coffee with an old wooden urn, the sound like a song from his past [...]

“I worked in the farm there. There were about 2,000 people living there on 30 dunams of land. We really lived like kings. The sun was beautiful, everything was. The spring time was stunning. But then after World War I came the Balfour Declaration from the British to make here to create nationalism for the Jews in Palestine. We had relationships with the few Jews and the Christians who lived here, we had no problems. No one was against his colleague or anything like that. All of us were living on our land here. All of the people were alright together, I mean we went to Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem to pray and the Christians were in Jerusalem to pray and the Christians were in Bethlehem. And the Jews were around too, in Rachel’s Tomb. I remember the Jews being there. But 2,000 years ago there was Babylon in Iraq. But then came the Jews who took 70,000 dunams from Babylon, and wrecked a lot of lives there. But they drank, ate and worked. But this is no huge problem; I mean what was anyone to do. [...]

Qassam rockets had not been invented yet, I guess.

Tags: Israel, Palestinains, Babylonia