Op-Ed: A Quaker Eye Witness to Mideast Violence
Published: Thursday, December 13, 2012 3:13 PM
It is interesting to see what the British do when Arab terrorists in the Middle East attack them.
Dr. Rafael Medoff
The writer is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and coauthor, with Prof. Sonja Schoepf Wentling, of the new book 'Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the "Jewish Vote" and Bipartisan Support for Israel.'
That may sound like a description of the
recent violence between Israel and Gaza. But in fact, it comes from the
letters and diary of a Baltimore teacher who volunteered to spend a year
at a Quaker school in British-ruled Palestine in 1938-1939, only to
find herself in the middle of a war between Arab terrorists and the
British army.
When Nancy Parker McDowell's 'Notes
from Ramallah' was published ten years ago by a small Quaker press in
Indiana, it attracted little attention. But her eyewitness account of
life in a Mideast war zone deserves a long second look now, especially
following British Foreign Secretary William Hague's statement urging
Israel to restrain its actions against Hamas. It turns out that when it was the British who had to face Arab terrorists, they were far from restrained.
At
age 22, Nancy agreed to spend a year teaching at the Friends Girls
School, a Quaker institution in Ramallah, one of the largest Arab cities
in the territory today known as the 'West Bank'. But as the Goucher College
alumnus discovered soon after her arrival in September 1938, Ramallah
was "a rebel town." Palestinian Arab terrorists were waging war against
the British authorities and Palestine's Jewish community. Clashes
between the British and the Arab forces turned the city into a veritable
battlefield.
Soon after her arrival, Nancy became
aware of the tense situation in the country, but it took a little while
before it really hit home. "To have rebels charging across your yard is
exciting for a while," she wrote, "but the sound of machine guns close
by becomes annoying."
And much worse than annoying.
In an early diary entry, Nancy described the shock of walking to her
classroom one morning and encountering a group of Arabs, with guns,
crouching inside the school gate and taking aim at British soldiers on a
hill nearby. She and her friend Gertrude McCoy, a fellow-teacher from
Ohio, lay on a floor in fear until the shooting subsided. But then the
bombing began--British planes strafed the city, killing terrorists as
well as "some innocent people who were only running home from their
vineyards...About 80 Arabs were killed."
Sometimes there would be a lull in the local fighting for days or even weeks, but soon the calm would be shattered again.
Nancy and Gertrude hurried the girls into a teacher's room and had them sit on the floor so they would be less exposed to gunfire. "I sang the 'Arkansas Traveler' with my teeth chattering, while the kids had to strain their ears to hear me above the guns." (One version of that 19th-century folk song, with its lyrics about "bringing home a baby bumble bee," is a popular children's song to this day.)
A common refrain in Nancy's diary
and letters is the strong detrmination of the British to root out the
terrorists, despite possible civilian casualties or international
criticism. "The British usually bomb towns where a British is killed,"
she noted, referring to the policy of bombing an entire area if a
government official or soldier was attacked in the vicinity.
Mass
detentions and forced labor were also used. "The British frequently
detain Arab citizens, keeping them in a concentration camp for several
days, hoping they may find the leader...In the daytime we could see a
long line of them working for the British, tearing down the stone walls
their ancestors had built between fields."
Collective
punishment was not uncommon. "In the village of Nablus there was a bank
robbery last week," Nancy recalled in one letter. "So the British
herded all the inhabitants out to a field, where they had to stand in
the hot sun all day while soldiers searched their houses. They rip up furniture, dumped out the food supplies and take all the money
and valuable things they can find. One of the our students from Nablus
was unable to come back to school, because her father's jewelrly shop
was wiped out."
The British also imposed a strict
nighttime curfew throughout the city. "Anyone breaking the evening
curfew is shot without question...They are doing too much damage, making
holes in people's houses, shooting cats and donkeys or anything they
see moving at night." Nancy loved to stargaze, but she knew --as she
wrote to her parents-- "that if I walked out on the balcony far enough
to cast a shadow in the moonlight, all Ramallah might soon be torn awake
by the sound of the hidden machine guns shooting at a curfew breaker."
Eventually,
the year of bombs, battles, and "sandbags in our windows to keep out
stray bullets" came to an end, and Nancy returned to the calm of life in
small town America. She married and raised a family in Indiana, where
she remained for the rest of her life, passing away earlier this year at
the age of 96.
Although she never returned to
Israel, Nancy left behind a document that today's Israelis may find
instructive. They are receiving a lot of unsolicited advice these days
from those, like British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who are
pressing Israel not to go all out on Hamas, while Khalid Mashaal calls
for the destruction of Israel.
Reprinted with permission from the Baltimore Sun
Labels: Britain, Communication, Conflict, Culture, Defence, Gaza, Israel
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, December 13, 2012
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