Ziyad Mahajneh, al-Lajjun

Ziyad Mahajneh was expelled from al-Lajjun together with his family as a young boy. His testimony was collected in preparation for Zochrot's tour and booklet of al-Lajjun on October 5, 2004.

"I imagine that my plot there is a few tens of dunams, or a few hundreds maybe. But take everything. Give me just a room."

What I remember from al-Lajjun is that we were among people who had a lot of land. My family was very well-to-do. They had the largest plot of the Mahajneh family, seventy-percent of the land. When al-Lajjun was being built, a certain Masraj bought our family’s house. A house made of stone. Until today we go to look for the fields; there are barely any remaining. It was an enormous house.

During that period we established ourselves and we started working the lands. We had plenty of crops and agriculture, so much that the Atabneh family, who are today a very well-to-do family in Jenin, worked for us. I remember one of them, today he has a shoe store in Jenin. He would come, work for us as a salaried worker in wheat. He would put me on a kind of board and circle around with me on it, over a stone, before there was the combine. We would load vegetables and go to Haifa to sell them. I remember that we had a watermelon field, it spread out from where Kibbutz Meggido is today up to the water well, Ayn al-Hajja. And there was a two-story structure there. I remember I would go up to the second floor, and you could see everything full of watermelons.

The first flight was in 1945-46. It was a flight after which we returned. One woman who died a few years ago at age 78 or 80, every time she bumped into me on the street, she would say to me, “Thanks to me you are alive, because your parents forgot you and I heard you crying.” She was our neighbor.

I don’t remember that particular flight, I was too little. But there are things I will never forget. During the second flight Sami and I rode a mule, not a horse, in back of Uncle Zohedi. We liked him. And then we came to the houses in Umm al-Fahm. The whole time that we had lived in al-Lajjun we neglected those houses. We didn’t think about them, they gave them to poor people to live in. The future was there in al-Lajjun. We stayed without any land here in Umm al-Fahm. Our house was also given to some family, and when we returned they said, “Gentlemen, what can we do? Where will we go now? Let us sleep here.” The adults said, “Ok, for two or three days.” The house was made of stone and silt. We had to sleep on the roof. Three families slept there, my uncle, my father, and us, and another uncle. I remember that they took hubeizeh [a wild green vegetable] with a single onion, and prepared it in some pan, and we had a meal. I will never forget the taste of it.

We slept three days on the roof, until they were kind enough to vacate the place for us, and then we stayed here. Even the lands – this land I am on now, I bought it. The person who built on it was my uncle. He told me that my grandfather gave this plot as a gift to one of the people here in Umm al-Fahm, and I bought it back from him. When we started digging the foundations here, the builder told him, “Do you know who this plot belongs to? It belongs to your grandfather, who gave it as a wedding gift to someone.” They didn’t think about those things then.

In al-Lajjun everyone was called by his name, but in Umm al-Fahm, when the government was issuing identity cards, they asked, “Do you live in this neighborhood? Then you are Mahmid.” Many families who came to live here found it easier to write Mahajneh, Jabbarin, Mahmid, Agbariya. And today many families are returning to their original names – because you send a letter from Tel Aviv to Mahmoud Mahajneh in Umm al-Fahm and there 5,000 like those.

There were cases where people died in 1948, in my family there are those who fell. A cousin on my mother’s side, who was at some school, they shot him in the eye, and he fell.

The tragedy was the flight itself. I, personally, am also a victim of the expulsion. I finished grade school here in Umm al-Fahm in 1957 or ‘58. At that time they had a kind of exam. Five students passed, and I was the first to pass. And I wanted to study so badly. But my father had no money. There was martial law then, so I couldn’t travel to work in Haifa and not anywhere else. We returned to Umm al-Fahm, and in time the money ran out. How much money had my father saved up in al-Lajjun? From 1948 to 1953 he did nothing, so at the end we didn’t have even a shekel at home. So what did I do? At that time people would go to buy materials in Haifa, to buy and sell. I ordered a few fish from them, and I wandered around here selling it. I earned 3 or 4 liras.

In 1959 I took a chance. Without permission from the military government I fled from here to Tel Aviv to work [at a vegetable store], because our economic situation was so difficult. I couldn’t attend high school. You had to go either to Nazareth, or to Hadera, or Tel Aviv. At that time there were three students who had money, who were residents of Umm al-Fahm from beforehand. They didn’t flee, they didn’t have a Nakba: Fatkhi Abed al-Juwad, Mahmoud Kakhoush, Abed al-Latif Asli. They went to study at Mikve Israel, with permission.

Then I thought, ‘Good, that’s an idea. I will start this way: After I finish working at the vegetable store [at 4 pm], I’ll take my bike to Holon, where I will study the material they brought back, and that way I will study at high school for free.’ It almost worked. For a month I sped every day to Holon. I lived in Jaffa, worked in north Tel Aviv, I wanted to study so badly. And my father tried to sell a plot of land. Teachers came who taught me and said: “Listen, don’t you have anything to sell? It would be too bad if he couldn’t study.” I have nightmares about it until today. That’s one of the things we paid for.

I love to go to al-Lajjun, almost every week. I have a 4 X 4. Once we went there to the Tel al-Asmar hill, and I was shocked. I saw all of a sudden that they were cutting through the hill. Three years and nobody knew about it. You drive through the kibbutz, and suddenly you see a hill cut in half. They take the stone, grind it, and make it into the last layer before they put down the asphalt. A ton costs seventy shekels. Everyday they take thousands of tons from there. It’s Solel Boneh, really a huge project. There was a guard there from the village of Manda. He said to me, “You can’t go in.” I said, “I’ll show you the land registry certificate, it’s written in my name.” We thought of stopping it. But you bring an interim order, and then you pay to compensate them for all their losses. I tell this story in the street in Tel Aviv, even to attorneys, those who have respectable offices. One of them, he says to me, “Ziyad, stop it, you can’t do that. You are living in a state of laws. What do you mean ‘yours?’” You understand? And I tell him that I’m not allowed to set foot there.

Once I drove to Madrech Oz, we had a barbecue there. The fig trees are ours. So someone from the moshav came, “Get out!” You know, a Yemenite guy, really angry. I said, “Listen a minute…” He said, “What are you doing here, why are you sitting here?” I told him, “My mother, she worked here in agriculture, here I fell from between her legs.” I wanted to prove that I was born there, that it was mine. And my father, may he rest in peace, knew them. He also went to pick the olives, the figs… so my father starts to yell at me in front of him, to satisfy him. And in the meantime there’s lots of cars driving around, but for us it is forbidden to be there… because it’s subconscious, so that the connection will not be renewed.

We went there some time ago with a map, and we started to mark every house. This belongs to Abu-Ali, this to Amin… you could really see it clearly, the school and everything, and we started to mark on the paper. After we had written things down for a day or two we went there. They had turned everything over, destroyed it, planted. We caused ourselves harm... as if you’re not supposed to have contact with this village. I imagine that my plot there is a few tens of dunams, or a few hundreds maybe, because my father had six sons. But take everything. Give me just a room.