6/5/2023 0 Comments Us memory pictures on state![]() ![]() Today, the United Nations estimates there are nearly 6 million Palestinian refugees, about a quarter of whom continue to live in 58 UN-recognised camps scattered across the region from Gaza to Jenin, East Jerusalem to Jordan, southern Lebanon to Syria. “It’s indelible in the consciousness of Palestinians and much of the Arab world.” A photo of Giries’s childhood home in Ayn Karim, which was depopulated by Israeli forces in 1948 Ībandoned remnants of former Palestinian communities are scattered across the landscape of modern Israel, quiet reminders of the more than 400 cities and villages that were depopulated to make way for the creation of a Jewish state on land where, in 1948, a large majority of the population was Palestinian.Īs villages were levelled by Israeli forces to prevent Palestinians from returning home, refugee camps sprung up to accommodate their displaced inhabitants. ![]() “1948 is a crucible where many of the elements of Palestinian identity as we understand it today are formed,” Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of several books on Palestine, told Al Jazeera in a recent phone call. Indeed, she is quick to add that every Palestinian family has a story like hers, memories of displacement and exile that continue to resonate. The world of Leila’s childhood, of Ayn Karim as a vibrant Palestinian community where people greeted her in the street and children played among rows of almond trees, was shattered alongside Palestinian society in the violence of 1948.įor Palestinians, that year represents the beginning of decades of ongoing violence and dispossession, referred to simply as Al-Nakba – the catastrophe. ![]() It felt like the end of the world.” The key to Leila Giries’s house in Ayn Karim is now framed in her Los Angeles home “The sky was lit up with the fire of the guns. We had only the clothes on our back,” Giries, who now lives in a suburb of Los Angeles in the US state of California, recalled in a recent phone call with Al Jazeera. More than seven decades later, her memories remain vivid: families rushing to pack their most vital belongings, prayers as a truck full of refugees drove along a cliffside road, the searing pain of her mother using a flaming piece of cloth to cauterise an open wound when she stepped on a nail. Nonetheless, all 50 states are included here - plus the District of Columbia.Los Angeles, United States – Leila Giries was eight years old when she fled with her family from Ayn Karim, a Palestinian village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, during the creation of the Israeli state and violent expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. In 1850, for example, right around the boom of photography in the country, we had only 31 states and four territories. Of course, the United States didn't always include 50 of them. The photos are often portraits of important people and, for the more western states, often landscapes and construction scenes. ![]() For this list, we relied largely on the photo archives of the Library of Congress and a few other sources. The records don't always exist, the photos seldom survive, pictures appear in unorganized collections, and not all of them are easily accessible. Looking at the earliest photos across the United States offers a sense of where the country was at the time, what the landscape looked like, and what its people looked like.īut it's not always easy to tell what the oldest photo is from each state. The technology of photography was invented in fits and starts in the early 1800s. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. ![]()
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