Robert Fisk - I watched a Palestinian family lose their land 25 years ago. This week I returned to find them

By Dilip -

A quarter of a century ago, I watched Israel take the Palestinian Khatib family’s land. With a British film director, we filmed the bulldozers closing in on the garden wall of the house of Mohamed and Saida Khatib and their son Sulieman amid their little orchard of olives, grapes, figs, apricots and almonds, beside Saida’s old chicken coop.

“It’s mine – it was my father’s and my father’s father’s,” crippled old Mohamed told me. “What do you expect me to do?” His 35-year-old schoolteacher son was going to the Israeli court to prevent this act of theft, he said. The family had refused compensation. The land belonged to them.

You can still see on YouTube the family’s pathetic hopes – standing in the garden of their home – in the film we made in 1993, Beirut to Bosnia: The Road to Palestine. Channel 4 and Discovery showed this sordid tale of dispossession and hopelessness in a three-part series – the late Mike Dutfield directed – on why Muslims had come to hate the West. I think we all hoped, in a naive way, that with our film cameras and our interviews with Mohamed and Saida and the quarter-hour we devoted to their struggle to keep their land east of Jerusalem, we might somehow save them from the official theft of their property... read more:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/israel-palestine-bulldozed-land-family-robert-fisk-return-jerusalem-a8568316.html

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