Fadi Al-Asa-Bethlehem
The Jordanian flag is engraved on a stone wall placed at the entrance to the cemetery of the town of Al-Ubeidiya, east of Bethlehem, southeast of occupied Jerusalem, bearing the names of martyrs who fought under the banner of the Jordanian army in one of the battles against the Israeli occupation army in the fifties of the last century.
Every year the townspeople commemorate the martyrdom of nine of its sons who were among more than seventy soldiers who were martyred in the battle that lasted for nearly nine continuous hours in the town of Husan, west of Bethlehem, and they raised the Jordanian flag alongside the Palestinian flag, and they feel proud of the Arabs fighting with them in defense of their homeland.
The Jordanian army was the only Arab army that remained after the establishment of the State of Israel on 78% of historic Palestine in 1948, and thousands of Jordanians and Palestinians were under its banner.
| Stone wall erected on the graves of Jordanian army personnel buried in the village of Dar Salah, east of Bethlehem (Al-Jazeera Net) |
Arab soldiers and leaders,
Hajj Younis Jadoua, a prisoner who spent 12 years in the Israeli occupation prisons, and who lived through these events, says that the matchless match has been shown by Arab soldiers in Palestine, whether before or after the Palestinian Nakba.
Jadoua recalls the battle that was under the command of the Jordanian officer Abdullah Abd al-Hadi, and it is considered one of the battles carried out by the Israeli occupation forces against the Jordanian army in various areas in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the fifties of the last century in response to targeting Palestinian settlements in the Negev.
Jaddoo added to Al-Jazeera Net dozens of battles in which the Arab soldiers participated in Palestine, and after that hundreds of martyrs fell, and the Palestinians - each in his area - celebrate these graves as evidence of an important stage they lived alongside the Arabs who fought with them.
| The people of the town of Al-Ubeidiyeh celebrate the martyrdom of nine of its sons who fought in the ranks of the Jordanian army with the battle of Husan in the fifties of the last century (Al-Jazeera Net) |
In fulfillment of the martyrs, we
accompanied Jadou to another cemetery in the nearby village of Dar Salah. The cemetery contains the remains of Jordanian soldiers who fought in the June 1967 war. At that time, Jadou had been transferred with the imam of a mosque from Beit Sahour, their bodies were from Jerusalem and were buried in the area, where a memorial was erected. For the memory of these martyrs.
In Jenin, in the north of the occupied West Bank, the Palestinians established a village called the "Martyrs Village" near the cemetery of the Iraqi army martyrs who participated in a battle against the Israeli occupation army during the Nakba in 1948.
The Palestinian historian Yassin Al-Saadi says to Al-Jazeera Net that there are 58 graves of the martyrs of the Iraqi army, of whom 44 know their identities and their names are inscribed on their testimonies, and 14 graves without names, because of the lack of knowledge of the identity of their owners, the Palestinians fenced the place and erected a memorial to commemorate their memory, and they drew the Iraqi flag on their graves.
| Cemetery of the martyrs of the Iraqi army who participated in a battle against the occupation army in Jenin in the northern West Bank in 1948 (networking sites) |
To commemorate the
Palestinians, the Palestinians organize school trips, activities, and annual events in the memories of those battles in which the Arab martyrs fought, which provoked the occupation authorities and pushed them to sabotage the monuments and attack them from time to time, and the Palestinians respond with more celebration and engraving the flags of the countries to which the martyrs belong in the form of murals Huge stone.
On the other hand, Palestinian activists have communicated everywhere that there are Arab martyrs with the families of the martyrs to inform them of the whereabouts of the relatives of their relatives, and while some of them transferred the remains of his relative to his home country, others insisted on keeping the bodies in the places of their burial in the wealth of Palestine as a witness to their participation in fighting with the Palestinians.
There are no official figures for the numbers of Arab martyrs who fought in Palestine, aside from Bethlehem and Jenin, there is hardly a Palestinian region devoid of participation by Arab soldiers in fighting with unrivaled valor as their fighting in defense of their countries of origin, and thus spread among the Palestinians a culture of great respect and prestige for these martyrs and their countries and peoples.