“It was the night of May 30, 1948, and I was twelve years
old. . . . Apart from our two horses, which we were able to take with us, we
left everything else behind. The village was completely deserted by the time
the Israelis captured it. We reached Umm- el-Fahem, but we had no food, so we
had to sneak back into the village to steal from our own stocks. The Jews,
thinking we might return to retrieve our things, had placed booby traps
underneath all the crates, so when we lifted them they would explode. One of
our neighbors, Hassan Sukkar, went back for some of his possessions and was
killed in his own home. . . . The following year the Kibbutz Megiddo was built
on our land. . . . Our mosque became the carpentry shop and the property was fenced
off. . . . It is my wish to die on that land where we once had 1,000 dunams
[247 acres]. Al-Lajjun was like a paradise for us. The land was rich and
fertile, and it was easy to cultivate. I used to take the horses into the
fields to graze. In the summer, after haymaking, all the nearby villages would
gather for a wrestling competition. And during Eid, the holiday after Ramadan,
our neighbors would go to one another’s houses to share in the celebrations. We
lived as one big family. Years later I went back to the village and took home
some of the earth from my land. . . . When I sleep, I dream that I am with my
brother Said who taught me how to plow. I can remember my father stopping us in
the middle of our work, telling us to make the plowing arc even wider, to cover
more land."

To hear Fazal Sheikh read the full text of Mahmud
Muhammad Mahmud’s recollections of home and his memory of being forced to
abandon his village as a child visit https://mfah.org/visit/audio-for-homelands-and-histories-photographs-by-fazal-sheikh/">mfah.org/fsaudio.