Write down this
I am an Arab
And I work with comrades in a stone quarry
And my children are eight in number.
For them I hack out
a loaf of bread
clothing
a school exercise-book
from the rocks
rather than begging for alms
at your door
rather than making myself small
at your doorsteps.
Does this bother you?
Mahmoud Darwish
My friend Khalil is a Palestinian arab from Al-Jammasin in Jaffa district. His grandfather grew oranges there before it was taken from him and his town destroyed by the terrorists of 1948. Khalil was 6-years old. He was forced to take shelter under olive trees and in caves with his family pursued by the Israeli militia Hagannah.
A break-a-away militia from the Hagannah called the Irgun led by Menachem Begin blew up the King David Hotel killing half the British military command and a lot of civil servants. So the British left after having had a mandate over Palestine from 1917 till 1947. Prior to the British Mandate was Ottoman rule. However the Ottomans did not occupy the country with military force as did the British after WW I and now the Israelis after WW II.
After the war, In 1948, driven by European guilt about the Holocaust, the United Nations set up the state of Israel. Zionists created the myth of national liberation, a land for a people, in a land without people. In 1977, Israelis made former terrorist, Menachem Begin, their Prime Minister after his party, the Likud, won most seats in the Knesset (parliament). Ironically the slogan of the Likud party was “From the river to the sea …” The Likud manifesto read: “Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” The slogan was repeated by Menachem Begin during the 1977 election.
In the 19th century Khalil Hamdan’s ancestors from the Jammasin (Masra’at Hasana) tribe had paid taxes to the Ottoman empire on goats, beehives and water buffaloes.
Now they were driven off their land (the Nakba) by Zionists in the greatest genocide of the 20th century only to be repeated in the 21st century by the new leader of the Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu whose cabinet is openly fascist.
In the 1930s Jaffa had a communist newspaper called the ‘Arab Labour Weekly‘ and its citizens read Egyptian papers like ‘Rose Al Youssef’. They went to the cinema ‘Al Cinema Wa Al Nas’. There were magazines like Sabah El Keir’ and a satirical one called ‘Al Baaqouqa’ which means the Mess.
The people in Jaffa used to go to the libraries to read short novels and magazines.
This was a very sophisticated society and many families were wealthy.
Khalil’s family was no different, they wanted their son to become and doctor but after Al Nakba he became a boilermaker instead, making water tanks. Khalil went to Germany to work and sent money home to his family now strangers in their own land. He now lives in Australia and makes honey from his beehives which he sells at a local market. Khalil’s family ended up in Nablus in the old city in a refugee camp. Khalil came to Australia and worked in the Ford motor company in Brisbane race the family and sent money back to his family in Nablus.
This is rarely seen archival footage that accompanies memories and accounts of forgotten Palestinian cities – highlighting the catastrophic effect the creation of Israel in 1948 had on them.
Banner photo: Al Quds, capital of Palestine.
The Queensland Supreme Court ruled in favour of ‘Khalil’s Story’ published by Trina Massey, councillor for the Gabba ward … Two years after a community newsletter on the history of the West Asia sparked controversy in Brisbane, the Supreme Court has thrown out a costly penalty imposed on the Greens councillor who distributed it.
The judgment was delivered by Justice Tom Sullivan of the Queensland Supreme Court. The Court quashed the Ethics Committee’s findings and orders, including the requirement that Massey repay $10,000 and apologise. The Court also ordered Brisbane City Council to pay her legal costs
Gabba ward representative Trina Massey mailed a spring pamphlet to residents at the height of the Gaza conflict with a two-page spread titled “Khalil’s Story”.
A council ethics committee had ordered Massey to repay $10,000 and issue an apology. But the Supreme Court has now overruled that ruling.
Greens councillor Trina Massey published a newsletter in August 2024 with a two-page spread titled “Khalil’s Story”.
“Today’s outcome is a vindication of my decision to challenge the investigation and the findings of the ethics committee,” Massey said in a statement.
“All of this just for speaking openly about the genocide against Palestinians and the human rights of Palestinians living in my ward.”
In the August 2024 article – which was written by academic Dr Jamal Nabulsi – the history of the modern state of Israel was framed as one of violent European colonialism on “stolen Indigenous land”.
Was the backlash from constituents a beat up? Who was it that said the language was ‘inflammatory and unfair’.
The Lord Mayor claimed that Jewish people in the Gabba ward criticised a timeline in the story that began with Ottoman rule in the Middle Ages and did not include the Holocaust or October 7 attacks.
To understand the Nakba (Catastrophe) we must go back to the period of the British Mandate for Palestine and the consequences of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, through which the British government supported the establishment in Palestine of a “national home for the Jewish people.” but none for 90% of the then population, the Palestinians.
The declaration emerged in the aftermath of European antisemitism and, later, the Holocaust, which created an enormous refugee crisis for European Jews.
But the tragedy was that the consequences of European persecution were imposed upon the Palestinian people, who had not been responsible for that persecution and who were already living in Palestine.
Khalil’s story does not begin in 1948, when he and his family were forcibly driven from Al-Jammasin. Previously they lived in harmony in their village for generations, along with Christians, Muslims, Bedouin, and Jew. During their flight, many people died—a tragedy that became part of the Palestinians enduring history of dispossession.
Their journey eventually took them to Samaria, where they were welcomed by some of the Jewish occupants of Nablus, but shunned by Zionists.
This is a story that deserves to be made into a film.
Khalil’s family history underlines the direct connection between the Palestinian struggle of 1948 and the continuing struggle for a free Palestine today. It is a struggle carried forward by Khalil’s family—not only in Palestine, but here in Australia as well.
His story reminds us that Palestine is not simply history. For Palestinian families, the Nakba is a living memory, passed from one generation to the next, and the struggle for justice and freedom continues to this day.
In December 2025, Brisbane City Council’s ethics committee – comprising three Labor and three LNP councillors – voted unanimously to endorse the recommendations of a review conducted by FairFact Consulting Services.
It found Massey breached several behavioural standards.
The report said the article was “essentially propaganda and a ‘call to arms’ for pro-Palestinian support that is not objective to the rest of the community”, and this “could reasonably be expected to make