Shukri’s interview was the first one that I performed that day. Naturally, as the room was quite full and the people were quite excited to have an opportunity to talk about Palestine, there were many moments of chaos as people talked all at once throughout my interview with Shukri.
As such, I have done my best to edit his interview to be as understandable as possible. This sometimes looks like jump cuts and other times it looks like the English captioning portraying the essence of what is being said, if not the exact translation. Furthermore, Shukri’s first language is Arabic. As such, some of his Spanish (as well as my own) is not entirely grammatically correct. In these moments, I have opted to correct the grammar as I translate into English, for easy viewer comprehension.
-Lauren Ryan
A Conversation with 94-Year-old Shukri
The following videos were filmed over the course of an hour-and-a-half-long interview with Shukri, a first-generation Palestinian. At the time of the Nakba, Shukri was only 20 years old. As a result of the mass displacement and ethnic cleansing that took place before, during, and after the Nakba, Shukri chose to migrate to Peru, searching for a better life. Shukri was 94 years old at the time of his interview. Despite being on oxygen and in a wheelchair, it was essential for him to share his story. He was just a young adult when the Nakba occurred, yet he remembers it like it was yesterday.
The day I interviewed him was one of the most impactful days of my life. What stuck out to me was his quiet joy at simply being asked to speak on his experience. Most of the Nakba generation was interviewed on the same day, all in a room together. There was an energy in that room, unlike anything I’d experienced before. There is something so powerful about all these people who, despite the odds, escaped the brutal colonization of their homelands, all speaking out—sharing their stories with the world and each other.
Shukri’s Story
In this video, Shukri tells the story of his journey as a migrant from Palestine to Lima, Peru due to the Nakba. He explains the difficulties of having much of his family so far away living under an oppressive regime. He also talks about the harsh realities of visiting family and his homelands. He also details the years of his life leading up to the Nakba, especially emphasizing that the Nakba did not simply start and end in 1948.
An Anecdote on life Just before the Nakba: The Boy Scouts
In this video, Shukri discusses the tactics used by Zionists prior to the Nakba itself to get to know the land they were attempting to colonize. When listening to this story, we can draw direct parallels to the ways in which settlers displacing Indigenous peoples in the US attempted to get to know the land via various tactics in order to eventually conquer it. I would like to urge the viewer to think about the real-life devastating affects that this type of strategic colonization has on both the colonized and the colonizer.
Dreams of a free Palestine and the Right to return
In this video, Shukri talks about what a Free Palestine means to him. He states that the want for a Free Palestine is the same as anyone’s wish to have freedom on their lands. He misses his homeland and his people but is unable to return safely. He emphasizes that no degree of separation from Palestine will ever divorce him from his homelands.
Here, Shukri elaborates on the reality that many Palestinians in the diaspora, including him, would love to return to their homelands and live peacefully, but are unable to do so due to the Zionist occupation of their ancestral homelands.
Shukri on Teaching His Children about Palestine
In this video Shukri discusses raising his children and the way that talking about Palestine factored into his parenting.