Turning 60, Israelis feel pride, Palestinians pain

By Rebecca Harrison

REHOVOT, Israel/GAZA (Reuters) - Like the state of Israel, Akram al-Shamali and Moshe Feist both turn 60 this year. But that's about where the similarities end.

For Feist, an Israeli, the anniversary is a chance to celebrate the Jewish state's hard-fought achievements and swap stories of survival and patriotism over a glass of local wine.

For Shamali, it is time to mourn the Nakba, or "catastrophe", when 700,000 Palestinians, his own family among them, fled in fear of Jewish attacks as violence mounted. He lives in the Gaza Strip, where Islamist rule makes alcohol taboo and an Israeli blockade cuts into any festivities.

Their opposing views on the conflict into which they were born reflect lives lived in close proximity -- they grew up about 60 km (37 miles) from each other -- but worlds apart.

Shamali slept in his mother's arms in April 1948 as she fled the family home in Jaffa, a biblical city now a part of the Israeli city of Tel Aviv but for centuries a bustling Arab port. He has never since set foot in his parents' house, but dreams of one day reclaiming it.

"I don't know how or when, but one day I will go back to our house in Jaffa," Shamali told Reuters in an interview at his dimly lit Gaza City office. "I feel it in my heart."

The son of a German farm worker who fled Nazi Germany for a kibbutz in British-ruled Palestine, Feist was born a few months later than Shamali into the infant state of Israel, created as a haven for Jews after six million died in the Holocaust in Europe.

For Feist, Jaffa and other towns are now an inseparable part of his homeland and his view is that Palestinians gave up their rights there decades ago.

"You can't come back and say 'my mother used to live here 50 years ago and it is mine now'. So what?" Feist told Reuters at his airy apartment in Rehovot, near Tel Aviv. "The Arabs didn't want to live with the Jews so they left. No one pushed them."

REFUGEES

That's not how Shamali sees it. When his parents and their four sons left Jaffa, they expected to return in months. He said they had hoped violence between Jews and Arabs would abate. It never happened.

As violence on both sides killed thousands in the months after a U.N. decision in 1947 to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, the Shamali family and their neighbors crammed into a truck bound further down the Mediterranean coast to Gaza, outside the zone designated to Jewish control.

They slept on the beach while they hunted for lodgings.

After attending a United Nations school for refugees, Shamali built a business fixing cars and says he studiously avoided the politics and violence that shaped so many others.

But he resents Israelis for "stealing" his land and bristles at Feist's suggestion he gave up the right to his Jaffa home.