As the nine-year old son of an eminent Palestinian doctor, Rajai Dajani saw the build-up to the war from his family home in the German Colony of Jerusalem. During the fighting he was taken to Lebanon, his mother's birthplace. When he returned, in 1949, the house was now inside Israel and his father had lost everything.

“You could pick up that there was violence, there was hatred. My parents had Jewish friends and you could tell there was tension coming up between these people who were supposedly colleagues,” he said from his clinic in Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem, where his father ended up. “At the same time you could hear shooting and all kinds of noise. The British put up many roadblocks; I remember my father had a special card as a doctor to be allowed to cross with a car.

“The older kids were climbing up to Talbiyeh area and throwing stones at the Jewish houses. We were younger - it was like a game of soccer. They were the leaders and we were the followers,” he said. But worse violence was under way. “There was a killing of a doctor, Dr Malouf, he was shot, reportedly by the Jews. I remember that because my mother got so mad with my father. She said, ‘If you stay here and drive through all this shooting your time will come'. But he was very stubborn and he stayed.”

Dr Dajani, who now runs the women's clinic his father set up in East Jerusalem, was unimpressed with the performance of the Arab armies that came to destroy the fledgling Jewish state. “My father had some contact with the Egyptian Army. He said most of the soldiers who reported sick were suffering from malingeritis.

“The Egyptian Army had no supplies, no maps. After May 15 they made camp in Beit Safafa and wanted to fire at the Israeli areas but had no maps. So they asked my uncle to point them out to them. The tragic thing is the first bomb blew through the corner of our own house.

“The whole thing actually was like a farce. The Palestinians underestimated the might of the Jewish gangs, as they used to call them. Most of the Palestinians weren't militant but they were hearing about massacres by Jews, and on top of that the Arab armies said, ‘Get out of the way and we'll take care of them. Take a vacation'. And we are still on vacation ...”

Dr Dajani takes a similarly dim view of the spangly “60” signs across Jerusalem in celebration of what the Palestinians call the Naqba, or the Disaster. “It's like a red-hot poker up the Palestinians' a***. Money and property you can always possibly forget. But when you lose your dignity and self-respect and get treated like a sixth-class citizen in the country where you live ... I'm 70 years old and stateless. You have only a residency permit. When you go through a security check [at an airport] you are humiliated.”

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