Gonen

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Gonen (Hebrew: גונן‎) is a neighbourhood in southcentral Jerusalem, Israel.

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Old maps show an Arab village on the site, which was ultimately engulfed by one of the first Arab settlements outside Jerusalem's Old City walls. The area was home to the affluent from among Jerusalem's Christian Arab community before it was captured in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and was referred to as Qatamon or Katamon. This name probably came from the Greek language kata tōi monastēriōi ("below the monastery"), as there is a monastery on a hilltop to the north, which was ultimately engulfed by the urban development of Jerusalem at the turn of the century. Today it is universally known as Qatamon (Hebrew: קטמון), and the old name, Gonen, is used almost only in an official context.

During the Siege of Jerusalem (1948), the neighborhood was an Arab salient between two starving Jewish neighborhoods and the strongpoint at the monastery was attacked by the Haganah. Katamon witnessed one of the conspicuous assassinations of the century when UN Mediator Folke Bernadotte and UN Observer André Serot, traveling in their professional duties through this part of the city, received multiple bullet hits from LEHI’s automatic guns firing at them point blank around 5.05 p.m. local time on Friday September 17th 1948.

The Palestinian author and academic Ghada Karmi has in her 2002 autobiography In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story described growing up in Katamon, with its mixture of Christian and Muslim Palestinians. With her family fled Katamon in 1948 during the Haganah attack.

Another Palestinian family that was forced to flee in April 1948 was the distinguished educator, scholar, and poet Khalil al-Sakakini with his family. His daughter Hala wrote about revisiting Katamon in 1967 in her book Jerusalem and I.

[edit] Bibliography:

Sakakini, Hala: Jerusalem and I, 1987
Karmi, Ghada: In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story ISBN 1-85984-694-7 Verso 2002
- A country of the mind Guardian, Saturday October 19, 2002 (from Dr Ghada Karmi's memoir, In Search of Fatima)
- In Search of Fatima Fateful Days in 1948 from Jerusalem Quarterly (from Dr Ghada Karmi's memoir, In Search of Fatima)