Khalaf was born in northern Jaffa in 1933 , close to Tel Aviv . His father , who came from Gaza , ran a grocery in Carmel Market , where half of his clients were Jewish and he spoke Hebrew , which his son also picked up from companions among Sephardic Jews . One of his uncles was married to a Jew . He dates his first feelings of animosity towards Jews to an incident in 1945 , when he was taunted by Jewish youths for being an Arab while riding over to visit relatives . They smashed his bicycle , and , on returning home , he learnt that Jewish friends had falsely reported that he had knifed Jews in Jaffa , at a time corresponding to the bicycle incident . He was arrested , aged 11 , by British police , beaten up and sentenced to a year of house arrest . On expiry of the sentence , he joined the ' lion cubs ' of the Najjada militia founded by his school principal Muhammad al-Hawari , which inculcated a rejection of racism , bigotry , and parochial loyalism , and taught him how to retaliate to violence with violence . His family abandoned Jaffa by boat for Gaza on 13 May 1948 , as part of a general flight inspired by news of the Deir Yassin massacre and a sense of Jewish military superiority . They fully expected to return as an expected tide in the fortunes of war changed , enabling the Arab armies to drive back to Zionists . He moved to Cairo in the early 1950s , enrolling in the Dar al-Ulum teacher 's college . There , in 1951 , he became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood
Deir Yassin massacre
Deir Yassin massacre
Salah Khalaf