The
Long Path Back To Umm al-Zinat For Palestine’s Refugees
By Jonathan Cook
08 May, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Across
Israel, the sirens have been blaring out this week, closing shops and
offices early and bringing Israelis to a minute’s silent halt
wherever they find themselves, whether in the house or pulled into a
layby at the side of the road. Israel has been commemorating its soldiers
who fell in the country’s many wars: a long roll call of names
appeared on television screens, and military cemeteries were packed
with visiting families.
But on Wednesday 3 May, the
sombre mood finally lifted as Israel celebrated its 58th Independence
Day, marking the declaration of statehood on midnight 14 May 1948 (the
anniversary varies every year because it is commemorated according to
the Hebrew calendar). Boisterous youngsters piled into the streets,
enjoying free public concerts and firework displays, and families headed
to the forests for barbecues. Every other car seems to be flying an
Israeli flag.
In Nazareth Elite, the Jewish
town built above Nazareth on land confiscated from its Arab neighbour,
children barely able to walk were guided by parents over the massive
metal frames of two bunting-festooned tanks stationed in a public park.
Older boys and girls played at being gunners or learnt how to operate
an army radio. Similar scenes were played out in towns across the country.
But not everyone was included
in the celebrations. One in five of Israel’s population is Palestinian.
The names of their dead from the 1948 war -- including unarmed women
and children killed in a spate of massacres documented by Israeli historians
-- were not listed on television. In Nazareth the local children were
not offered tanks as playthings, nor did friendly officers come offering
lessons in soldiering.
There is no other time when
the two national historical narratives contained in Israel are so at
odds: the celebrations in Jewish communities could be taken for gloating
were it not so apparent that most Israeli Jews have almost no appreciation
that their own nation’s gains came at another nation’s expense.
Few Israeli Jews understand that the “Arabs” living alongside
them -- those sitting next to them in the doctor’s surgery or
restaurant, or shopping by them in the mall -- might have little cause
to celebrate this time of year.
Many Israeli Jews have never
heard of the Nakba (the Catastrophe), the mirror event to Israel’s
Independence, when at least 80 per cent of the Palestinian population
-- some 750,000 -- were forced or terrorised to leave the land that
would become Israel. It is not something discussed in Israeli schools
or the Hebrew media.
A few Israeli historians,
however, have shown that the exodus of Palestinians did not come about
by chance; most likely Israel’s leaders, including the first prime
minister, David Ben Gurion, plotted the expulsion through military operations
such as Plan Dalet.
But if it was not carefully
worked out in advance, the mass flight of Palestinians was certainly
encouraged by the country’s founding fathers when they realised
that well-publicised massacres of Palestinian civilians -- like the
infamous one at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem on 9 April 1948 -- were terrorising
away the native population.
After the year-long war in
1948, only 150,000 Palestinians remained inside the peripheries of the
new state -- in the northern region of the Galilee and in the southern
desert of the Negev. The centre of the country, what today is Tel Aviv
and its sprawling suburban hinterland, was almost entirely ethnically
cleansed.
Even those observers who
still object to the characterisation of Israel’s treatment of
the Palestinians in 1948 as ethnic cleansing can hardly deny that in
subsequent years Israel covered up the way it systematically dispossessed
the Palestinians of their homeland under cover of war.
At the heart of the project
was the destruction of more than 400 villages emptied of their Palestinian
inhabitants by the Israeli army. The government set up a special department
to oversee the razing of these Palestinian communities, officially on
the grounds that Jews might find the remains upsetting and that the
crumbling buildings were a safety hazard: children might fall into the
wells, and the walls offered hiding places to snakes.
Next the Jewish National
Fund used tax-deductible donations from American and European donors
to buy millions of trees to bury the remains of the villages, creating
national parks and forests to “camouflage the ruins”, as
Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jersualem, once wrote.
It is in these parks, scattered across Israel, that Israeli Jews celebrated
Independence Day with barbecues.
Ensuring that the villages
were placed permanently out of bounds to the refugees, even to those
still living close by in Israel, was considered of paramount importance.
Israel refused even the tiniest concession to the villagers, fearing
that it might establish a precedent for the general right of return
for the Palestinian refugees.
But in the past few years
the absence of a Palestinian narrative of 1948 -- one not acknowledged
by Israeli Jews and little understood by Europeans and Americans --
has been publicly challenged. Israel’s Palestinian citizens and
a small number of Israeli Jews have joined together to show that the
memories of 1948 cannot be erased as easily as Palestinian homes were.
Until the late 1990s, most
of 250,000 Palestinian refugees living in Israel -- a quarter of the
the country’s total Palestinian population -- staged their own
private commemorations in the villages from which they were expelled.
They chose Israel’s Independence Day (even though it rarely fell
on Nakba Day of 15 May) for the simple reason that it was the one day
of the year when they could return to their destroyed homes without
fear of arrest or intimidation. The authorities tacitly agreed to turn
a blind eye.
But the refugees in Israel
only got organised in the mid-1990s when they founded an Association
for the Rights of the Internally Displaced (ADRID), largely in response
to Palestinian concessions on the right of return implicitly made in
the Oslo agreements. Ever since the refugees have been arranging a main
procession in a different village each year to mark the Nakba.
The event, say organisers,
is an attempt to commemorate what is lost, to remind younger Palestinians
in Israel of a history they cannot study in their schools, and increasingly
to help Israeli Jews understand that there was traumatic flipside to
their independence. One Jewish group, Zochrot (“Remembering”
in Hebrew), has joined ADRID in its processions and has established
a website that educates Israeli Jews about the Nakba in their own language.
This year the march was held
in Umm al-Zinat, once an important village owning more than 5,500 acres
on the lower slopes of Mount Carmel near Haifa. It was attacked by the
Golani Brigade before sunrise on 15 May 1948, a few hours after the
Declaration of Independence was issued.
There are still a few physical
clues that 1,500 Palestinians once lived here: the stones littering
the ground are the rubble of 250 houses that were wrecked by the army;
the solid foundations of the school can be made out; and the gravestones
of the cemetery are visible. No trace of the village’s mosque,
however, is left. Vigorous Sabr cactuses originally used by Palestinian
families to mark out the boundaries of their property have survived
attempts to destroy them better than the houses. Covering all of it
is a forest of fir trees planted many years ago courtesy of the Jewish
National Fund.
In 1948 no resistance was
provided by the villagers, peasant farmers who relied on income from
selling the produce of their extensive olive groves and of their herds
of sheep. But they were expelled nonetheless.
Most of Umm al-Zinat’s
refugees were unable to attend the procession because they are now living
in exile in Jordan or the West Bank. Israel almost always refuses entry
permits to Palestinians from the occupied territories and Arab states.
Instead it was left to the
small number of refugees who managed to stay inside Israel, today living
nearby in Haifa or the Druze town of Daliyat al-Carmel, to tell their
story.
Badria Fachmawi, who was
14 when Israeli soldiers advanced on the village, says she remembers
the sound of Israeli gunfire and fleeing with her parents and siblings.
They had heard about the massacre at Deir Yassin a month earlier, she
says, and knew it was dangerous to stay.
Her family ended up in Daliyat
al-Carmel, where they were joined by as many as 10,000 refugees from
other villages seeking shelter. Because the Druze had signed a pact
with the Jewish state’s leaders to fight on Israel’s side,
their communities were not attacked.
A few days later, she says,
the Israeli army arrived with 18 buses to transport the refugees across
the border into Jordan. “My father, uncle and cousins hid among
the Druze and escaped the expulsion, which is the reason why we are
still here today and most of the refugees are not.”
For the past 20 years, Badria
and her family have ventured back to the village to pick the prickly-pear
fruit of the cactuses that flourish on the mountainside. “It's
hard to come back, though, when we have so many sad memories associated
with this place,” she said. “But it is important to bring
the children here so that they know where they are from.”
Salim Fachmawi, a 65-year-old
refugee from Umm al-Zinat, helped organise this year's procession. He
says he still remembers the war crimes the world has forgotten. Three
of the village elders who refused to leave when the army arrived in
1948 were executed in cold blood, he says.
And later, when the buses
arrived in Daliyat al-Carmel to expel the villagers to Jordan, armed
guards took aside many of Umm al-Zinat’s men and arrested them.
“They were just farmers but the Israeli army jailed them as prisoners
of war for 18 months. Eventually they were exchanged by Israel for Jewish
soldiers captured by Jordan.”
His aunt was on one of the
expulsion buses that drove towards Jenin, from which the villagers were
to be forced into Jordan. “She had with her her gold jewelry and
savings stuffed into a pillowcase but she was not allowed to take any
possessions with her. Her life savings were stolen by the soldiers.”
Then, Salim says, the guards pushed the villagers towards Jenin, shouting,
“Go to Abdullah!”, referring to the King of Jordan, and
“Don’t look back or we will shoot.”
Salim’s commitment
to the village has brought him into repeated confrontation with the
authorities. In 1969 he spent two years under house arrest for his political
activities. A week ago he was called to his local police station for
interrogation after it was learnt that he had held meetings at his home
about the march and posted adverts. “They asked me why I wanted
to stage the march and I replied: ‘Because you built your state
on my homeland. I am older than your state’. I am an old man and
they cannot so easily intimidate me."
Earlier, in 1998, when his
father died at 93, Salim also clashed with the police. He had promised
his father that he would bury him in the cemetery of Umm al-Zinat, the
ruins of which have been fenced off. But when the family arrived with
the coffin at the graveyard, they found it surrounded by more than 100
armed police.
“I spoke with the captain
and told him of my promise to my father,” Salim said. “But
he replied simply: ‘If you want to bury your father here you'll
have to bury me first’. I understood what he meant. We turned
back and buried my father in Daliyat instead.”
Jonathan Cook
is a writer and journalist living in Nazareth, Israel. His book, “Blood
and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State”,
is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net