Israel
Bars Visit To Father’s Grave
By Jonathan Cook
30 October,
2008
Countercurrents.org
Salwa Salam Qupty clutches
a fading sepia photograph of a young Palestinian man wearing a traditional
white headscarf. It is the sole memento that survives of her father,
killed by a Jewish militia during the 1948 war that established Israel.
“He was killed 60 years ago as he was travelling to work,”
she said, struggling to hold back the tears. “My mother was
four months pregnant with me at the time. This photograph is the closest
I’ve ever got to him.”
Six decades on from his death, she has never been allowed to visit
his grave in Galilee and lay a wreath for the father she never met.
This month, after more than 10 years of requests to the Israeli authorities,
she learnt that officials are unlikely ever to grant such a visit,
even though Mrs Qupty is an Israeli citizen and lives only a few miles
from the cemetery.
Government sources said allowing the visit risks encouraging hundreds
of thousands of Palestinian refugees to claim a right to return to
the villages from which they were expelled in 1948.
As Israel celebrated its 60th Independence Day with street parties
this summer, Mrs Qupty was marking two related anniversaries: the
Nakba, or catastrophe, and her father’s death in the early stages
of the war.
“I am a twin of the Nakba,” she said from her home in
Kafr Kana, close to Nazareth. “I was born at the very moment
when most of my people lost everything: their homes, their land, their
belongings, their livelihoods. In my case I lost my father, too.”
Faris Salam was killed in late March 1948, shortly before Israel’s
establishment. On the day he died, Salam left his village of Malul,
west of Nazareth, to catch a bus to his job on the railways in Haifa.
“Those were dangerous times,” Mrs Qupty said. “My
family were even afraid to go and collect water from the village well
because Jews would shoot at them from their positions up in the hills.”
When the bus drove into an ambush, Salam and the driver were shot
dead and several other passengers injured. He was buried in Malul,
but four months later the 800 inhabitants were forced to flee when
they came under sustained attack from the Israeli army. Mrs Qupty’s
mother sought sanctuary in Nazareth, where she gave birth to Salwa
days later.
Soon the army declared Malul a military zone and blew up all the homes,
sparing only two churches and the mosque. The Christian cemetery,
where Salam is buried, was enclosed by a military base named Nahlal.
For the past 12 years, Mrs Qupty has been trying to find a way to
visit the grave and say a few words to the father she never knew.
“As I get older, the fact that I never met him and that I haven’t
seen where he is buried gets harder to bear,” she said. “I
want him to know that I exist and that I miss him. Is that too much
to ask?”
Over the years she has lobbied members of the Israeli parliament,
written to the defence ministry and sent countless letters to the
local media – to little avail.
“The nearest I can get to him is looking through the base’s
perimeter fence at a forest that hides my view of the cemetery,”
she said. To the bemusement of the Israeli soldiers on guard, she
sometimes throws a bouquet of flowers over the fence.
On one occasion, she said, she found the courage to approach the base’s
gate and asked to be let in. An officer told her to address a formal
request to the defence ministry. “But I’m not going there
with a gun, only with a bunch of flowers,” she said.
This month a government spokesman finally responded, calling Mrs Qupty’s
request to visit her father’s grave a “complex”
matter that had been referred to the defence minister, Ehud Barak,
for a final decision.
Ministry officials were reported to have decided that her visit should
be blocked on the grounds that other Palestinians who seek to return
to the villages from which they or their ancestors were expelled in
1948 might use it as legal precedent.
During the war, 750,000 Palestinians fled from more than 400 villages,
all of which were subsequently levelled. Most of the refugees ended
up in camps in neighbouring Arab states.
Unlike them, however, Mrs Qupty’s mother managed to remain inside
the borders of the new Jewish state, along with about 100,000 other
Palestinians, and eventually received citizenship.
Today there are 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, one fifth
of the country’s population. Of those, one quarter are internal
refugees, or officially classified as “present absentees”:
present in Israel in terms of citizenship but absent in terms of legal
redress over their forced removal from their homes.
Isabelle Humphries, a British scholar who has interviewed many families
expelled from Malul, pointed out that the refugees’ Israeli
citizenship conferred on them no more rights to access their former
village than refugees living abroad.
“Most cannot make even short visits to the ruins of the villages,
to their places of worship or their graves. Often the lands of the
destroyed village have been declared military zones or are now in
the private hands of Jewish communities.”
Ms Humphries said Israel had repeatedly used the excuse that making
any concessions to individual refugees would open the floodgates to
the return of all the refugees.
“If Israel were to admit that internal refugees have rights
to the land and property confiscated in 1948, policymakers know that
it would draw further attention to Israel’s continuing refusal
to recognise the rights of refugees outside the state.”
Mrs Qupty, a social worker supervising children in protective custody,
said her work had increased her understanding of the trauma that the
events of 1948 had done to Palestinians.
“My mother was left with nothing after the war. I was born in
a tiny room in Nazareth and we lived there for many years. My older
brother and two sisters had to be placed in religious institutions
because she did not have the means to care for them. We grew up hardly
knowing each other.”
For several years after the war, her grandfather secretly returned
to Malul by donkey to grow crops on his land, though he was fined
when he was caught doing so.
On a few occasions Mrs Qupty accompanied him, but never saw the cemetery
where her father is buried. “By the time I was old enough to
understand what had happened to my father, the military base had been
built over the cemetery.”
Finally convinced that Israel is unlikely ever to concede a visit,
Mrs Qupty said she would turn to the courts.
But human rights lawyers regard her chances of success as slim. The
Supreme Court rarely overturns government decisions taken on security
grounds.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash
of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East”
(Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments
in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
This article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae),
published in Abu Dhabi.