Washington Report, July 2006, pages 24, 45

Special Report

58 Years of Nakba: Keeping a Foothold on The Land

By Isabelle Humphries

ANOTHER YEAR has passed, and the Fahmawi family is still waiting to return home. And despite the 58 years gone by, they are still not very far away.

For their part, Israelis were out in force for Independence Day, filling picnic sites and forest glades across the countryside, parking their cars by the roadside with the requisite Israeli flag flapping in the wind.

And for the million Arabs inside Israel for whom national celebrations are taking place on the sites of around 530 of their destroyed villages? This year an estimated 2,500 Palestinians who remain in the land occupied by the Jewish state since 1948 headed to the site of Umm al Zinat, former home to the Fahmawis and other families who stayed in the area. While only a few stones remain of the school building and the graveyard, all those present were acutely aware of the significance of these crumbling ruins. From the forests of the north to the beaches of Mediterranean Tel Aviv, the Jewish state of Israel continues to be built by tearing down the stones of a thriving Palestinian society.

In May 1948 Salim Fahmawi, now 65, was in the second grade at Umm al Zinat elementary school. Sitting on all that survives of the school wall today, he points just ahead. “The headmaster gathered us together there in the schoolyard,” he recalled. “We knew that Haifa had fallen…He asked us to build a stone blockade across the road to the village to protect ourselves.”

The villagers believed that simple barricades could prevent the military invasion of their homes. But, said Fahmawi, “It made no difference—they just came from the other side of the village.”

In the face of artillery fire and rumors of rape and massacre in Deir Yassin the 1,500 villagers fled—the few staying behind were shot on their doorsteps.

Today Fahmawi and his family live in the village of Daliyat al Karmel, a few kilometers across the mountain. When it comes to their rights in Umm al Zinat, however, they may as well live halfway around the world. After the initial attack on their village, many refugees sheltered in Daliyat, believing they would be able to return after hostilities ended. It was then that the buses came. Shipped to the West Bank, many villagers were never to see their mountain homes again. Others had the “luck” to remain so close they would witness the crushing of their livelihood under their very noses.

Those villagers who received Israeli ID cards in Daliyat saw the building of the settlement of Elyakim in 1949 and the destruction of their own homes. “One 70-year-old man came to pick the fruits from the village cactuses,” Fahmawi related. “Soldiers shot him dead on the spot.”

A 16-year-old boy faced the same fate. There would be no return to the village with the “end of hostilities.”

The families of Umm al Zinat living in Daliyat today are among 300,000 Palestinians who can be classified as internal refugees (and who represent a third of the total Palestinian population inside Israel). Living largely within 10 kilometers of their native village, they are denied the right to return to their homes and land in the same way as international refugees. For non-Jews, Israeli citizenship does not bestow the right to return to one’s village.

In the years following the Nakba displacement, Arab villages became Jewish settlements, kibbutzes or closed military zones. From 1948-66, when Palestinians inside Israeli borders were under military rule, Israel’s Independence Day often was the only time that villagers were given permission to enter village ruins. From Saffuriyya to Kafr Bir’im to Malul, while Israelis were out celebrating, internal refugees came to pick wild plants among the ruins and bring families to picnic for a few brief hours on their ancestral lands.

Throughout the struggles of the 1960s and ’70s, Palestinians remained united on the fundamental principle of the right to return. Under the now defunct Oslo negotiations, however, refugees worldwide, as well as inside Israeli borders, feared that the Palestinian elites would sign away the right to return. Reflecting the international movement, a new form of activism developed among internal refugees, resulting most notably in a mass demonstration at a different village site every year. Aside from Land Day commemoration, this event has become one of the biggest annual political gatherings for Palestinians inside Israel.

This year’s marchers to Umm al Zinat included not only refugees but other members of the community, as well as a handful of Jewish Israeli participants. While many individual village commemorative events are dominated by elderly men of the Nakba generation, the 2006 crowd was full of women, men and children of all ages. One group of young people expressed solidarity with another occupation, carrying the Iraqi flag alongside the numerous large Palestinian flags weaving through the trees. As happens every year, children carried placards with the names of individual villages. Speeches were led by representatives of the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced (ADRID) and the Umm al Zinat committee, in addition to the political addresses by notables such as Shawqi Khatib of the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee and Sheikh Ra’ed Saleh of the Islamic Movement. The right of refugees is an issue for which every group within the community wishes to show its enthusiasm.

So what do the Israelis make of all this? After Salim Fahmawi held a planning meeting in his home he was called into the local police station and asked what he was doing. “I told them: ‘I am 65. I am older than your state,” he said. “We are organizing this [march] because you built your state on our ruins…There are thousands of us here, and we are interested to tell you, the Jews inside, our story.”

The police know exactly what the people of Umm al Zinat are doing, of course. In 1998, at his father’s dying request, Fahmawi came with tens of villagers to try and bury the body in the old village cemetery in among the trees of what is now part of the lands of the settlement of Elyakim. He was greeted by hundreds of armed police and a threat by the police chief that he would bury his father “over my dead body.” Having made their point, an angry funeral procession returned to the graveyard in Daliyat al Karmel.

Thanks to the diligence of certain individual journalists, this story did make it into the mainstream Israeli newspaper Haaretz. By the end of the day, however, the online version had a stream of the usual abusive and racist responses, from declarations that all Palestinians inside should be transferred, to the demand that the “Nakba for the settlers of Gaza” should be recognized. And while the individual journalist got his facts correct, the caption writers did not. First it was announced that Palestinians were marching in the northern town of Umm al Zinat (seemingly ignorant of the fact that it no longer exists), then it was changed to state that a photo showed marchers in the town of Daliyat al Karmel, also incorrect as the location was several kilometers away. A telling reflection of the lack of knowledge, even on the staff of a so-called “liberal” Israeli paper, of the displacement of their “fellow citizens.”

And what of the Israeli leadership? The new government of Ehud Olmert has named Shimon Peres, as keen an acolyte of Israeli apartheid as any other, minister for the development of the Negev and Galilee—the areas that happen to be most densely populated with Arabs. Not surprisingly, however, development plans are focused not on Arab cities, but on bringing more Jews to displace them in the “periphery zones.” As 2006 has been declared the “Year of Development of the Negev and Galilee,” Israeli Independence Day celebrations officially adopted this theme. At the launch event on Mount Herzl, Peres told the crowd, “We are leaving the territories in order to make the Negev bloom and to building the Galilee…We must plant a tree in the Negev and build in the north, shape a nation, a land, a state, to strengthen Jerusalem.”

Hundreds of Palestinian homes in the Negev and Galilee remain slated for demolition this year, and lands continue to be confiscated for industrial zones, new roads and development of Jewish communities. Fifty-eight years later, the Nakba continues.

Isabelle Humphries is a freelance researcher based in Nazareth, Galilee. She can be contacted at < This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it >.

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