[News] Palestine - "Always on my mind"

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://electronicintifada.net/content/always-my-mind/24976


  "Always on my mind"

Anne Paq <https://electronicintifada.net/people/anne-paq> - 26 July 2018

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Muhammad Awadallah, 80, near his home in the village of al-Walaja.

There is no choice but to remember.

“I can’t forget the land. It’s always on my mind. It’s like a mother 
longing for her son.”

Muhammad Mahmoud Salem Awadallah, 80, was speaking in the occupied West 
Bank village of new al-Walaja. It is located just a few kilometers from 
the original al-Walaja village, from where he and all its other 
residents were displaced in 1948 by Zionist forces.

Awadallah can still remember the vegetables his family grew on their 
land, a time, he said, when “we had lands and our hearts were open.” And 
he is typical, not just of the generations who were ethnically cleansed, 
but of those who have come after him.

There are around 5 million Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA, 
the UN agency set up in 1949 especially to provide for them. Badil 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/badil>, a Palestinian refugee 
advocacy group, estimated that there were almost 8 million Palestinian 
refugees worldwide by the end of 2014, among them 720,000 internally 
displaced persons.

The majority of these refugees, according to Badil, live within 100 
kilometers of their original homes, yet most cannot visit, let alone 
return to live. That is despite how the right of refugees to return to 
their homes is a tenet of international humanitarian law.

Their plight lies at the heart of the Palestinian issue and, among 
Palestinians, reverberates down the generations.

The recent Great March of Return 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/great-march-return> series of 
protests in Gaza sought to put this issue back front and center of the 
Palestinian national struggle.

Most of the protesters marching toward the boundary between Gaza and 
Israel, braving sniper fire and risking their lives, were refugees, but 
were also too young to remember the ethnic cleansing of 1948 when 
750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to flee their homes.

For those who remember, the pain is still vivid.

“With your questions, you are opening the wounds again,” said Yacoub 
Ahmad Odeh, a refugee from Lifta 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/lifta>, a village in the Jerusalem 
area.

Odeh is the head of the Committee to Protect Lifta Heritage and Culture 
and has organized more than 40 tours to his Lifta for young people from 
around the world. These outsiders can visit, unlike Palestinians in the 
occupied West Bank, at the mercy of Israel’s permit system, locked away 
behind checkpoints or who are simply too poor to afford the cost of travel.

In addition, many of the Palestinian villages that were depopulated in 
1948 were destroyed afterwards to leave no place to return and no 
reference for memory. In some places, only piles of stones and cacti 
remain as testimonies to a life that was abruptly interrupted by the 
Nakba <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/nakba>, the catastrophe, of 1948.

Israel has used other strategies to fade memories, adopting legislation 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-criminalizes-commemoration-nakba/9289> 
criminalizing the commemoration of the Nakba, or covering the ruins of 
Palestinian villages with pine tree forests.

But the right of return is far from disappearing from refugees’ minds.

This photo essay attempts to make visible the connection between 
Palestinian refugees and their places of origin by displaying the names 
of refugees in Arabic in the location of their villages of origin. The 
names were written by Afnan Zboun, a 14-year-old who lives in al-Azzeh 
refugee camp <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/al-azzeh-refugee-camp>.

/Anne Paq is a French freelance photographer and member of the 
photography collective ActiveStills <http://activestills.org/>./

/Umar al-Ghubari contributed research./

Abdelhamid Ahmad Ibrahim Abu Srour

/Abdelhamid Ahmad Ibrahim Abu Srour is originally from Beit Natif 
<http://www.palestineremembered.com/Hebron/Bayt-Nattif/>. He now lives 
in the Aida refugee camp 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/aida-refugee-camp>, in the West 
Bank city of Bethlehem, where he has had a grocery shop for 40 years and 
still works there. He keeps the key to his father’s home in Beit Natif. 
He is, he said, “around” 85 in age./

/Approximate distance to his original village: 25 kilometers./

I went back to see Beit Natif after 1967. Everything was destroyed.

We were happy. Everyone owned their land. We were living with Christians 
and Jews like brothers.

My father was a farmer. We got everything from our own land – wheat, 
beans, vegetables.

Each family had 30 to 60 /dunums/ [a /dunum/ is 1,000 square meters]. 
But we lived like one big family, and we did everything together. If we 
saw a car in the village, we would follow it, it was something so new.

Beit Shemesh, a city in present-day Israel that is partly built on the 
land of Beit Natif village, is expanding toward the ruins of Beit Natif. 
Earth dug for construction is being put on top of some of the old stones 
from the destroyed village.

We did not have radio or TV. I did not go to school there. We were busy 
with the land. It was a simple life.

When the Zionist soldiers started shooting at us, we left. We were 
scared. We left in the middle of the night with nothing.

We walked towards Wadi Fukin, went on top of the mountains and saw 
people being killed. We stayed in the mountains for two months, sleeping 
on the ground. Once we sneaked into our lands before the Jordanians told 
us to leave.

Later, we went to Aida refugee camp and stayed in a big tent for three 
months shared with seven families. Then we got a small tent for a couple 
of years.

We’ve been occupied by many. In the end we will get our freedom.

Halima Ali Khalil

/Halima Ali Khalil, 78, is from al-Walaja 
<http://www.palestineremembered.com/Jerusalem/al-Walaja/index.html> 
village, and currently lives in the new al-Walaja, which was built by 
fleeing refugees in what became a Jordanian-controlled area and what is 
now the occupied West Bank. When we approached the nearby Ein al-Balad 
spring to take photographs, there were some Israelis swimming there. 
After they heard the purpose of the photo project, they told our guide, 
who works for Zochrot <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/zochrot>, an 
Israeli organization dedicated to the memory of the Nakba: “Your work is 
useless, they [Palestinians] will never return here.”/

/Distance to her original village: 4 kilometers./

My nephew took me once to Ein al-Balad. I saw the Israelis swimming. I 
was crying. I was also worried because I was afraid they would beat us. 
They had big dogs.

We had a big house, made of stones, near Ein al-Balad. We had three 
rooms for the people and two for the animals over two floors.

We had many trees: apricot trees, apple trees, olive trees, grapes. Life 
was the best.

There were 16 springs in al-Walaja. My father was a farmer.

We cultivated everything around the spring, vegetables and fruits, and 
we would sell in Jerusalem all the way to Jaffa. We used to take the train.

There was no school for us [girls], only the boys could go. I would go 
with my father to the fields. We played outside a lot. We built a castle 
and played hide and seek.

My family had 150 /dunums/ in different locations – like 50 /dunums/ in 
Ras Abu Ammar 
<http://www.palestineremembered.com/Jerusalem/Ras-Abu-%27Ammar/index.html> 
that my father bought just before we left.

A view of the new village of al-Walaja from the opposite hill. A newly 
constructed barbed-wire fence, several meters high, separates residents 
from their agricultural lands. When completed, this structure, part of 
Israel’s wall in the West Bank, will totally surround the village and 
will likely force many to leave.

In 1948, the Zionists were at the Battir station 
<http://www.palestineremembered.com/GeoPoints/Battir_7295/Article_19849.html>. 
They shot at us. We fled and took only small things we could carry.

My father hid the new crops. On the night the militias came, some men 
fought back and five or six were killed.

The Zionists destroyed our house. A few days later, we saw it from the 
mountains. We cried.

After one year we came back to the mountain and started to dig. We were 
living in caves and then we made houses of mud.

My father was always talking about al-Walaja. He died not long after we 
fled.

He was so sad that they took the land. He was going back in secret to 
the old al-Walaja to take care of the trees and always hoped to go back.

After 1967, we went back to take some crops and some herbs. We used to 
go to Ein Hanyia but now we can’t go at all. With the building of the 
wall, we also lost 10 /dunums/.

God willing, we will go back. I still cry over our land. Hopefully we 
will go back and Palestine will be free, and all people will be united.

Muhammad Mahmoud Salem Awadallah

/Muhammad Mahmoud Salem Awadallah, 80, is from al-Walaja and currently 
lives in the new village, just a few meters away from the Israeli wall. 
 From an old photo found on the internet, taken just after the Zionist 
troops took control of the village, he could identify his home, up in 
the mountain./

/Approximate distance to his original village: 3 kilometers./

We had so many vegetables, herbs, fruits: parsley, mint, cucumbers, 
tomatoes, sweet peppers, cherries, apricots, peaches. So many.

We lived near Ein Balad spring. My father was a farmer. Our home had two 
floors. Downstairs was for the animals. Upstairs there were four rooms 
for us.

We had many sheep, and a lot of land around Ein Haniya spring and Ein 
Balad, between 60 and 80 /dunums/. My father would sell to Jerusalem and 
Jaffa.

There were Jewish neighbors in [the nearby village of] Malha. They were 
like friends then. But after Israel was created, nothing was good.

We had lands and open hearts. I went to school for a year and a half.

I was around 8 when the Nakba happened. It was a quiet night and then 
suddenly there were bullets.

We ran away to the mountains. We left under a rain of bullets. In the 
chaos, we could not take anything.

After some days some came back, sneaking into the village. My 
grandmother, Mahbouba Ali Sabha, was shot in the shoulder when she 
sneaked there to look for our animals.

We stayed here, exactly at this location, under the trees for a couple 
of years. Then we built a house of mud.

Three years after the Nakba, they demolished our houses to say to us: 
you don’t have a home to go back to. But even if they destroyed our 
village, my children, my grandchildren will go back and rebuild it.

I always have the land on my mind. It’s like a mother longing for her son.

Yacoub Ahmad Odeh

/Yacoub Ahmad Odeh, 78, is originally from Lifta 
<http://www.palestineremembered.com/Jerusalem/Lifta/>. He now lives in 
the Sheikh Jarrah <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/sheikh-jarrah> 
neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem. Here he is holding a family 
tree of people from Lifta./

/Odeh is the head of the Committee to Protect Lifta Heritage and 
Culture, and has been a human rights activist for 33 years. He spent 17 
years in Israeli jail for his political activism, and was released 
during a prisoner exchange deal in 1985./

/The village of Lifta is one of the only Palestinian villages attacked 
in 1948 where there are still dozens of old homes standing that are not 
now inhabited by new Jewish residents./

/Distance to his original village: 4 kilometers./

The first time I went back to Lifta was maybe three weeks after 1967 
[the June 1967 war]. I remember a Jewish man on a horse came and said: 
“I forbid you to visit Lifta.”

The next day I came with my mother. She started to cry when she saw her 
childhood home.

We also saw the house where I was born. There were some holes in the 
ceiling.

It fell down in 1983 or 1984 with the snow. Now there are just some 
walls that are standing. My mother fell sick after that first visit.

Life in Lifta was beautiful. We lived very close to the spring. As a 
child I was always swimming and diving there.

I’d bring home water. We’d play around the spring with my cousins and 
all the children of the neighborhood. We’d climb trees, eat their figs.

I remember the smell of the taboun bakery where my mother would take me. 
It was so delicious, the taboun bread, with zeit and zataar [olive oil 
and a thyme mixture]. I can still smell it.

My family worked the land. My father and mother were farmers. We were 
seven in all.

A general view of some of the old houses of Lifta today.

Our house was built from large stones. We had a lot of fruit and land. 
That is where the Ramot colony is now.

We had apricots, olive trees, and so on. People helped each other. That 
was part of the Lifta culture.

If someone needed to repair the roof, everybody would come to help. We 
were like a big family.

The Zionist gangs started to attack in 1947. Lifta is the western gate 
of Jerusalem, at a very strategic location. They wanted to take control 
of the road from Jerusalem to Jaffa to secure movement.

On 28 December 1947, the village coffee shop was attacked and sprayed 
with bullets. Six people were killed.

People came down from the upper part of the village, the women were 
crying and people prayed by the yard near the spring.

After the gang took control of the upper part they controlled the 
village. The villagers had to use small bypass roads. But every day, the 
military presence became stronger.

One day, my father came and carried my little sister and called me and 
my brother and we followed him. We went down to the valley and climbed 
up to the main street. My father was shot at but the bullet landed 
between his legs. We went into a truck.

We went from Latrun to Beitunia, and then to al-Bireh [near the West 
Bank city of Ramallah]. In one hour we became refugees.

It was a very miserable life. We were kings before and suddenly we were 
beggars.

My father went back to fight. But when he returned, he was so sad. He 
found us in a miserable situation and could not take it.

He became sick. His stomach did not take the food. He was nervous. After 
a year and a half, he died.

We lost everything. We lost our dignity. These things shaped my memory 
and my life.

We moved to Jerusalem to be closer to Lifta. After prison, I got 
involved in the campaign against plans to build luxury villas in Lifta. 
We went to the court.

The Coalition to Save Lifta is international and is big now. We make 
surveys, books, videos, and we mobilize the media. Between 2011 and 2016 
I did 45 tours of Lifta for university groups coming from 25 countries.

I don’t lose hope. I dream to go back. I am sure the time will come. The 
sun will rise again.

The Israelis did not study history. All occupiers go. We can live 
together but we should put an end to the occupation, and create a 
democratic state for all under democratic laws.

Israelis say the new generations will forget. I did not forget. Now I am 
a father. I send the message to my daughter and my son. We used to go, 
four or five times a year, to teach them that this is your village, this 
is your mosque, and so on.

I taught them and they continue. This is my memory and my history. 
Nobody has the right to take them away.


-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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