 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Return when you die
By Graham UsherIkrit's church rests at the peak of a rugged knoll in the northern Galilee. Outside is a makeshift shed and piles of ruined stone, debris of a cruel Christmas Eve in 1951. Inside there is an incongruous decor of icons and unmade beds, and a story remarkable even by the standards of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
"Ikrit was an Arab Christian village for hundreds of years -- until 31 October 1948," recalls Rizik Atalla, a native of Ikrit who was 19 years old in 1948. On that day a battalion of the Israeli army entered the village to be met, not with resistance, but with white flags and wooden crosses. Due to Ikrit's proximity to the Lebanese border -- about five kilometres -- the battalion's commander told the village's 500 residents that it was dangerous for them to stay, but promised that they would be able to return to their homes "within two weeks." Fifty-one years later, that promise has yet to be fulfilled.
In 1951, Ikrit petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court of Justice. This ruled that since the residents were "legitimate citizens" of Israel there was "no legal obstacle" preventing a return to their village and requested that the northern Galilee district's military governor explain why they had not been allowed to do so. The military governor replied by issuing a retroactive evacuation order on the village and, on 24 December 1951, destroying Ikrit's 70 or so houses "from land and air," recalls Atalla. Why such savagery, a full three years after the end of hostilities? "They wanted us to forget about our right to return. But we haven't forgotten," he says.
A similar tale is told in Birem, a Palestinian village near Ikrit. There, too, 1050 residents surrendered in peace to their new Jewish conquerors. There too they were promised a return to their homes "within two weeks." There, too, they received assurances from no less a figure than David Ben-Gurion that Israel "has no intention to deprive the residents of Kafr Birem of their lands." There, too, on 16 September 1953, the Israeli army destroyed Birem's 100 stone houses. And there, too, the desire to return among the residents and their descendants is as passionate today as it was on 29 October 1949, the date the army entered the village and the moment "the last Palestinian village in Palestine fell," remembers Birem resident, Afif Ibrahim.
One reason for the strength of this passion -- Ikrit and Birem residents freely admit -- is that they believed the promises of their new rulers. "Every time we raised our case in court we won," says Birem's Toomi Magzal. But the decision was never obeyed due to "security reasons." "No Israeli official ever told us we can't go back," repeats Ikrit's Atalla. "They told us we could go back. So we waited."
It looks like they will have to wait some more. In December 1995, a ministerial committee was formed to deal with Ikrit and Birem and, headed by Israel's then justice minister, David Libai, made its recommendations on the issue. Suspended during the years of the Netanyahu government, the committee was re-formed last year under the new chairmanship of Israel's current justice minister, Yossi Beilin, and will present its recommendations to the Supreme Court in May. In a tour of Ikrit and Birem last month, Beilin made it clear that these recommendations would be "on the bases" of Libai's proposals. It is easy to understand Beilin's content with such an outcome. It is no less easy to understand the residents' outrage.
Under the Libai formula, "a limited proportion" of Ikrit's and Birem's "population can return," but only if the two villages accept a number of conditions. These are that the "returnees" must have owned a house in one of the two villages in 1948; the sites of the two new "community settlements" must be at some distance from the original villages; a "family" must be defined as no more than one father and two sons and can build a house no more than three stories high; and that any land returned to the villages cannot be owned by the residents themselves but rather leased "in perpetuity" from the state. For such "goodwill" (in the phrase of the original Libai recommendations) the villagers will be expected to waive all future claims on their land. In return, the government will "rent" Ikrit and Birem 600 dunams each, which works out at about 50 square metres for each family.
In 1948, Ikrit owned about 16,000 dunams and Birem 12,000. The two villages have long renounced any claims on land taken from them by Jewish settlements, which, in Birem's case, includes some 2,000 dunams of their most fertile land "so that a couple of kibbutzim can graze 30 cows," in the words of one Birem descendant. But the vast bulk of their lands to this day remains unused and is needed if the two villages are to have the land reserves to develop communities that between them now number about 3,500 people. In these circumstances, to accept the Libai-Beilin recommendations would not only be a violation of a natural right to their own lands. It would -- in the villages' formal response to the recommendations -- provide Israel "with retroactive justification for uprooting and dispossessing us."
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is precisely the justification Beilin seeks. Whatever his (in some instances deserved) reputation as a political dove, on the issue of the Palestinians' right to return Beilin is no less a hawk than his Labour Party mentor, Golda Meir. In 1972, she famously ruled out any return of Ikrit and Birem for fear of the "precedent it would set" not only for the estimated 250,000 "internally displaced" Palestinians inside Israel but also for the 3.5 million Palestinian refugees who reside in the diaspora.
Precedent is what Beilin appears to seek in the Ikrit and Birem case. For, in microcosm, the solution here bears an uncanny resemblance to the 1995 "understandings" he reached with PLO executive member Mahmoud Abbass on a solution to the "refugee problem." There, too, the trade-off is a symbolic return of a few refugees in exchange for a collective renunciation of the right of all so that Israel can garner the dividends of peace while keeping the spoils of war.
The climb to Birem's church is as gentle as Ikrit's is steep. But in contrast to the scrub that runs over the Ikrit parish, here the paths are gravelled and neatly trimmed. In its infinite wisdom, the Israeli government long ago turned the destroyed village of Birem into a National Park, housing its own ancient synagogue, which to most eyes looks strangely like a Roman Temple. At the edge of the crumbled stone and wild flowers sits the village cemetery. "We have been allowed to bury our people here since 1967," says Toomi Magzal. Are there any conditions? "No," he laughs. "When it comes to the graveyard, Israel observes the right to return. The only condition is that you have to be dead."
