August 11, 2001
Today was a day of visits, one right after the other. The first was to al-Zahra'a, a women's organization in Sakhneen which is trying to deal with many of the issues affecting women in Palestinian Israeli society. It seems that the problems are compounded here, as women are faced with not only daily discrimination as second-class citizens in Israel, but also because of the sexism of retro-traditional Arab communities. She confirmed what we had heard from others before, that the status of women among Palestinians within Israel is often lower than it is in Palestine. Nevertheless, the organization has been able to engage in quite a few initiatives.
Dr. Uri Davis describes himself as “a Jew born in Palestine”.
We then found our highlight of the day - or rather, he found us. Dr. Uri Davis is, in his own words, "A Jew born in Palestine," (born in 1943, he likes to point out that his statement is both technically and also ethically correct). An academic and a human rights activist, Dr. Davis began to explain to us - patiently and clearly - how it is that Israel has established a racist state with a sheen of credibility. An example: the settlements that surround Sakhneen are all-Jewish. Arabs cannot live there - but it doesn’t say that anywhere. Instead, rules use other terms to exclude Arabs. Some state that you can live there if you are eligible for "Aliya" (Jewish return to the land); some require evidence of military service (generally not open to Arabs except for the Druze minority), or you will "fit in socially" with the rest of the residents (i.e. you are Jewish). He has spent much of his recent activist time with an organization called Al-Beit which uses the court system to find cracks in the system, hoping to establish precedents that may change the face of the land. He has used the legal tools at his disposal to move an Arab family into an all-Jewish settlement that was built on their family lands.
Large stones like these are often the sign of a destroyed Palestinian village. An Israeli Jewish only town sits in the distance.
After talking with us, he headed off to the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa and left us in the hands of the Committee for the Defense of the Internally Displaced, an organization that works with the Palestinian population who were expelled from their villages in the 1948 War but remained within what became Israel. Like all Arabs here, they lived from 1948 to 1966 under military rule (similar to how Palestinians in the Occupied Territories live today, a system perfected in Israel proper - according to Dr. Davis). Most of the internally displaced have since been integrated into their adopted villages, but many still dream of returning home. Our host took us to his family’s former village of Mia'ar - nothing but rubble abutting an all-Jewish town (built on Mia'ar's fields). He has spent a great deal of time gathering oral histories from the people of the village, as well as the Israeli soldiers who carried out the expulsion and destruction of the village. Their stories are the same except for one point - the villagers say that they left the older people of the village gathered in one house at the edge of the village since they couldn't run fast enough to escape to the hills. They returned to find them all shot and killed. The Israeli soldiers deny this part of the narrative. He has also found that most of the soldiers are willing to talk to him quite openly - until he mentions the desire to return and rebuild the village, at which point they tend to clam up. There seems to be a very clearly-drawn line, even for those Palestinians who still live in Israel and have citizenship.
Ten percent of the Arab citizens of Israel live in unrecognized villages like these. Legally speaking, they are considered squatters on their own land.
Our next visit was to the village of 'Arab al Na'im, one of the unrecognized villages in which Palestinian Israelis live. There are approximately 100,000 people living in them, totalling 10% of the Palestinian Israeli population (most of them are in the Negev, but there are many in the Galilee as well). They live in shacks like we had seen in Bedouin encampments, without water or electricity or sewage. These villages mostly predate the 1948 War, but for whatever reason they were not recognized as valid by the Israeli government and were zoned for other purposes - agricultural land, Jewish residences, etc. People in unrecognized villages are not allowed to build permanent homes; when people have tried to improve their conditions with, for example, a stone wall, they have had their homes bulldozed. This village, however, is better-off since the Association of Forty finally won this village official recognition. While they now have a few communal water tanks (supplied from a European NGO), they are still waiting for infrastructure such as electricity and roads. Our guide pointed out that these people pay the same taxes as their Jewish neighbors, so they should receive the same benefits as any other municipality. The visit was quite odd, though, as we didn’t meet with anyone in the village and were told that people in 'Arab al Na'im often don't like their photos taken. Suddenly we felt like we were on a "disaster tour" of Israel. That uncomfortable feeling combined with depression about their living conditions in a way that made us feel ashamed. Some people on the trip began to comment how unaware they had been about the history and living situation of Palestinian Israelis - how severe and unjust.
A photo with our host family in the Golan Heights.
Our final stop for the day was the Golan Heights (which Israel annexed in the 1970s). We arrived at our hosts and noted the flag on the wall - not the Palestinian, but perhaps the Iraqi, we thought. It turned out to be Syrian, of course - the Golan Heights belonged to Syria from 1948 until 1967 when Israel captured it and expelled most of its population of 150,000 and levelled most of their villages. The reason given has often been that the Syrians were shelling Israeli communities in the north from the heights of their mountains (the tallest in the region). While the Syrian shelling hasn’t been disputed, the cause of it has - some say Israelis attacked first in most of those cases - and others have supposed that the extremely rich land and water resources of the Golan are the real reason. The Arabs here - 18,000 - are mostly Druze (an offshoot of Islam) and are fiercly loyal to Syria (one of the few Arab nations that treated the Druze well). They barely outnumber the Israelis who have since moved into the area - 15,000 - and live in one of the five villages remaining from 1967. Their status is similar to that of Arab Jerusalemites who have Israeli ID Cards but not citizenship or passports (they were offered Israeli citizenship, but most refused out of allegiance to Syria).
We stayed with a lovely Druze family and their two children where we drank Matte - a "traditional" Golani beverage (yerba matte, drunk as tea with sugar, sucked through a straw/sieve-spoon contraption, and passed clockwise around the circle at least two times) brought here one hundred years ago by a few of their number who ventured off to Argentina.