From Al Nakba to 'Anata: 56 Years of Home Demolitions

I was sitting in a room on the bottom floor of the Ibdaa Cultural Center in Dheisheh Refugee Camp near Bethlehem. With me was a delegation from Berkeley Jews for Palestine (a group of anti-Zionist Jewish Americans), the Director of Ibdaa and a group of youth from the Center. Ibdaa is a cultural center for the youth of Dheisheh Camp.


Al-Nakba

The residents of Dheisheh are from 46 villages which were depopulated by Zionist forces in 1948. There were over 418 villages cleansed of their Palestinian inhabitants in 1948 as nearly 800,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes in what is now the state of Israel. Israelis mark the event as their independence day, but for Palestinians it is Al-Nakba ("The Catastrophe"). Today, there are over 5 million Palestinian refugees spread around the world. Many live in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

Al-Nakba stands as the defining moment in the Palestinian narrative. No other event captures the pain of Palestinians so wholly and unites them so closely. The goal of Ibdaa's Oral History Program is to tell the stories of Al-Nakba and of life in the depopulated villages. The program once included taking groups of children from Dheisheh for visits to their home villages inside what is now Israel. Since the renewed Israeli crackdown on Palestinian movement in 2000, however, the Israeli government has refused to allow the trips and has denied travel permits to the children of Dheisheh. Many of the kids have never seen their home village, although most are less than 20 miles from the camp.

The young girl continued to tell us about her village. She explained that many of the homes there had been occupied by Israelis. Other homes had been demolished. In fact, many of the depopulated Palestinian villages were totally destroyed soon after the war when the state of Israel was created. The new Israeli government quickly passed a series of laws to appropriate the vacated Palestinian land and define the refugees as "infiltrators" that were to be banned from the country. In the meantime, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 194, affirming the right of the 1948 refugees to return to their homes. A right that has yet to be honored.

In Dheisheh, as in other Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, life is as unstable as the conflict itself. The refugees have tried to make the camp as comfortable as possible, erecting cement houses and small gardens where once there were only tents. Many have the deeds to their land inside Israel and the keys to the homes which stood there. Consecutive Israeli governments, however, have refused to honor the Right of Return of the Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948. Meanwhile, the more than 5 million refugees wait for their rights to be addressed.


'Anata

A day after my visit to Ibdaa, I found myself in the village of 'Anata in East Jerusalem watching an Israeli bulldozer tear down the home of a Palestinian family. There were two Palestinian homes demolished on Monday (November 29) and another destroyed the following day. I received a call on Monday morning and within the hour a coworker and I were negotiating our way through the Israeli checkpoints between Bethlehem and 'Anata. We followed the Wall winding through Palestinian land east of Jerusalem and ended up on a hilltop overlooking a small valley and the ruins of several house demolitions lingering on the hillside.

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