BIRAM, Israel:
Biram's cemetery, nestling amid apple and olive trees in the rolling blue hills
of the Upper Galilee in northern Israel, is carefully tended each day by Abrahim
Iassa, 68, even though the village it once served no longer exists.
The 1,000
Christian inhabitants of Biram were asked to leave their homes by the Israeli
army in October 1948 - a few months after the establishment of the Jewish state
- while soldiers cleared the area of enemy forces. Today, 54 years later, they
are still waiting for permission to return.
Iassa is
increasingly pessimistic about his chances. "I'll be honest," he says. "I think
there is only one way they will let me back to my village - and that is in a
coffin."
A year ago,
after decades of promises from Israeli leaders that the villagers would be
allowed to return, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon closed the door on their hopes.
He said the claims of Biram and Ikrit, another Christian village in the same
situation, had to be rejected on security grounds and because they would set a
precedent for the right of return.
He was assumed
to be referring to the fact that both villages are close to the border with
Lebanon and that the fate of nearly 4 million Palestinian refugees from the 1948
war now living in the camps of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria has yet to be decided.
The fear of Israeli politicians is that these Palestinians will claim a right to
return to 400 destroyed villages in what is now Israel.
But unlike
these refugees, the villagers of Biram and Ikrit live inside the Jewish state
and hold Israeli citizenship. Today the total number of internally displaced
Palestinians is estimated at 250,000, a quarter of Israel's Arab population.
What
distinguishes the cases of Biram and Ikrit from other destroyed Palestinian
villages, however, is that the Israeli state admits both that the inhabitants
never resisted the advancing soldiers and that they were given an explicit
promise by the army that they would be allowed to return.
After the
evacuation, many of Biram's inhabitants moved a short distance away to the
village of Jish waiting for the all-clear from the army. When they heard
nothing, they turned to the courts and began the long legal battle that
continues to this day.
The High Court
backed them in 1951, ordering that they be restored to their homes. But before
the order could be enforced, the area was sealed off as a military secure zone.
Days later, says Toomi Magzal, 74, the villagers watched from Jish as their
homes were blown up by the army.
Today all that
is left standing are the church and the cemetery: the latter was returned to
them in 1967. The ruins of their homes were long ago incorporated into a
national park. Park signs in English and Hebrew tell of the ancient Jewish
community of Baram but make no mention that an Arab village ever existed here.
The cases of
Biram and Ikrit are likely to be a thorn in the Israeli authorities' side for
some time to come, however. The government has been ordered to pay compensation
to the villagers, although most of the villagers insist they want their land
back, not money.
There is also
mounting international pressure to right the historical injustice. But the
government is unlikely to give in. As one official told the daily Ha'aretz
newspaper this year: "No government could ever give land back to Arabs. That is
a sad, but real, political truth."
Magzal says
that although the villagers have scattered as far away as Nazareth, Haifa and
Jerusalem, they and their descendants have not forgotten their connection to
Biram.
Living in
neighboring Jish, he says, has been particularly difficult. "I still feel like a
refugee all these years later. Each day I see my village but cannot return
there." He adds: "How can Israel say our rights are not important because they
are 50 years old when they claim rights to this land from 2,000 years ago?"
The writer reports from Israel for the Egyptian-based Al
Ahram Weekly. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.
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