Military checkpoint in the Jordan Valley. 17 October, 2023 | International Solidarity Movement | Jordan Valley
Tuesday 17 Oct, an update from the Jordan Valley:
Since Israel waged war on Gaza, on October 7, the situation in the Jordan Valley has deteriorated dramatically.
Military checkpoints are often completely closed, and movements in and out of the Jordan Valley are severely limited. West Bank citizens who are not residents of the Jordan Valley are identified and can be forbidden to enter certain areas or villages in the Jordan Valley. While residents of the Jordan Valley are hindered from moving.
There is also limited gasoline or diesel available and any solidarity activity is prohibited. There was an activity in Khirbet Atuf in the northern Jordan Valley, which was responded to by the occupation army forces with live fire, resulting in the martyrdom of the young man Muhammad Ahmad Bsharat, and more than 20 injuries.
Residents of the Jordan Valley and Bedouin communities are also prohibited from moving after 5 p.m.
There are more than 10 communities and villages that cannot obtain water due to closures and the water deprivation policy.
Israeli settlers also took advantage of the support from Minister Ben Gvir and the state of emergency and began to displace Palestinian citizens.
Queues at military checkpoint, Jordan Valley. Credit to Jordan Valley activists.
Several families in Bedouin communities were displaced, threatened by armed settlers. The settlers attacked, intimidated and destroyed the private property of residents in the Jordan Valley and confiscated some lands.
The situation is difficult, and the communities realize that they need to struggle for survival during this ongoing war against the Bedouins and pastoral communities, also being waged taking advantage of the state of emergency and the continuous crimes against children and civilians in Gaza.
In Mapping Exile and Return: Palestinian Dispossession and a Political Theology for a Shared Future, American Mennonite theologian and aid worker Alain Epp Weaver explores a legacy of Palestinian Christian exile, and struggle for return. The book’s terrain ranges from the ethnically-cleansed villages of the Galilee to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Weaver focuses particularly on contending geographies: how “Palestinians have been ‘abolished from the map,’ in the words of Palestinian cartographer Salman Abu-Sitta,” and the prospect of “counter-cartographies that subvert colonialism’s map-making.”
His book encompasses the work of specialists, like Abu-Sitta’s maps, the writings of Edward Said, the Institute for Palestine Studies’ encyclopedic volume All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, as well as “memory production” by thousands of Palestinians through collaborations like the web archive Palestine Remembered.
“In the face of Zionist rejection of Palestinian refugee return, international indifference, and an ineffectual and compromising Palestinian leadership for whom the refugee question is a source of irritation, Palestinian refugees pin their hopes on memory,” Weaver writes.
Significantly, he also includes extended histories of two key initiatives: the struggles for return by the ethnically-cleansed Christian villagers of Kufr Birim and Iqrit in the Galilee, and Zochrot, an Israeli organization dedicated to “remembering the Nakba in Hebrew.”
Rites of return
The residents of Kufr Birim and Iqrit, Weaver writes, “pioneered and in turn inspired activism on the part of other internally displaced persons (IDPs) inside Israel” through mass mobilizations, as well as “rites of return.”
Through the latter, ranging from personal visits to destroyed family homes to community festivals, like Iqrit’s recent Easter celebrations, villagers “carry on a dual struggle, both against the Israeli state and its institutions that deny their rights to the land and against sedentary tendencies and forgetfulness,” Weaver writes.
Later he likens Zochrot’s public mappings of ethnically-cleansed villages to “at least some practices of Palestinian refugees” as “exilic vigils.”
But at times, Weaver’s heavy-handed application of his own theology, and efforts to find its reflection in Palestinian Christianity, pose a bigger challenge.
His analysis is steeped in the writings of another American Mennonite, John Howard Yoder, popular among Catholic Workers and other Christian activists, as well as Mennonites. Like his Mennonite forebears, Yoder viewed nations and their political institutions critically.
At his most succinct, he told a 1957 Mennonite peace conference near Karlsruhe, Germany, “The state is a pagan institution in which a Christian would not normally hold a position” (John Howard Yoder, Discipleship as Political Responsibility, Scottsdale, Pennsylvania, Herald Press, 2003, p. 25).
Following Yoder’s “theology of galut [exile] as vocation,” Weaver argues for “accepting one’s exilic status, even when one is at home,” and advocates a binationalism “differentiated from the one-state solution.”
Theological cartography
His prescription bears some resemblance to the description of a “very fluid model” of “overlapping claims” in ancient Palestine offered by Hebrew Bible scholar Rachel Havrelock.
And in each case study in the book, Weaver searches “for a theological cartography of land and return in which exile and return function as potentially interpenetrating, instead of irreducibly opposed, realities.”
In his section on Edward Said, Weaver may find what he seeks. In another, he fairly claims, “Abu-Sitta’s maps can (but need not) be interpreted as escaping the statist character of most national maps.”
At a low point, Weaver reproaches recently-retired Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop Elias Chacour, a displaced resident of Kufr Birim and noted writer as well as community leader, for a statement of Chacour’s own, fairly standard Christian belief.
“[N]ow we have a new understanding of the Chosenness,” Chacour wrote in 1999. “Who is Chosen? Man and Woman — every man and every woman — are invited to take part in the divine banquet” (“Reconciliation and Justice: Living with the Memory,” Holy Land, Hollow Jubilee: God, Justice, and the Palestinians, ed. Naim Ateek and Michael Prior (London: Melisende, 1999), p. 112).
This clear opinion “fails to do justice to Chacour’s nuance at other points in his writings,” Weaver states, before divining the position he would prefer Chacour hold instead from his choice of a Bible translation. In such passages, it becomes painfully obvious that what Weaver hopes to find is simply not there.
In 1970, black liberation theologian James H. Cone wrote that “there can be no theology of the gospel which does not arise from an oppressed community.” Theology, Cone added, “cannot be separated from the community which it represents” (James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, Maryknoll, New York, Orbis Books, 2010, p. 5, 9).
Divide and rule
Weaver’s account offers a testimony to both the world’s oldest Christian community’s theological response to its own oppression, and the risks of viewing its struggle through a lens that may, in another context, make perfect sense.
In Kairos Palestine’s recent Easter Alert, Hind Khoury, Sabeel’s vice-president and former Palestinian Authority minister of Jerusalem affairs and Palestine Liberation Organization ambassador to France, writes, “Each one of us is targeted in our very survival and the integrity of our community, as in the integrity of our identity and our culture. Even our memory and our future are being hijacked.”
“One of the latest such laws, for example, decreed that Palestinian Christians are not Arabs in order to further divide and rule and confuse Palestinian cohesive identity,” she added.
Palestinians facing not only occupation and exile, but also denial of their heritage and sectarian attempts to fragment it, may find belonging, identity and nationality more liberatory, for themselves and the world around them, than those of us who share Weaver’s “location within political and theological maps of power and privilege” as “descendant[s] of European immigrants who settled on land claimed by Pawnee and Cheyenne nations,” among a great many others.
And it is the commonality of Palestinian experience and destiny that politically-engaged Palestinian Christians stress, from religious figures like Greek Orthodox ArchbishopAtallah Hanna to boycott, divestment and sanctions organizer Sandra Tamari, who wrote for Mondoweiss last year: “I am uncomfortable with the identity of Palestinian Christian because — thankfully — Palestinians have not fallen into sectarian traps that divide along religious lines.”
“We must create spaces for listening to the broad spectrum of Palestinian stories,” she added. “We cannot do that by excluding the majority of Palestinians who happen to be Muslims.”
Nor, while Israel’s sectarian legislation and attempts to recruit Christians into its army, and what the Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land yesterday called “a wave of anti-Christian fanaticism and violence” by Israelis continue, is it likely to happen through the detachment Yoder suggested and Weaver champions.
Instead most Palestinians, regardless of faith, may find more promise in the “firm national position of the Christians in refusing to join a military that exercises violence against the rights of the Palestinian people,” expressed Friday by Archbishop Hannah and retired Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, and in the Easter sentiments of Sabbah’s successor, current Patriarch Fouad Twal: “We are the rightful/lawful owners, and you will hear our voice before all governments worldwide.”
Recording the testimony of Nakba survivors is essential for educating future generations of Palestinians, say oral historians. (APA images)
Tucked into a quiet basement suite in the main building of the immaculate Islamic University of Gaza campus, the Oral History Center could at first be mistaken for a bursar or registrar’s office.
But its stacks of metal filing cabinets may contain more memories per square meter than any other place in the occupied Gaza Strip.
Researcher Nermin Habib said that the center conducted interviews with those who had witnessed the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the ethnic cleansing ahead of Israel’s foundation in 1948, as well as the Naksa (setback), Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and Sinai in 1967.
“We have already conducted 1,500 oral interviews and archived audio files from them,” Habib added. “A meeting can last anywhere from half an hour, to two or three hours. We can also have follow-up meetings.
“We have also published 120 [interviews] in written form. In the future, we plan video interviews. We hope to use them to produce a documentary film about the history of Palestine.”
Launched as part of the university’s faculty of arts in 1998, the Oral History Center has a staff of experienced field researchers and recent graduates from the university’s departments of history, press and media, and social studies.
“It is by experience, by relationships,” said Habib. “We built the archive from scratch. There is no systematic reference center for such information in Gaza.”
The Oral History Center researches a number of fields. Beyond displacement and refugee life, it has programs on Palestinian regions, folklore, politics and culture, as well as Israeli violations of Palestinian rights.
“We are trying our best to maintain our Palestinian identity and Palestinian heritage, customs and traditions, like food and dress, after the Nakba,” said Habib. “Oral history has links with all fields of knowledge, like folk medicine. It’s part of our work as historical researchers to convey this information.
“We seek to document the history of the Palestinian people and the main events that have shaped the Palestinian cause.”
The Gaza Strip has the highest proportion of refugees of any territory in the world. Few aspects of life, from the economy and politics, to the broad range of local foods and dialects from elsewhere in Palestine, are unaffected by the Nakba, during which approximately 750,000 Palestinians were displaced by Zionist forces and hundreds of villages and cities depopulated.
The Israeli army expelled 400,000 to 450,000 more Palestinians during the Naksa in 1967, according to the Palestinian refugee advocacy group BADIL.
By the end of 2011, at least 7.4 million Palestinians had been displaced, 66 percent of a global Palestinian population of 11.2 million, making them the world’s largest and longest-standing group of refugees, according to a recent survey by BADIL.
But with the 1948 ethnic cleansing more than 65 years in the past, the ranks of those who witnessed it firsthand, in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere, are quickly declining.
“We started thinking about how the generation that survived the Nakba are leaving us,” said Haidar Eid of the Oral History Project, another effort to collect accounts of 1948.
The project team has recorded 64 hours of interviews, Eid said. Time to complete the rest is running out.
“Most of these people are dying. For the project, they are supposed to have been at least ten when the Nakba happened. So we are talking about people in their seventies and eighties.”
“One of the major demands of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is the implementation of United Nations Resolution 194, which clearly calls for the return of all Palestinian refugees to the lands, villages and towns from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and their compensation,” Eid said. “With the Oral History Project, we are supporting this demand and making it real. We move from ethnic cleansing as an abstract term into the practicality, the life itself.
“An interesting question we sometimes ask is whether they would accept any solution that would compromise their right of return. There is a consensus among all the refugees we’ve interviewed that no compromise on the right of return would be accepted. For them, that is not a solution.”
Gaza’s Oral History Project works in cooperation with Palestine Remembered, an online archive of information on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the Israeli organization Zochrot, which advocates the return of Palestinian refugees. Eid called this “a form of co-resistance” as opposed to projects which normalize Israel’s ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine.
“The onslaught of normalization projects has taken place at the expense of two-thirds of the Palestinian people who are refugees,” he added, drawing a distinction with other kinds of cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis. “1948 is the original sin, rather than 1967, on which these projects are all based.”
Young volunteers conduct most of the Oral History Project’s interviews. Many belong to the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel, PACBI’s youth affiliate.
“Revisiting the trauma”
“It’s tiring, I must tell you,” Eid said. “I have been avoiding recording with people myself, because it’s extremely difficult. Revisiting the trauma is not easy. But they would be very happy to talk about everything before 1948.”
Oral History Project interviews consist of three sections: Palestine before 1948, its ethnic cleansing and refugee life.
“We ask about mundane things, the daily life of people in the village or city, weddings, funerals and coffee shops,” Eid said. “We ask if the people still have a thobe [a traditional garment] or anything from the village. They usually love it.
“When they come closer to the moment of truth, when the person was forced from their village, it’s heartbreaking. Many start crying. They can give you minute details about the strangest things.”
Accounts can be not only emotional, but brutal as well. “Those Palestinians who refused to leave Palestine were basically massacred,” Eid said.
“This is the embodiment of the Zionist dream of creating a state with a Jewish majority. To guarantee that, you need to have a process of either ethnic cleansing or genocide.”
A refugee himself, Eid cited his own background to illustrate the importance of oral history to the Palestinian narrative.
“I’m from a village called Zarnuga, which is on the outskirts of Ramle [in present-day Israel],” he said. “I found only three pictures of Zarnuga. Only three.”
“The history of the Tantura massacre relies heavily on oral history. Now people know that a massacre took place in the Tantura village, about 30 meters south of Haifa, based on recorded oral history,” Eid added.
Oral history also has an important role in the continuity of Palestinian culture. “This work has a lot of benefit for new Palestinian generations,” said Nermid Habib. “It allows them to know that what their grandparents were doing,”
Israel “trying to whitewash”
On 12 August, a number of Palestine solidarity groups issued an open letter protesting an international conference on oral history planned by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for June 2014, calling for oral historians to boycott it.
PACBI endorsed the letter, and Eid and more than 350 others working in the field of oral history have signed it.
“Israel is trying to whitewash and beautify its image,” Eid said. “One of the questions that we want to raise here in Palestine, as academics and also as refugees, is whether the Nakba will be part of the conference, whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 will be addressed. I think this is a rhetorical question, the answer to which we know.”
Participation in the conference by oral historians from the Gaza Strip is out of the question. Most Palestinians are banned from entering present-day Israel. The 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law even criminalizes the presence of Palestinian refugees in Israel.
But through these longstanding exclusions, Israel may inadvertently highlight the relevance of the work on refugees, as well as the darker elements of its history and society.
“The Zionist narrative has been the recognized narrative in the West,” Eid said. “Before 1948, there was nothing. There was a gap between 1948 and 2,000 years before that.
“We are helping to provide an alternative to it. It’s part of what we call the counter-narrative.”
“The stories of the old are more confident than the history books,” Habib said. “They witnessed the events themselves. There are written histories as well. It’s essential to add a new kind of reference.”
22nd August 2013 | International Solidarity Movement, Ramallah Team | Beit Hanina, Occupied Palestine
On the morning of the19th August, two hundred soldiers in thirty-eight jeeps and with two military dogs dismantled several tents housing the Tal ‘Adasa Bedouin community in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina.
Destroyed homes and furniture in front of the Apartheid Wall (photo by ISM)
At around 6am, Israeli soldiers surrounded the Bedouins tents, pointing guns at the fifty-three residents, which includes twenty-eight children. The family members were separated into three groups, always under the threat of guns, and were not allow to move for three hours. Children were not permitted to go to the bathroom nor to have anything to drink or eat.
At 9am, two armored bulldozers invaded the camp, destroying all the tents, animal facilities and furniture. The two military-trained dogs attacked the sheep and goats of the Bedouin, causing them to scatter all around. The Bedouins, worried about losing their flocks, ignored the soldiers orders and ran after them, managing to bring them back.
Three hours later, the soldiers left the area but before fining the community with 70,000 NIS for use of the bulldozers and – according to Israeli authorities – for illegally occupying the land. One of the eldest men of the community was told by Israeli soldiers that they have to clear the area within the next ten days, otherwise they will be arrested.
Destroyed Bedouin homes (photo by ISM)
The Red Cross and Palestine Red Crescent personnel visited the community after the demolitions and provided the Bedouins with nine tents. However, when international activists visited the community, there were only twenty-eight people left. Most of the children were moved to Jericho where they won’t be able to continue their schooling as they are already registered in the schools located in Beit Hanina area.
Surrounded by mountains of rubble and damaged furniture piled up around the area Abo Hosean Kaabna stated; “We have been living in Beit Hanina for over 60 years, since 1948 after being forcibly displaced from Al Khalil during the Nakba in 1948”. “I have been taking care of that olive tree for 16 years”, continued with deep sorrow on his face and tears in his eyes, pointing out a large tree in front of him.
If the threats of the Israeli authorities are carried out, next Wednesday, the soldiers will go back and arrest the remaining Bedouins, as the community has no intention of leaving the area.
“Please, don’t forget us. This is not finished yet, we will have to face other problems later. Our community will have to look for another place to live but we don’t know where we could go and families will be forced to be separate again”, said Abu Hosean Kaabna.
This Bedouin community received a demolition order last June and since that time they have been expecting the order to be enforced, without knowing the exact date that their homes would be destroyed.
The Tal ‘Adasa Bedouin community has been living in Beit Hanina for over 50 years after being displaced from Hebron and Beer Seba areas during the 1948 Nakba. Despite living within the Jerusalem boundaries, residents of this community only hold West Bank IDs. In 2006, the Annexation Wall was constructed to the east and west of the community, isolating it from the rest of the West Bank. Israeli authorities rarely issue them permits to cross Qalandiya checkpoint and access the West Bank, cutting them off from villages such as Bir Nabala and Ram, where they have family relatives.
For nearly the past twenty years Israeli officials have attemped in several occasions to force them off their land. However, even after the Israeli forces demolished their houses, residents of Tal ‘Asada remain steadfast on the land.
2 September 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
Demolishing tents donated by the UN
Caterpillar Bulldozer demolishing tents donated to the residents of Susiya as emergency aid by the U.N.
On August 28 Israeli occupation forces demolished tents donated by the United Nations (UN) in the Palestinian village of Susiya in the South Hebron hills. This is the second similar demolition within three months.
Caterpillar Bulldozer demolishing tents donated to the residents of Susiya as emergency aid by the U.N.
Displacement in Zenuta
Israeli bulldozers entered the Palestinian village of Zenuta in the South Hebron Hills Tuesday morning and demolished water cisterns, residential dwellings, and sheep stables, devastating the small community of only 7 families.
In total, 4 water cisterns, 2 caves, 2 houses, and 6 stables were destroyed. Zenuta is a small village of 7 families with a herd of 400 sheep. The army destroyed the houses of 2 families, each with 7children, as well as 6 stables holding sheep.
Perhaps most devastating of all in a region starved for water, the army bulldozed the village’s cisterns, holding water collected from winter rains. The cisterns cost NIS 15,000 each, an incredible toll amounting to about a year and half’s wages for the average Palestinian worker in the area. For more information click here.
Palestinian children n front of their destroyed home in Zenuta, August 28 2012 (Operation Dove)
Displacement in the Judean Desert
On the 29 of August, 4 Bedouin families were targeted. They live far inside the Judean Desert, east of Deis Salah and near Bethlehem. They also faced demolitions 2 months ago. All their structures were demolished including tents provided by international agencies. Israeli authorities said they had to leave because they lived in the Israeli firing zone 914.
Abu Sarah is a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).
