CHAPTER 13
“ON OCTOBER 31, 1948, when I was twenty years old, the Israeli Army came to my village, Ikrit. We received the soldiers as guests. With food, drink, and song.”
“Song? What were you so happy about?”
“We were glad that none of our people had been hurt in the fighting. That the war had not touched the village. Up until then we had had very good relations with the surrounding kibbutzim. We weren’t for Qawukji [the commander of an Arab guerrilla force during the War of Independence] and we weren’t for the Israelis. We were a Christian village, we knew that neither side cared much about us, and we wanted to live. During the week after the Israeli soldiers came, we continued to feed them. Our mothers and wives would draw water from the spring, two kilometers from the village, and bring it to the soldiers to drink. When the soldiers wanted to go to the spring themselves, we showed them the best way, so they wouldn’t tread on the mines that Qawukji’s army had laid. And in fact none of the soldiers was hurt.”
I met with Aouni Sbeit in his home in Rama, a Galilee village of Muslims, Druze, and Maronite Christians. Aouni is sixty-three today, father of eight and grandfather of nineteen. He is a popular folk poet, making a living from composing lyrics for weddings and celebrations, an affable, paunchy, warmhearted man, wearing a white kaffiyeh on his head, against the heat. He leans on a cane, a tractor having run over his foot; Sbeit is now receiving physical therapy. Perhaps he is too tired to go to Ikrit?
“Too tired? For Ikrit?” He laughed, showing a full complement of white teeth.
The car has trouble following the deceptive twists in the road. Low-lying Levantine oaks and carob trees line both sides. Red peppers dry on the roofs of small villages. Aouni Sbeit (who speaks only Arabic) cannot wait for us to reach Ikrit; along the way he begins telling his story, knowing every date and name involved in his tragedy by heart.
“Then, on the fifth of November 1948, the army commander, whose name was Ya’akov Kara, came and said that he had received orders. No one knew who had given them. We did not see the paper. Orders. The children and women and old people are to be evacuated from the village, because the army wants to fight Qawukji’s army, which is still in the area, and doesn’t want civilians to be hurt.
“Officer Ya’akov Kara gave his military word of honor, which is always the truth, and promised that we would leave the village for fifteen days only, and afterward each one of us would return to his home. Each family was allowed to leave one person to guard their house. The priest was also allowed to stay, to guard the church.
“The army itself evacuated us in its vehicles to Rama. Did you hear that? We didn’t flee. The army evacuated us, and we had an agreement with the army that after they finished off Qawukji they would bring us back.
“Fifteen days later we went to the authorities and they said fifteen more days. We returned to Rama and waited. Fifteen days later we again went to the authorities, and they said come back in fifteen more days. On and on. We spent six months in Rama. All the people of Ikrit. They gave us the keys to the houses of people from Rama who had fled.”
“You mean that you lived in the houses of people who had also left their homes?”
“Precisely. That hurts a man at his most sensitive spot. Because what can justify my leaving my house and going to live in someone else’s house? We didn’t know the people of Rama at all. Then it wasn’t like today, where there’s a car and you drive over. Nor did we know where they had disappeared to. They showed us houses and said go on in. We went in. We saw that the houses were already empty. Thieves had entered and taken everything.”
The people of Ikrit were lucky. They had roofs over their heads. The residents of Biram, another Maronite Christian village on the Lebanese border, were also asked by the army to leave their village for a few days, “until hostile forces are cleaned out of the area,” the army explained to them, and they obeyed. They also knew the soldiers who evacuated them. In the weeks preceding the request to leave, the soldiers had lived with the villagers. Every house in the village assigned them a room. They slept and ate together, and the children of Biram, who have grown old in the meantime, still remember those meals, with the rifles leaning against the wall. Before the evacuation, the villagers cleaned their houses and put them in order. Then, one after another, they handed the keys over to the officers.
They left on foot in a long convoy to go to their ancient olive groves, on the mountains overlooking the village. There they lived for two weeks. It was November and there were heavy rains. The families slept on the ground. The lucky, or perhaps the strong, found caves to live in. During the day everyone would gather under the olive trees, gazing down in concern and incomprehension at their village, which military trucks kept entering and leaving. Two weeks later their patience came to an end. A delegation of elders set out for the village to ask the army to return them to their homes, as they had been promised. When they entered the village all seemed to go black—the doors on their homes had been broken. The houses were empty. Shattered furniture lay abandoned in the street. The soldiers they met ejected them, aiming their rifles. “This land is ours now,” they said.
“The betrayal cut us like a knife,” wrote Elias Shakur, a former resident of Biram, in his book Blood Brothers. Shakur was then a young boy. “Father and mother seemed as baffled as children because of that merciless betrayal. I think it was beyond their comprehension.”
We pass by Alkush, a moshav—a Jewish farming settlement—built on the site of the former Arab village of Dir Elkasi. Then we pass another moshav. Even Menahem, the former Kalat Elraheb (“the monk’s fortress”). Aouni Sbeit points all around. “Everything you see around us was ours. All this was Ikrit’s land.” They had had 16,000 dunams, most of it rocky. In the distance we could already see the Ikrit church, a white dome jutting up from the top of a hill.
“We saw that they weren’t going to bring us back,” he continued, “and we decided to turn to the law for help. We went to a lawyer in Nazareth and brought him the deeds. In May 1951 he petitioned the High Court of Justice, and the court began to hear the case in July.
“In July we traveled to Jerusalem. We were perhaps two hundred people from Ikrit. The case was between us and the government, over the question of whether we resided permanently in Ikrit. The court ruled that Ikrit had to be returned to us immediately.”
The High Court of Justice, Israel’s supreme judicial body, did not accept the state’s arguments and ruled in favor of the petitioners. “We believe that the respondents [i.e., the state] can no longer deny that the petitioners are permanent residents,” the court ruled, although it postponed execution of its verdict to a later date. It seemed that a barrier had been lifted and that the villagers would return to their village very soon.
“We danced with joy the entire day. In Jerusalem and in the buses home. We returned to Rama. We began to pack our things. The court said that we were residents of Ikrit! The army came and distributed keys and locks with which to lock the houses we had lived in in Rama, and we made preparations to leave for Ikrit. There were only two cars in Rama, but we were willing to walk. Then a sergeant suddenly appeared and notified us that a letter had arrived from the army to the mukhtar of Ikrit, and in the letter the army notified the mukhtar that Ikrit was now a military zone and no entry was allowed until further notice.”
The army’s maneuver will never be studied in military textbooks. It went like this: In court the army had argued that the villagers were not permanent residents of Ikrit because they had not been in their village when the area was declared a security zone. The High Court of Justice ruled that it was illegal to prevent their return, because the residents of the village had been asked by the army to leave, and for this reason could not have been in their village when it was declared a military zone. The army had lost the battle but was not going to lose the war. Immediately after the court announced its decision, the army got smart and sent the evacuees, who were then in Rama, “exit orders” (expulsion orders in all but name) from Ikrit. In other words, the army addressed the evacuees as if they were still living in Ikrit, as if nothing had happened, and notified them that it had now been decided—for the first time, as it were—to expel them from Ikrit. To the villagers’ surprise, it turned out that not even the court could do anything to block this military ploy—formally, it was a legal and totally legitimate finger on the scales of justice.
“We didn’t know what to do. If the Supreme Court made a decision and the army violated it, the story must be over for us. But we still didn’t give up. Not for a minute. Just as the Jewish people suffered and were persecuted for 2,000 years, and always hoped, until they returned, so we hope also. We still do.”
We pass the rusty sign announcing that this is a military zone. We turn onto a dirt road. The Lebanese border is close by. In Israel’s early days this border was an excuse for evicting no small number of Arab villagers from the area—defense officials feared that the people would try to aid the enemy across the border. They feared that the people of Ikrit and Biram would forge ties with their Christian brothers in Lebanon. Today a Christian militia supplied by the Israeli Army defends the north of Israel from the other side of the border.
Aouni’s son, Halil, jumps from the car and opens a barbed-wire fence for us—a barrier meant to prevent the flight of Yehuda Dari’s cows, which graze there. “The last thing we need is for a cow to escape,” Aouni Sbeit mumbles.
In September 1951 the village of Ikrit was suddenly destroyed by the security forces. All the houses were blown up and the site was plowed. The church, which the destroyers did not mean to blow up, was hit also. The date for leveling the village was carefully chosen—December 25. “What a Christmas present for the village!” Aouni Sbeit sighed. “While we held in our hands a court decision saying that we have a right to return as soon as it is no longer part of a military zone. Why? Because. They wanted us to give up. To hurt us when it hurt most.”
The fate of the people of Biram was no better. They were living in abandoned houses in Jish (called Gush Halav in Hebrew). In September 1953, five years after they had been duped into leaving, the Biramers stood on a hill above their village. Now they call it “the hill of tears” and “the Biram Wailing Wall.” Down below, not far from them, the village of their birth was abuzz with unusual activity. Military vehicles and bulldozers surrounded it, and a company of soldiers walked through the village laying out wires.
The refugees heard a loud explosion and saw their houses fly up in the air. The whole action took only five minutes—brief and efficient. For five minutes the village, with its people looking down from above, quaked and was destroyed. Then the bulldozers began leveling the ruins.
Now the whole area is silent. The air is clear. Tangled thorns sway in the breeze. A small hill, a ruin, with little vegetation, rises up over the plain. Here and there broken stones are scattered about. Above, a single structure—the restored church. We climb up a difficult, rocky path, but here Aouni Sbeit has almost no need of his cane. He skips between the stones and shrubs, using his stick to point out a rusty olive press, a small pool for collecting the olive oil that runs off the press. We step over a path of cut stones, hidden among the thorns and the caper bushes. Aouni’s legs lead him without needing directions—Here was the road that descended from the village. I would go down from here. Here is the well. And from within the deep well grows a magnificent chinaberry tree.
I ask him how he felt when he came here for the first time and saw the ruins.
He turned to me, smiling benevolently at my foolishness. “Let’s trade places. I’m David and you’re Aouni Sbeit. Now write what you felt.” He adds, “Man is not stone, hawajeh.”
He calls me hawajeh, “sir.” You can tell the members of his generation, the generation of defeat, by that hawajeh. Even after forty-odd years they seem not to have recovered from that huge upheaval that undid their lives and turned them from masters of their homes into barely tolerated guests. “… the event that emptied our heads and erased memories from our memory and blurred the contours of our world,” as Emile Habibi wrote in his novel Ahtia. “Beyond their comprehension,” as Shakur said, was this cruel awakening into a morning that was not theirs, the morning of a nation that was at the pinnacle of its new ascent, which had given birth to itself out of cataclysm and had vigorously suckled all the future that was then to be had in the region. They slowly awaken to find themselves bound in the strong cords of ingenious laws, unintelligible to them, and arguments that could not be challenged—historical justice, ancestral right, security needs—yes, who could possibly doubt the right of adversity we had then, but “then” (have I said this already?) is over.
“Returning the villages would weaken faith in Zionism, and create doubts about the justice of its claims,” Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1972. She thus placed above the justice of our claims a huge billboard that said: CAUTION: WE ARE RIGHT! Lutfi Mashour sighed, “That’s what I always say: Our problem is, we’re dealing with Jews.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s our problem. If we had been conquered by someone else … but you were always better bastards than we were, stronger than us, more legalistic than us, more paranoid than us. Take, for example, the Turks. They conquered us and went to hell. They had no culture. What was their culture? Large pots! That’s all they left us here … They didn’t have the brains and the character that you have. With you it is very difficult,” he said, and then grew serious. “You are a very strong nation. Too strong a nation.”
“Here there were figs, and here olives, and here grapes.” Sbeit’s cane waves in the air, drawing orchards and vineyards. “And here was my house.”
Now it is only a mound of wreckage next to the church. Aouni Sbeit’s father had been the village mukhtar, and his house had been the only one with poured concrete. “Father himself chose every stone in the house. When the house was destroyed, people came and stole the stones. Not one remains.” With his cane he straightens a trailing raspberry bush, pacing absentmindedly between the large pieces of dung shat by Dari’s cows in his living room. It shocks him anew each time he sees it.
“If they allow you to return, would you come back here?” I asked Halil, Aouni’s son, who now lives in Haifa. He shakes his head definitively: No. He has already become accustomed to city life. He’s used to living away from his family. He will not return. But his father differs. “If they let me return, I am ready to sleep even on this,” he said, striking a thorn bush with his cane. “Look what a crime they have committed against us. We are refugees in our own homeland. And how often we have asked to return. And how much they promised us. Who didn’t promise us? Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann and Begin and Golda Meir and Ezer Weizman and Moshe Arens. I said to Shimon Peres, ‘Mr. Minister, let’s put the Israeli Declaration of Independence between us and go over it section by section, and let it judge between us.’ Yigal Allon once asked me if the children of Ikrit who were born in Rama still think about Ikrit. I laughed. I, to this day, live in a rented house in Rama. I did not build a house. Because I believe that my sons will be able to return. If you gather together all the children in Rama and ask them where they’re from, the smallest of our children will tell you that they’re from Ikrit. I’ll take you to a pregnant woman, put your ear to her belly and you’ll hear: ‘I’m from Ikrit.’”
Afterward, in his home in Rama, Sbeit shows me a picture that an anonymous Jewish photographer took fifty years ago, “one who used to wander around the Galilee looking for pretty things to photograph.” Aouni’s wife also came to look, and her eyes immediately filled with tears. “Look what we had and where we are now, refugees …” She waved her hand at the bare floor of their rented house, the peeling walls, and fled. The photograph in my hand showed a village blooming with flowers and green with trees: Ikrit when it lived.
Halil: “For Father, Ikrit is memories. It’s his childhood. For me, Ikrit was the escape from the Rama that didn’t want us. Didn’t absorb us. To this day we’re considered refugees there. We’re considered homeless. The people of Rama did not intermarry with us, will not give their daughters to a refugee. To this day—forty-three years later!—they make us feel like strangers. They curse us. Humiliate us. Rama is a very closed society. I have no chance of getting involved in the municipal government. If I tried to get involved, they’d tell me I don’t belong.”
Do the people of Rama act that way because the people of Ikrit moved into their houses when they were exiled? Is it because the people from Ikrit are Christian, while the rest of Rama is Muslim and Druze? Is it because the people of Rama wish—in accordance with instructions they received from somewhere, or of their own volition—to keep the Ikrit refugee problem alive? Halil listens to the questions and nods, but makes no response.
“Will you, despite all that, be a candidate for the Rama village council?”
He smiles. “That’s the other side of the matter. The people of Ikrit won’t support one of their own.”
“?”
“Because they refuse to participate in the elections in any way. It is liable to be interpreted as an acknowledgment that they already belong to Rama and not to Ikrit.”
Today the people of Ikrit are spread all over the country. Yet they hold their religious and family celebrations here, and the whole community gathers. The same holds true for the people of Biram. I heard of a man from Biram, Joseph Elias, who for nineteen years has worked a small piece of land at the edge of the ruined village. He goes there three times a week to water his vegetables. Sometimes, on Saturdays, there is a long line of cars along the road to the two villages. On weekdays you are also likely to find an Ikrit family having a picnic. “They come to take a little of the air here, to renew their strength.” The younger Sbeit laughs.
“You should know,” Aouni explains for the third or fourth time, “that the problem of Ikrit and Biram is different from the problems of other villages and refugees. We did not flee and were not expelled. The army came, was our guest, ate of our bread, drank of our water, and promised to let us return.” His son shakes his head as one who knows that these are but dreams, words worth less than the air that carries them. “They don’t want to return us,” Halil bursts out in the end, “because that will reveal the truth about what happened in ’48. You are afraid to admit that the Palestinian refugees did not flee. They were plundered. If you return us, it will shatter the myth on which you’ve educated each generation of your youth.”
“The government,” I answer, my lips unmoving, “is afraid to return the people of these two villages to their homes, lest it become a precedent.”
“What do I care about your government’s fears?” Halil fumes. “It’s my right to demand justice for myself! Why do I have to deal with the whole refugee problem? That’s a problem you made, not me!”
We descend through the thorn bushes to the cemetery. The mountains around us are covered with green, the Galilee is drunk with spring, and only Ikrit’s hill is nearly bald. As if nature had decided to leave a patch of starkness here. Neither is the hand of man to be seen—the place has been declared a military area, so no one, Jew or Arab, may cultivate the fields, and they have wasted, as if the place is still staring around groggily, still in shock.
In the cemetery Aouni Sbeit shows me the graves of his father and mother. Since 1972 the Ikrit dead have been allowed to be buried in their village, and each family has established a plot of its own. All descendants of the villagers—even if they themselves were not born in Ikrit—are put to rest here. The first to be buried on Ikrit’s land after the eviction was Aouni’s grandfather. When he died, in 1953, his family brought his body and buried it here, in accordance with his will.
“When we left, the army came and asked us what he was doing here. We told them. They said, Now go back and take him out and take him back to Rama. We dug him up and took him back on our shoulders. What were they afraid of,” Sbeit asks, “that he might rise from his grave and sow the land?”
“Evil are those who make history,” said Hegel, but there, on the deserted hill of Ikrit, one could only consider how history makes people evil. I will not list all the promises made to the people of Ikrit and Biram. Promises by Labor governments and Likud governments. All were broken. Menachem Begin wrote to them to say he supported their return, but that it would be delayed because of the security situation. Most of the villages’ land was long ago parceled out among the surrounding Jewish settlements, and parts have been declared nature preserves. A minuscule number of the deportees have accepted the government’s offer of compensation. All of them rejected a proposal to establish new villages for them, because their original lands were not included in the designated area.
In June 1986 cabinet minister Moshe Arens declared his intention of returning the people to their villages soon. The villagers were carried away by a wave of joy and hope. They called Moshe Arens “our new Moses,” and hoped that he would lead them back to their land after forty years of exile. Yet this promise also came to naught—Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir shot it down in a way that was described in the Likud as “a slap in the face for Arens.”
Until 1948, my grandfather and grandmother, my mother’s parents, lived in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of east Jerusalem. It was then a mixed Jewish and Arab neighborhood. When the War of Independence began to intensify, my grandfather, Shalom Vermus, began each night to transfer his religious books and the lighter furnishings to the home of friends in the western part of the city. Afterward the war began to rage around them, and my grandfather and grandmother, with my young mother and her brother, became refugees in their own land. One evening, at the beginning of October 1991, I returned to that neighborhood to meet the Minister of Defense, Moshe Arens, in his office. “There is no justification for preventing the people of Ikrit and Biram from returning to their land. Today there are no security considerations to prevent it. Those who oppose it fear that it will be a precedent that will open a Pandora’s box. I don’t see a precedent here. Ikrit and Biram are special cases.”
I asked him why the Israeli government should not now, with the beginning of the dialogue between the countries of the Middle East, or during the process, make a symbolic gesture and call on the evacuees to return. If it is a precedent, I said, it would be a precedent of goodwill, of generosity, and of self-assurance.
“If it depended on me, I would do it,” Arens said simply. “I think that we need to do it, and I also agree with the idea that now is an especially good time for it. But there is no point in my making such a proposal now, when it is clear to me in advance that it will fail.”
Today, in the estimation of people who know the subject well, the Israeli government could solve the problem with relative ease, to the satisfaction of all sides. They surmise that a majority of the villagers will now agree to accept the compensation the government offers, and that about a hundred families from each village will resettle on land assigned to them. Most of the evacuees realize that their former land will not be returned to them. An old injustice should not be corrected by creating a new one.
“And write that since 1948 there has been no one from Ikrit who has done anything against the country,” Aouni Sbeit intones, suddenly exhausted as we leave the site. “All we did was in accordance with the law. And what did we get? Even a prisoner is better off than we are. A prisoner who is sentenced to ten years knows when it will be over. We don’t know when our imprisonment will end.”
We drove away. Halil got down to open and close the barbed-wire fence, so that Dari’s cows would not escape, so there wouldn’t be a scandal. Aouni, a warm man, all heart, embraced me and said, as if trying to comfort me, “We will return. There is no escaping it. We will return and build houses and plant orchards and vineyards, and compensate ourselves for what we missed all these years. And then you’ll come to visit me.”
I’m sure they will return. It is malicious to keep them from doing so. I know well how this sounds to sober individuals, to the experts, to the systems analysts, to politicians covered with the moss of experience, and to all those analytic brains that anticipated none of the important developments in our region and in the world. In their internal dictionary, the dictionary of life-survival, all the words of suspicion and entrapment and subterfuge are in bold type. They will say that the smallest of concessions will crack the entire line of defense. That Israel’s credibility as a country that sticks to its principles will be harmed if we make even one small retreat. That it is better, even, to stand by one’s errors and injustices, just as long as one does not create untimely doubts as to the justice of our case. Especially, they will say I am naïve.
That may well be, but perhaps the criminal naïveté is that of those who still believe that Israel can completely and permanently ignore the reasonable demands of its Arab citizens. Just as it can, they believe, create a “new order” in the region when it wants to, just as it can always win every war, and will certainly win American support for all it does.
How long will we prevent the Ikrit and Biram evacuees from going home? For how long will we brandish the justice of our 1948? At some point another, new process must begin. And we must fight for it with the only permissible naïveté in the Middle East, scarred naïveté, like that which may be heard in a poem by Yehuda Amichai, who also fought in that war:
In the place where we are right
Flowers will never bloom
In the spring.
The place where we are right
Is trodden and hard
Like a courtyard.
But like a mole, like a plow,
Doubts and loves make
The world crumble.
And a whisper will be heard
Where once there was a house
That was destroyed.