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Special
Features:
Portraits of Palestinian Refugees
Stealing the River, ‘Trespassing’ on Our Own Land
Hussein and Ghada Mubaraki
(father and daughter) - Abu Snaan, 1948 Palestine
By Isabelle Humphries*
What did military government mean? The
military rule was made because of the people who fled… If there wasn’t
military rule we could have gone home. They made the military government so
that all people were [permanently] exiled from their villages.
- Hussein Mubaraki
Like approximately 300,000
other Palestinian refugees, Hussein Mubaraki and his daughter Ghada live
within a few kilometres of their family village. Classified as ‘Present
Absentees’, while free to live in Israel, the Mubaraki family are not
allowed to live on their ancestral lands in the village of Al-Nahr in the
Western Galilee.
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Depopulated village of Saffuriyya. (source:palestineremembered.com)
Al-Nahr. Fourteen kilometers north-east of Akka stands a
tall palm tree on the site of what was once the small village of
Al-Nahr. Nearby one can see the remains of two of the village
houses, a grave that was part of the village cemetery, and the
cactus and fig trees that remind the passerby that Palestinians
lived here. Al-Nahr (the river), together with its twin
village Al-Tall (the hill) and several other villages in
the area were destroyed and depopulated on 20-21 May 1948 in the
second phase of Operation Ben-Ami. Ac cording to Israeli
historian Benny Morris, the commander of the Carmeli Brigade
that executed this operation ordered his battalion commanders to
“attack in order to conquer, to kill among the men, to destroy
and burn the villages of Al-Kabri, Umm al-Faraj and Al-Nahr”.
According to Morris, this razing of the villages was done “both
to punish the villagers... and to make sure the villagers could
and would never return.” [Morris (1987), The Birth of the
Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947- 1949. Cambridge Univ.
Press, p.125]
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Between 1948 and 1966 all
Palestinians remaining in the new Jewish state lived under military rule,
bound by curfews and geographic limits just as the Palestinians of the 1967
occupied territory are today. Permission to go beyond such boundaries – even
to visit family – required lengthy waits for permits which were very often
refused. It was this tight military enclosure – resulting in the killing,
injury and imprisonment of those who dared to trespass – that prevented the
return of the refugees, even those carrying Israeli ID cards and
citizenship.
Ghada was born in 1958, 10
years after the occupation, in the coastal town of Akka. With the vast
majority of the original Palestinians of Akka displaced to Lebanon or
further afield, in 1958 many of the Palestinians in Akka were internally
displaced like the Mubarak family. The inhabitants were crowded into the Old
City as Jewish immigrants moved into the homes of the depopulated newer
neighborhoods.
There was never a time when
Ghada was unaware of where her father Hussein’s family was from. She grew up
on stories of al-Nahr, its water (the name means river in Arabic), its
fertile lands, the orange trees. And with that were the indescribable
memories. Her aunt, her father’s younger sister, was only 12 years old as
they fled the village. She was carrying the youngest brother, a newborn, an
uncle whom Ghada would never get to know; for as they fled the child was
shot in its older sister’s arms. Like many families taking flight, they had
no choice but to bury the baby and carry on their way.
Sitting on his sofa in Abu
Snaan village Hussein pulls out photocopies of the title deeds (tabo)
to his family land, his first Israeli
identity card which named his place of birth as al-Nahr in Hebrew script,
and even correspondence of his father with British Mandate Authorities.
Hussein Mubaraki has kept all the evidence of the 77 dunams of orchards and
arable land that they owned within the 6000 dunam village.
Unlike the village of
Saffuriyya (see Ziad Awaisy profile),
only a handful of al-Nahr’s inhabitants
managed to remain in the Galilee. I ask Hussein why he thinks his father Ali
did not end up in Lebanon.
The people who were old back then they
said this – ‘There were people when the Turkish came here, and the people
remained in their homes. And when they waved the white flag…there wasn’t a
problem… And the Turkish went and the British came and the people who raised
a white flag stayed in their homes. When the Jewish came they recognized
neither white nor black flag! They wanted the land. Why?-to bring the Jews
from outside.
In early months and years,
Palestinians on either side of the border did not know what would happen – a
new war? New expulsions? There were indeed further expulsions – in 1949 some
700 refugees were forced onto trucks in Kafr Yassif by the army. Hussein’s
parents were taken from their shelter in Abu Snaan village (next to Kafr
Yassif) and placed behind the iron fence in which refugees to be deported
were gathered. It was only after intervention by a local leader that they
were some of the lucky few who escaped this transfer.
 Even
in such frightening circumstances, people continued to resist in whatever
way they could, even if it meant, as in the case of many political
activists, that they risked their own expulsion.
In Kafr Yassif there were
communists. When they put the people in the army trucks they came out and
lay down in front of the trucks to prevent them from sending people away…
[But to no avail] we were just 150,000 Arabs left here then…
Ghada was brought up hearing
the story of how in the first months of exile, her grandfather watched as
bulldozers dug up his trees before his own eyes. Her grandfather and father,
like all Palestinians remaining in Israel, were forced into the only work
available – manual labour for Jewish employers – in their case being forced
to work on their own land for the benefit of Jewish companies.
You saw our land today?
Did you see the bananas? They make gold from our land – that’s land with
water! They came from Europe and it was free for them! They took our land
and now I must buy bananas and eggs from them!! We pay money for the fruits
of our land! He’s a king and we are nothing.
The words of her grandfather
and his watching of the destruction of “our land” echo today in Ghada’s head
as we get out of the car and stand at a locked gate trying to reach the land
which is now deemed ‘private’.
‘How did he feel as he
stood here back then? I shiver when I think of it… All his life he kept the
‘tabo’ [land deed] and he said; “Take care after I die that it’s your
right, this land is your right, it’s for you, for all the family; maybe one
day they'll give it back to us. It was his dream you know that maybe he
would come back one day to his village."
Under military rule the only
day of the year that Palestinians in Israel were allowed to roam the land
freely was the day of their Nakba – the day when Israelis celebrate
‘independence’. As a child she recalls the whole family going to drink water
from the stream and to pick fruit on this day. Her grandmother would
describe every part of the land to her – where they slept, where they ate,
where they sat.
 And
then one day the family came and discovered that the water had been diverted
to the neighbouring moshav (Israeli agricultural settlement). In the early
1970s – although military rule over Palestinian citizens had ended, Israel
found other ways of keeping the refugees from even visiting, let alone
returning, to their lands and villages. One Nakba Day visit, internally
displaced villagers of al-Nahr found a locked gate and soldiers barring
their way.
How the people cried when they stopped us…. They didn’t
let us go inside. I was about 11 or 12 years… at that age how I felt sad… I
belonged to this place… Even though I wasn’t born here, but I felt that they
had taken something from me, it’s my right, this land is my right.
Although born a decade after the Nakba, the village was
always something that belonged to Ghada. She watched her father greeting the
other people of the village whenever he saw them, always talking about life
in al-Nahr. She recalls as a young girl becoming angry and shouting at her
father – ‘Coward – why did you leave our village?’ And then my father
explained to me slowly and quietly how they had no choice – there was
nothing they could do.’
Despite the end of the military rule that her parents had
suffered, growing up in Akka and attending school in the 1970s was not an
easy time. Born into an Egyptian family living in Akka during the British
Mandate, Ghada’s mother Nefisa was active in the Communist Party during the
1950s, leading women’s demonstrations and at times arrested for her
activities. With the example of her mother and father, Ghada learned about
Palestine, the Nakba and to struggle for her rights as a Palestinian in
Israel – yet she quickly realised this was something that many of their
neighbours were too frightened to do.
They [her parents with the Communists]
went to all the houses and said ‘Don’t put
your vote for the Zionist parties.’ People - they were afraid you know and
they didn’t like … the Communist people… And my mother she visited people;
she tried to convince them not to be afraid of the Israelis. And that’s how
she was – very strong.
Under pressure and threats from all sides - from Israeli
security police to charities to Jewish employers - Palestinians in Israel
were subjected to a new Israeli second-class identity. Those who questioned
it faced severe penalties. Enrolling at the Terra Sancta school in Akka, the
young Ghada discovered that she would be punished for even saying that she
was from al-Nahr – ‘You are an Israeli!’ she was told sharply by the head
teacher. History teachers could not teach about Palestine (and still can’t)
– teachers with Communist affiliations knew they could be fired. Ghada
recalls demonstrations when two teachers were dismissed by the Ministry of
Education for ‘political activity’.
Despite the dangers, politics and Palestine were always
part of her life. Demonstrations and strikes continued – ‘I remember so
many’ – from a funeral parade for Egyptian leader Nasser, to protesting
assassinations of Palestinian leaders to a march against the Akka visit of
Meir Kahane, a Zionist leader who advocated the transfer of the Palestinians
who remained.
Married to a fellow activist in Nazareth, sadly Ghada was
widowed at a young age and returned with her young son to live with her
parents. By this stage her family had moved to Abu Snaan village – a village
which was home to many internal refugees and crucially for Hussein, where he
could buy a small piece of land which was impossible in Akka. ‘For him he
missed the land, to be part of it.’
Today Ghada’s son, Hussein and Nefisa’s grandchild, lives
in Sweden. But Ghada has no doubt that he will always know where he comes
from, his heritage and his rights. For this is what she brought him up to
know and to struggle for.
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* Isabelle Humphries has worked with various Palestinian
human rights NGOs on both sides of the Green Line and is currently
completing doctoral research on internally displaced Palestinian refugees.
Contact:
isabellebh2004@yahoo.co.uk |
