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*Saffuriyya in 1931 |
Saffuriyya
Saffuriyya, larger than the nearest district town of Nazareth, was famous in Roman times as “Sepphoris” with the remains of a coliseum still visible today. Today the hill of Saffuriyya is covered with a pine forest planted by the Jewish National Fund and commemorating such random events as Guatemalan Independence Day. Daher al-Umar's somewhat dilapidated fortress still stands, but it is no longer surrounded by a Palestinian village. The Israeli settlement of Tzippori nestles in the hills, welcoming tourists to visit its historical Roman paradise, with no acknowledgement of the recent history of the ethnic cleansing of a whole village.
Israeli forces occupied Saffuriyya on July 15, 1948, a village with over 4000 Palestinian residents and 55,000 dunams (a dunam is approximately 1/4 acre) of land. Many of the residents fled to camps in the south of Lebanon or farther afield. However, a fact that is often ignored by media and negotiators alike is that numerous residents found themselves living just a few kilometers away. Classified by the state under the oxymoron “Present Absentees,” the people of Saffuriyya built what they believed would be a temporary life on the edge of Nazareth. They were given Israeli citizenship, but while their existence was recognized, their right to the land was not.
“I Was Born Under That Tree Over There”
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| Traditional village visitations in holidays |
Umm Ahmad points across the field to the tree marking the spot where she was born. The tree is the marker because the building is no longer there. Umm Ahmad spends everyday sitting by her husband in the fields of Saffuriyya as he tends the crops. Both are from the village, but Abu Ahmad is paid as a wage laborer by Jewish farmers, and does not benefit from the fruit of the land. Every night they must return to Nazareth just two kilometers away.
For decades the couple have come to work on the land, sheltering from the hot midday sun under a small nylon awning. Last week, the Israeli antiquities police tore down their shelter, because the Palestinians were deemed to be sitting too close to the ancient well of Saffuriyya.
Ziad Awaisy pointed through the locked gate and beyond the trees to the place where his family used to live. Awaisy's immediate family is one of a significant number who ended up in exile just a few kilometers away in the neighborhood of Saffafra on the edge of Nazareth. He, along with other refugees, has been organizing a festival for the residents of Saffuriyya. Needless to say, it is not being held in the original village.
The festival organizers decided to make a video recording the stories of their grandparents and those that remember before 1948. “We brought people back here to the site to film their reactions,” explained Awaisy, “and one Romanian living here came over to us. He started accusing us of trying to set fire to his house. But when we talked further, I saw that it was not this that he was afraid of. Looking at us, he was afraid that we wanted to come and take back our homes.”
The “internal” refugees are struggling to keep their issue on the agenda, as part of the wider campaign for the right of return. “Our issue symbolizes the core of ethnic discrimination and of the violation of Palestinian national rights,” states the National Committee. “Raising awareness for the issue of the internally displaced on the local and international level will spread awareness of the historical international responsibility for one of the most critical issues which will never be outdated.”
Finishing the Job?
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| Remains of a mill (1987) |
Israel mistakenly believed that the residents of Saffuriyya, as part of 100,000 Palestinians in total who were able to remain in the 1948 borders, would simply drift away, or decrease in number. In the current climate, Israeli politicians and Zionist demographers are openly admitting that they were wrong. Now numbering around a million and representing 20% of the Israeli population, Palestinian citizens are a real threat to the Zionist ethnic project.
The topic of transfer becomes an increasingly acceptable subject for mainstream politicians and historians in Israel. This month, the so-called new historian Benny Morris caused an outcry among Palestinians who had once welcomed his history, which questioned the Zionist version of Al-Nakba (the catastrophe – Arab reference to the 1948 displacement). “One wonders what Ben-Gurion - who probably could have engineered a comprehensive rather than a partial transfer in 1948, but refrained - would have made of all this... Perhaps he would now regret his restraint,” wrote Morris in an article in the UK Guardian, Oct 3. “Perhaps, had he gone the whole hog, today's Middle East would be a healthier, less violent place, with a Jewish state between Jordan and the Mediterranean and a Palestinian Arab state in Transjordan.” Such rhetoric from Israelis once believed to be radical reinforces the fears of those who believe that Israel is pursuing a second Nakba, both for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and those, like Umm Ahmad, still living at the heart of 1948 Palestine.
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