The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (39 page)

The human geography of Palestine as a whole was forceably transformed. The Arab character of the cities was effaced by the destruction of large sections, including the spacious park in Jaffa and community centres in Jerusalem. This transformation was driven by the desire to wipe out one nation’s history and culture and replace it with a fabricated version of another, from which all traces of the indegenous population were elided.

Haifa was a case in point. As early as 1 May 1948, (Haifa having been taken on 23 April) Zionist officials had written to David Ben-Gurion that an ‘historical opportunity’ had fallen into their hands to metamorphose Haifa’s Arab character. All that was needed, they explained, was ‘the destruction of 227 houses.’
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Ben-Gurion visited the city to inspect the scene of the intended destruction himself, and also ordered the destruction of the covered marketplace, one of the most beautiful markets of its kind. Similar decisions were taken with regard to Tiberias, where almost 500 houses were demolished, and a similar number in Jaffa and Western Jerusalem.
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Ben-Gurion’s sensitivity here vis-à-vis the mosques was unusual, the exception that proved the rule. Israel’s official plunder did not spare holy shrines, least of all mosques, that were part of the newly acquired possessions.

Until 1948 all Muslim holy sites in Palestine belonged to the Waqf, the Islamic endowment authority recognised by both the Ottoman Empire and
the British Mandatory government. They were supervised by the Supreme Muslim Council, a body of local religious dignitaries, at the head of which stood al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni. After 1948 Israel confiscated all these endowments, with all the properties incorporated in them, and transferred them first to the Custodian, then to the state, and eventually sold them to Jewish public bodies and private citizens.
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Neither were the Christian churches immune from this land grab. Much of the land that churches owned within destroyed villages was confiscated like the Waqf endowments, although unlike the vast majority of mosques, quite a few of the churches remained intact. Many churches and mosques were never properly destroyed, but left to look like ‘ancient’ historical ruins – vestiges of the ‘past’ to remind people of Israel’s might of destruction. However, among these holy sites were some of Palestine’s most impressive architectural gems, and they disappeared forever: Masjad al-Khayriyya vanished under the city of Givatayim, and the rubble of the church of Birwa now lies beneath the cultivated land of the Jewish settlement of Ahihud. A similar masonry treasure was the mosque in Sarafand on the coast near Haifa (not to be confused with the Sarafand in the heart of Palestine where a huge British base was located). The mosque was a hundred years old when the Israeli government gave the go-ahead to have it bulldozed on 25 July 2000, ignoring a petition addressed to the then prime minister, Ehud Barak, beseeching him not to authorise this official act of state vandalism.

In retrospect, however, it was the abuse of their Islamic holy shrines that proved the most painful to a Palestinian community, the large majority of whose members found solace and comfort in the embrace of tradition and religion. The Israelis turned the mosques of Majdal and Qisarya into restaurants, and the Beersheba mosque into a shop. The Ayn Hawd mosque is used as a bar, and that of Zib is part of a resort village: the mosque is still there but owned by the government agency responsible for maintaining the national parks. Some mosques remained intact until the Israeli authorities believed time had released them from the obligation to protect the sanctity of these places. The remains of the Ayn al-Zaytun mosque, for example, were turned into a milk farm as late as 2004: the Jewish owner removed the stone that indicated the founding date of the mosque and covered the walls with Hebrew graffiti. By contrast, in August 2005 the Israeli media, public and politicians castigated their government for its decision to leave in the
hands of the Palestinians the synagogues of the settlements Israel evicted in the Gaza Strip that summer. When the inevitable destruction of these synagogues came about – cement structures from which the settlers themselves had removed all religious items prior to their eviction – the general outcry in Israel reached the skies.

As for the Muslim shrines and Christian churches that survived, these are not always accessible. The church and mosque of Suhmata are still visible today, but if you want to pray there or simply wish to visit these sites you have to cross Jewish farms and risk being reported to the police for trespassing. This is also the case if you attempt to visit the Balad al-Shaykh mosque near Haifa and, equally, Muslims are denied access to the mosque of Khalsa located today in the development town of Qiryat Shemona. The people of Kerem Maharal still refuse to allow access to the beautiful nineteenth-century mosque at the centre of what used to be the village of Ijzim, one of the wealthiest villages in Palestine.

Sometimes access is denied by official manipulation rather than force, as in the case of the Hittin mosque. According to tradition Salah al-Din built this amazing structure in the middle of the village in 1187 to commemorate his victory over the Crusaders. Not too long ago, 73-year-old Abu Jamal from Deir Hanna hoped that through a summer camp for Palestinian children he could help restore the place to its past glory and re-open it for worship. But the Ministry of Education tricked him: its senior officials promised Abu Jamal that if he cancelled the camp, the ministry would donate money for the restoration work. However, when he accepted the offer the ministry sealed the site with barbed wire as if it were a high-security installation. All the stones, including the foundation stone, were then removed by the nearby kibbutzniks who use the land to graze their sheep and cows.

The following is a short registry covering the last decade or so. In 1993 the Nabi Rubin mosque was blown up by Jewish fanatics. In February 2000 the Wadi Hawarith mosque was ruined, two weeks after Muslim volunteers had finished restoring the building. Some restored mosques were the target of sheer vandalism. The Maqam of Shaykh Shehade, in the destroyed village of Ayn Ghazal, was burned down in 2002, and the Araba’in mosque of Baysan was ruined by an arson attack in March 2004. The al-Umari and al-Bahr mosques in Tiberias escaped two similar attacks in June 2004 in which they were badly damaged. The Mosque of Hasan Beik in Jaffa is assaulted regularly by people throwing stones at it, and it was desecrated
once when the head of a pig with the name of the prophet written on it was tossed into its yard. In 2003, bulldozers erased out all traces of the al-Salam (‘Peace’) mosque in Zarughara, half a year after the mosque had been re-erected, while the Maqam of Shaykh Sam’an near Kfar Saba was demolished by unknown assailants in 2005.

Other mosques were turned into Jewish places of worship, as in the iconoclastic days of medieval times. The mosques of Wadi Unayn and Yazur are today synagogues, as is the mosque in the maqam of Samakiyya in Tiberias and in the two villages of Kfar Inan and Daliyya. The mosque of Abassiyya, near Ben-Gurion Airport, was turned into a synagogue, too, but has since been abandoned. It is decorated today with graffiti saying ‘Kill the Arabs!’ The Lifta mosque at the western entrance to Jerusalem has become a
mikweh
(Jewish ritual bath for women).

Recent targets are the mosques of the so-called ‘unrecognised villages’ in Israel; this is the most recent aspect of the dispossession that first began during the Nakba. Since, according to Israeli law, most of the land in Israel belongs to the ‘Jewish people’ from which Palestinian citizens are barred, Palestinian farmers are left with very little space to expand or build new villages. In 1965 the government abolished all infrastructure plans for the urban and rural development of the Palestinian areas. As a result Palestinians, and especially the Bedouin in the south, began to establish ‘illegal’ villages with, of course, mosques in them. Both houses and mosques in these villages are under constant threat of demolition. The Israeli authorities play a highly cynical game with the residents: they are given the option between their houses or their mosque. In one such village, Husayniyya (named after a 1948 destroyed village), a long battle in court saved the mosque but not the village. In October 2003, the authorities offered to leave 13 houses in Kutaymat standing instead of the mosque, which they demolished.

When the international pressure subsided and Israel had put in place clear rules for dividing the spoils, the Committee for Arab Affairs also formalised the official governmental attitude towards the Palestinians left within the territory of the new state, who were now citizens of Israel. Totalling about 150,000, these became the ‘Israeli Arabs’ – as if it made sense to talk about
‘Syrian Arabs’ or ‘Iraqi Arabs’ and not ‘Syrians’ or ‘Iraqis’. They were put under a military regime based on British Mandatory emergency regulations which, when they were issued in 1945, none other than Menachem Begin had compared to Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws. These regulations virtually abolished people’s basic rights of expression, movement, organisation, and equality before the law. They left them the right to vote for and be elected to the Israeli parliament, but this too came with severe restrictions. This regime officially lasted until 1966, but, for all intents and purposes, the regulations are still in place.

The Committee for Arab Affairs continued to meet, and as late as 1956 some of its more prominent members seriously advocated plans for the expulsion of the ‘Arabs’ from Israel. Massive expulsions continued until 1953. The last village to be depopulated at gunpoint was Umm al-Faraj, near Nahariyya. The army went in, drove out all the inhabitants and then destroyed the village. The Bedouin in the Negev were subjected to expulsions up to 1962, when the tribe of al-Hawashli was forced to leave. In the dead of night 750 people were put on trucks and driven away. Their houses were demolished and the 8000 dunam they owned were confiscated and then given to families who were collaborating with the Israeli authorities. Most of the plans the Committee discussed were never implemented for various reasons. They have come to light thanks to the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha.

Had it not been for some liberal-minded Israeli politicians who objected to the schemes, and the Palestinian minority’s own steadfastness in several cases where such plans to expel them were set in motion, we would long ago have witnessed the ethnic cleansing of the ‘remnant’ of the Palestinian people now living within the borders of the Jewish state. But if that final danger seemed to have been averted, the ‘price’ they paid for living in relative physical safety was incalculable – the loss not only of their land, but with it the soul of Palestine’s history and future. The appropriation of Palestinian lands by the government continued from the 1950s onwards under the auspices of the JNF.

It was the Settlement Department in the JNF that decided the fate of the destroyed villages once they had been flattened: whether a Jewish settlement
or a Zionist forest would take its place. Back in June 1948, the head of the department, Yossef Weitz, had reported to the Israeli government: ‘We have begun the operation of cleansing, removing the rubble and preparing the villages for cultivation and settlement. Some of these will become parks.’ As he observed the ongoing destruction, Weitz had proudly reported that he remained unmoved by the sight of tractors destroying whole villages.
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But to the public at large, a very different picture was portrayed: ‘creating’ new Jewish settlements was accompanied by such slogans as ‘making the desert bloom’, while the JNF’s forestation activities were marketed as an ecological mission designed to keep the country green.

Forestation was not a first choice. The selection process did not actually rest on any clear strategy but consisted of ad-hoc decisions. First there were the abandoned cultivated lands that could immediately be harvested; then there were tracts of fertile land that could potentially yield crops in the near future that went to ‘veteran’ Jewish settlements or were set aside for the establishment new ones. As we saw, the JNF had a hard time fending off the competition which came from the kibbutzim movements. They would start cultivating the lands of neigbhouring villages even before they had been given permission to take them over, and then on the basis of the work already carried out would demand ownership. As a rule the feeling in the government was that land first had to be allotted to existing Jewish settlements, then to the building of new ones, and only in the third place be made available for forestation.

In 1950, the Knesset passed the Law for Absentee Property, while the Custodian introduced some order into the way it dealt with the booty, but had not yet made the JNF sole owner. On the way to becoming the exclusive proprietor of Israel’s new forests – almost all planted over the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed in the ethnic cleansing of 1948 – the JNF defeated the Ministry of Agriculture, which naturally sought control over the forestation issue. The state, however, recognised the advantage of giving the JNF a full mandate not only as Israel’s forest-keepers but also as the principal custodian of the lands as a whole on ‘behalf of the Jewish people’. From now on, even on land it did not own, the JNF was responsible for safeguarding its ‘Jewishness’ by prohibiting all transactions with non-Jews, namely Palestinians.

This is not the place to expand on the complex trajectory the JNF followed in its struggle to keep its spoils. Its primary tool, however, was the use
of government legislation. The JNF Law was passed in 1953 and granted the agency independent status as land-owner on behalf of the Jewish state. This law, and a host of others that followed, such as the Law of the Land of Israel and the Law of the Israel Land Authority (ILA), both passed in 1960, all reinforced this position. These were all constitutional laws determining that the JNF was not allowed to sell or lease land to non-Jews. They finalised the JNF’s share in the overall state lands (thirteen per cent) but hid a much more complex reality that enabled the JNF to implement its policy of ‘guarding the nation’s land’ in areas beyond its direct control, simply because it had a decisive role in, and impact on, the directorship of the ILA, which became the owner of eighty per cent of all state lands (the rest being owned by the JNF, the army and the government).