The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (41 page)

The home page of the JNF’s official website showcases the agency as being responsible for having made the desert bloom and the historical Arab landscape look European. It proudly proclaims that these forests and parks were built upon ‘arid and desert-like areas’, and that ‘Israel’s forests and parks were not always here. The first Jewish settlers in the country, at the end of the 19th century, found a desolate land with not a mite of shade.’

The JNF is not only the creator of Israel’s ‘green lungs’, it is also their preserver. The JNF declares that the forests are there to provide recreation for the benefit of all citizens of Israel and to make them ‘ecologically aware’. What visitors are not being told is that in addition the JNF is the principal agency whose job it is to prevent all acts of commemoration at these ‘forests’, let alone visits of return, by Palestinian refugees whose own houses lie entombed under these trees and playgrounds.

Four of the larger and most popular picnic sites that appear on the JNF website – the Birya Forest, the Ramat Menashe Forest, the Jerusalem Forest,
and the Sataf – all epitomise, better than any other space today in Israel, both the Nakba and the denial of the Nakba .

Moving from north to south, the Birya Forest is located in the Safad region and covers a total of 20,000 dunam. It is the largest man-made forest in Israel and a very popular site. It conceals the houses and the lands of at least six Palestinian villages. Reading through the text on the website and simply highlighting what it includes and excludes, none of the villages of Dishon, Alma, Qaddita, Amqa, Ayn al-Zaytun or Biriyya are ever mentioned. They all disappear behind the descriptions the website gives of the forest’s wonderful charms and attractions: ‘No wonder that in such a huge forest one can find a plethora of interesting and intriguing sites: woods, bustans, springs and an old synagogue [namely a small piece of mosaic that may or may not be an old synagogue, as the area through the ages was frequented by the Orthodox Jews of Safad].’ In many of the JNF sites, bustans – the fruit gardens Palestinian farmers would plant around their farm houses – appear as one of the many mysteries the JNF promises the adventurous visitor. These clearly visible remnants of Palestinian villages are referred to as an inherent part of nature and her wonderful secrets. At one of the sites, it actually refers to the terraces you can find almost everywhere there as the proud creation of the JNF. Some of these were in fact rebuilt over the original ones, and go back centuries before the Zionist takeover.

Thus, Palestinian bustans are attributed to nature and Palestine’s history transported back to a biblical and Talmudic past. Such is the fate of one of the best known villages, Ayn al-Zaytun, which was emptied in May 1948, during which many of its inhabitants were massacred. Ayn al-Zaytun is mentioned by name, but in the following manner:

Ein Zeitun has become one of the most attractive spots within the recreational ground as it harbors large picnic tables and ample parking for the disabled. It is located where once stood the settlement Ein Zeitun, where Jews used to live ever since the medieval times and until the 18th century. There were four abortive [Jewish] settlement attempts. The parking lot has biological
toilets and playgrounds. Next to the parking lot, a memorial stands in memory of the soldiers who fell in the Six Day War.

Fancifully meshing history and tourist tips, the text totally erases from Israel’s collective memory the thriving Palestinian community Jewish troops wiped out within a few hours.

The pages of the JNF website on the history of Ayn al-Zaytun go into great detail, and the narrative that accompanies a virtual or real journey into the forest takes the reader back to the alleged Talmudic town in the third century, before skipping a whole millennium of Palestinian villages and communities. It finally focuses on the last three years of the Mandatory period, as these same grounds were hiding places where the Jewish underground, trying to escape the watchful eyes of the British, trained its troops and stashed the weapons it was amassing.

South of Biriyya lies Ramat Menashe Park. It covers the ruins of Lajjun, Mansi, Kafrayn, Butaymat, Hubeiza, Daliyat al-Rawha, Sabbarin, Burayka, Sindiyana and Umm al-Zinat. At the very centre of the park lie the remains of the destroyed village of Daliyat al-Rawha, now covered by Kibbutz Ramat Menashe of the socialist movement Hashomer Ha-Tza‘ir. The remnants of the blown-up houses
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of one of the villages, Kafrayn, are still visible. The JNF website highlights the admixture of nature and human habitat in the forest when it tells us that in its midst there are ‘six villages’. The website uses the highly atypical Hebrew word for ‘village’,
kfar
, to refer to the
kibbutzim
in the park, and not the six villages underneath the park – a linguistic ploy that serves to reinforce the metaphorical palimpsest at work here: the erasure of the history of one people in order to write that of another people over it.
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In the words of the JNF website, the beauty and the attraction of this site are ‘unmatched’. One of the principal reasons is the countryside itself, with its bustans and its ruins of ‘the past’, but there is a master design behind all this that strives to maintain the contours of the natural scenery. Here, too, nature has its ‘particular appeal’ because of the destroyed Palestinian villages the park covers up. Both the JNF’s virtual and real tour through the park gently guide the visitor from one recommended spot to another, all carrying Arabic names: these are the names of the destroyed villages, but
here presented as natural or geographical locations that betray no earlier human presence. The reason one can move from one point to the other so smoothly is attributed by the JNF to a network of roads that were paved in the ‘British period’. Why did the British bother to pave roads here? Obviously to better connect (and thus control)
existing
villages, but this fact can only be extracted from the text with great difficulty, if at all.

This system of erasure, however, can never be foolproof. For example, the JNF website tells us something you will not find mentioned on the boards that punctuate the forest paths themselves. Within the many ruins dotting the place the ‘Village Spring’ (‘
Ein ha-Kfar
’) is recommended as ‘the quietest part of the site’. Often a village spring would be at the heart of the village, close to the village square, as here in Kafrayn, its ruins now providing not only ‘peace of mind’ but also serving the cattle of the nearby kibbutz Mishmar Ha-Emek as a resting point on their way to meadows down below.

The last two examples come from the Jerusalem area. The western slopes of the city are covered with the ‘Jerusalem forest’, another brainchild of Yossef Weitz. In 1956 Weitz complained to the mayor of Jerusalem about the barren sight of the western hills of the city. Eight years earlier, they had of course been covered with the houses and the cultivated lands of Palestinian villages bustling with life. In 1967 Weitz’s efforts finally bore fruit: The JNF decided to plant one million trees on 4,500 dunam that, in the words of the website, ‘encircle Jerusalem with a green belt.’ At one of its southern corners, the forest reaches the ruined village of Ayn Karim and covers the destroyed village of Beit Mazmil. Its most western point stretches over the land and houses of the destroyed village of Beit Horish, whose people were expelled as late as 1949. The forest extends further over Deir Yassin, Zuba, Sataf, Jura and Beit Umm al-Meis.

The JNF website here promises its visitors unique sites and special experiences in a forest whose historical remnants ‘testify to intensive agricultural activity’. More specifically, it highlights the various terraces one finds carved out along the western slopes: as in all other sites, these terraces are always ‘ancient’ – even when they were shaped by Palestinian villagers less than two or three generations ago.

The last geographical site is the destroyed Palestinian village of Sataf, located in one of the most beautiful spots high up in the Jerusalem Mountains. The site’s greatest attraction, according to the JNF website, is the reconstruction it offers of ‘ancient’ (
kadum
in Hebrew) agriculture – the adjective ‘ancient’ is used for every single detail in this site: paths are ‘ancient’, steps are ‘ancient’, and so on. Sataf, in fact, was a Palestinian village expelled and mostly destroyed in 1948. For the JNF, the remains of the village are one more station visitors encounter on the intriguing walking tours it has set out for them within this ‘ancient site’. The mixture here of Palestinian terraces and the remains of four or five Palestinian buildings almost fully intact inspired the JNF to create a new concept, the ‘bustanof’ (‘bustan’ plus ‘
nof
’, the Hebrew word for panorama, the English equivalent for which would probably be something like ‘bustanorama’ or ‘orchard-view’). The concept is wholly original to the JNF.

The bustans overlook some exquisite scenery and are popular with Jerusalem’s young professional class who come here to experience ‘ancient’ and ‘biblical’ ways of cultivating a plot of land that may even yield some ‘biblical’ fruits and vegetables. Needless to say, these ancient ways are far from ‘biblical’ but are Palestinian, as are the plots and the bustans and the place itself.

In Sataf the JNF promises the more adventurous visitors a ‘Secret Garden’ and an ‘Elusive Spring’, two gems they can discover among terraces that are a ‘testimony to human habitation 6,000 years ago culminating in the period of the Second Temple.’ This is not exactly how these terraces were described in 1949 when Jewish immigrants from Arab countries were sent to repopulate the Palestinian village and take over the houses that had remained standing. Only when these new settlers proved unmanageable did the JNF decide to turn the village into a tourist site.

At the time, in 1949, Israel’s naming committee searched for a biblical association for the place, but failed to find any connection to Jewish sources. They then hit upon the idea of associating the vineyard that surrounded the village with the vineyards mentioned in the biblical Psalms and Song of Songs. For a while they even invented a name for the place to suit their fancy, ‘Bikura’ – the early fruit of the summer – but gave it up again as Israelis had already got used to the name Sataf.

The JNF website narrative and the information offered on the various boards set up at the locations themselves is also widely available elsewhere.
There has always been a thriving literature in Israel catering for domestic tourism where ecological awareness, Zionist ideology and erasure of the past often go hand in hand. The encyclopedias, tourist guides and albums generated for the purpose appear even more popular and are in greater demand today than ever before. In this way, the JNF ‘ecologises’ the crimes of 1948 in order for Israel to tell one narrative and erase another. As Walid Khalidi has put in his forceful style: ‘It is a platitude of historiography that the victors in war get away with both the loot and the version of events.’
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Despite this deliberate airbrushing of history, the fate of the villages that lie buried under the recreational parks in Israel is intimately linked to the future of the Palestinian families who once lived there and who now, almost sixty years later, still reside in refugee camps and faraway diasporic communities. The solution of the Palestinian refugee problem remains the key to any just and lasting settlement of the conflict in Palestine: for close to sixty years now the Palestinians have remained steadfast as a nation in their demand to have their legal rights acknowledged, above all their Right of Return, originally granted to them by the United Nations in 1948. They continue to confront an official Israeli policy of denial and anti-repatriation that seems only to have hardened over the same period.

There are two factors that have so far succeeded in defeating all chances of an equitable solution to the conflict in Palestine to take root: the Zionist ideology of ethnic supremacy and the ‘peace process’. From the former stems Israel’s continuing denial of the Nakba; in the latter we see the lack of international will to bring justice to the region – two obstacles that perpetuate the refugee problem and stand in the way of a just and comprehensive peace emerging in the land.

The UN General Assembly resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for the loss of or damage to property which, under the principles of international law and in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

UN GA resolution 194 (III), 11 December 1948.

The US government supports the return of refugees, democratization, and protection of human rights throughout the country.

Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, US State Department, 2003

W
hile the Palestinians Israel had failed to expel from the country were subjected to the military regime Israel put in place in October 1948, and those in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were now under foreign Arab occupation, the rest of the Palestinian people were scattered throughout the neighbouring Arab states where they had found shelter in makeshift tent camps provided by international aid organisations.

In mid-1949, the United Nations stepped in to try to deal with the bitter fruits of its 1947 peace plan. One of the UN’s first misguided decisions
was not to involve the International Refugee Organization (IRO) but to create a special agency for the Palestinian refugees. It was Israel and the Zionist Jewish organisations abroad that were behind the decision to keep the IRO out of the picture: the IRO was the very same body that was assisting the Jewish refugees in Europe following the Second World War, and the Zionist organisations were keen to prevent anyone from making any possible association or even comparison between the two cases. Moreover, the IRO always recommended repatriation as the first option to which refugees were entitled.