I have seen
many photos of the destroyed village of Lifta, which dates back 1,000 years and
has tax records from the Ottoman Empire. The photos show a famous,
archetypal vista of fragmented houses, piles of stones extending into a valley
at the edge of Jerusalem, but Omar from the Israeli organization Zochrot,
(Remembering) has much to teach us. He has us rotate around 180 degrees
and look at a conglomeration of modern buildings extending up the hill.
These were all built on the land of the destroyed village of Lifta. He points
out a little building hiding under a big billboard; this was once the school of
Lifta and is now a Jewish school. So the village is far more than its famous
ruins and actually encompasses much of the land around it. Close to old Jerusalem
and on the road from Al Quds (Jerusalem) to Jaffa, this was a busy area for the
locals, religious pilgrims, and tourists. The village actually dates back
to the Canaanites, and has Aramaic, Arabic and Hebrew roots. Lifta means “The
Gate," (of Jerusalem).
The sign
reads En Neftoah (Lifta), and Omar explains that Neftoah is a Biblical place
somewhere around here and then the Israelis added “En” to Hebraicize the name
as well as give it an ancient reference. We scramble down a steep rocky path,
past a dusty construction site which is part of a new project to build a train
track to Jaffa that will include bridges and tunnels through this area.
He points out nearby destroyed villages such as Biddu and JNF forests near the
Jewish settlement of Ramot. We see a mosque at the top of a mountain
which was attacked by settlers who wanted to turn it into a park and synagogue.
Facing the other way towards the construction is the site of Deir Yassin, now a
Jewish neighborhood. Beyond that is Ein Kerem and other Palestinian villages
all occupied and mostly destroyed in 1948 with the creation of thousands of
refugees. There are also a scattering of Palestinian homes at the top of the
valley that are now Jewish homes. The Knesset and many governmental offices, the
high court, and even parts of Hebrew University are all on Lifta. I am in one
of my feeling particularly hostile to ultra Orthodox Jews in general and
settlers in particular moods (this is happening fairly frequently), and note
that many boys with kippas, dangling payes, and tzitzit bouncing from
their shirts as well as girls in long skirts and long sleeved blouses are
walking on these paths as well. I can feel the bitterness in my throat
and a twitching in my commitment to passivism.
Omar
explains that before 1948, Lifta included 10,000 dunams with 40,000 more
cultivated and a population of 3,000 which was a big, wealthy town for those
days. There were many olive trees and vegetables planted from seed and it was a
lush and prosperous place. 50 of the 400 houses are left. Other villages such
as Ein Kerem and Ein Hod were not destroyed and are now Jewish towns, but 95%
of villages were completely demolished to eliminate the possibility of return.
Strangely enough, in 1949 Jews from Arab countries were brought in to live in
Lifta, (it probably looked a lot like home), but they left after a few years
because the village was near the Green Line with the Jordanians on the other
side and it was slightly dangerous plus these Arab Jews had no water and no
electricity in their homes (Jews from Arabic speaking countries were second
class from the start). And did I mention that this area is crawling with
Orthodox boys and girls and occasional older men with big hats and stern faces?
(For me, this is how I know how bigotry feels. My hostility is growing
and I don’t even know any of these people.)
Almost
immediately, various green organizations asked that Lifta be left as a park, a
green spot in Jerusalem, but even today, most Israelis do not see the
relationship between a park with graceful ruins and the Arabs that once
inhabited them and are now deafeningly absent. As we scramble, walk, jump, trip
around the stone paths and in and outside of crumbling homes, the sunset
creating a shimmery streaking light, the extraordinary beauty of Lifta is
painfully obvious. The stones range from grey white to orange. There are
wells and aqueducts, the original fig trees and lush saber cactus, ancient
terraces, amazing architecture with graceful archways and floors built on top
of each other dating from different centuries and now crumbling from age and
neglect. Each family also had a smaller house for baking bread. At the
base of the valley we come across two pools with a predominantly orthodox group
of youth playing in the water with a few guys in their underwear and girls in
bikinis thrown in for dramatic effect. The first pool is cleaner and was
originally for washing dishes, etc in the homes while the second pool, which is
utterly disgusting, was for the animals to drink. Canals lead from the pools to
water the various gardens below and each family had plots for figs and almonds,
apricots, vegetables. This seems to me like an approximation of the
Garden of Eden.
In 1947 the
UN Partition Plan was announced and Jewish militias immediately started to
occupy villages beyond the partition line. (Remember this important
tidbit, this is before the state was declared, the Arabs attacked, etc). Lifta
and Jerusalem were supposed to be international zones, but clashes with the Irgun
started in 1947 and in early 1948, Irgun fighters, (terrorists?) dressed as
tourists came into a Lifta coffee shop and shot six people, wounding
seven. This created a wave of fear and the families living on the edges
of town fled to East Jerusalem and Ramallah. A month later the Irgun
bombed all the empty houses and then started attacking every few days to weeks.
The inhabitants were terrified and fled to Ramallah but 30 to 50 young men
stayed with some meager ammunition and guns. The Haganah and Irgun attacked
again and Ben Gurion famously declared that you can now enter Jerusalem
(through the Lifta area) “without seeing any strangers,” (read Arabs).
The on
April 9, 1948, 120 men, women and children were massacred in nearby Deir Yassin
and the Jewish soldiers took a group of captured women on a “victory tour”
around the city and then dumped them at the Jaffa Gate. The Arab population
panicked and fled to Ramallah. The Israeli forces declared all the
fleeing home owners “absentees” and confiscated all the property for the state.
As Lifta
decayed, it also became a home for squatters, the homeless, and drug dealers
who have been pushed out by the police. In the 1980s there was also a
Jewish terror cell called the Lifta Underground, that was plotting to bomb the
Al Aqsa Mosque and the mosque in Hebron. (Yikes!) The mosque, one of the
oldest buildings made of stone and mud mixed with ash, is cooler with a
courtyard, trees growing stubbornly out of the stone walls and stairs.
There are two rooms in various states of ruin, the prayer room and the
school. Palestinian groups still come here to pray and Lifta survivors living
in East Jerusalem come to pray and clean up the cemetery. In many of the rooms
with high arched ceilings the keystone at the top (which is critical to the
architectural stability of the stones) has been removed, thus contributing to
the future collapse of the ruin.
At one
point as we walk soberly through one stately house after another, gracefully
arching windows, floors sticking out into nowhere, Omar tells us to put away
our cameras. We peer across a roof and there is a gigantic construction
site. Haaretz reports that the Israelis are building a massive bunker and
underground tunnel that will connect to the prime minister’s house and be a
functional government in case of nuclear war. Ultimately this will all be
planted to appear as a garden. It seems that everyone around here is preparing
for the apocalypse. Security is a bit touchy about us taking pictures of
this not so secret project.
There is
now a plan to finish the destruction of Lifta and build a posh new Jerusalem
neighborhood and while there is a campaign fighting this proposal, Omar
predicts it will start in a few months. When he says this I am seized
with a wave of grief and rage, and start taking photos of every stairway,
crumbling wall, olive press, desperately trying to document the world that may
soon be erased.
Omar
explains that Zochort started 12 to 13 years ago to document the Nakba and
create a new memory of ’48. He reminds us that in the early days of the state,
Ben Gurion asked academic researches to create a history that stated
Palestinians made the decision to leave voluntarily and the researchers have
done an excellent job creating that illusion. Zochrot has researched 58
destroyed villages and has documented a total of 672 lost villages and small
towns. 800,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled one way or another and
100,000 stayed. Omar was lucky. His village was attacked, one
donkey was killed, homes were destroyed, and the remaining houses were totally
ransacked (sugar poured into the olive oil, flour spilled on the floor,
deliberate chaos), but the families returned. The village was located in
the Triangle Area controlled by Jordan, but in the agreements at the end of the
war, the Jordanians gave the Triangle Area as a gift to Israel, so by quirk of
fate Omar is an Israeli citizen
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