Memories of the Village – Palestinians in Exile

According to our Israeli road atlas, Route 899 runs from the sea along the Lebanese border to the
town of Sasa, and along the way passes an
"archaeological ruin" called Iqrit.

The three-dot symbol on the map is one of

hundreds of such locations throughout this
historically rich land - but this is no biblical or
Roman-era relic.

They are of course no ‘archaeological ruins.’

Palestinian Villages which where forcibly
evacuated, and their inhabitants sent into
nowhere!

Iqrit was an Arab Christian village was forcibly

evacuated during the 1948-49 war, one of
hundreds of villages in the former Palestine
whose populations either went into exile or, as in
the Iqritis' case, into internal displacement in the
new Israeli state.

While traces of many of these deserted villages have all but disappeared, the sparsely wooded
hilltop of Iqrit - against all odds - continues to play host to its former inhabitants and their
children and grandchildren.

On the first Saturday of every month, a priest comes to hold mass in the only permanent building
left in the village, the blue-domed St Mary's church.

Here Iqritis get married and christen their children, and they bury dead in the little cemetery at
the bottom of the hill.

On Sundays and public holidays, youngsters play football on the hilltop's only flat area, parents
arrange picnics and old-timers reminisce or sit in silent thought.

Hopes dashed
One old man, 80-year-old Asad Mbada Daoud, says he clearly remembers the day Israeli troops
captured Iqrit, in October 1948.

Initially, it seemed the 450 inhabitants might remain in their homes after surrendering to the
troops and pledging to live in peace under Israeli rule.

After a week, however, they were evacuated by force to al-Rama, about 12 miles (20km) south.
"It was a very hard life," says Mr. Daoud. "All our food and resources were in the village, we
had no work. We lived 60 to a room in schools or stayed in empty houses of refugees."

Assurances that they would be allowed to return

after a fortnight were not honoured; weeks of
exile turned into months, years. Despite several
court rulings in the inhabitants' favour, the Israeli
military prevented their return citing emergency
regulations.

On Christmas Eve in 1951, army officers took

some village elders to a nearby hill and they
watched as the old stone houses were blown up
with dynamite and tank fire, as many other
Palestinian villages had been.

Burial rights
Already however, the Iqritis' persistence had
started to become apparent, for one thing bringing
their dead for burial here.

"We tried to bury Diab Sbayt here in 1949," says Maruf Ashkar, another octogenarian. "But the
police came and told us to disinter him and take him to Fasuta" (a still-populated Christian
village nearby).

Villagers launched petitions, more court cases and parliamentary hearings, but the army
remained adamant. Even Pope John Paul II took up their case on his historic millennial visit to
the Holy Land, but to no avail.

They did win the legal right to bury their dead in Iqrit, but to date that has been their only
concrete success.

The old men's stories continue as we leave the shade of

the high church walls and walk down rutted tracks past
the piles of grey stones that were their old homes.

Mr Ashkar picks wild thyme from the rubble which he

hopes will take root in his "temporary" home of many
decades, Kafr Yassif.

Enduring commitment
We pass Hana Nasser, who was 10 in 1948, sitting with
his head in his hands. "I am here to see the ruins from far
below… the ruins of my house," he says.
"I come here to sit almost every Sunday. I will never
forget my home."
The people of Iqrit are luckier than many of their compatriots living as refugees in Lebanon,
Syria, Jordan and the occupied Palestinian territories - now numbering many millions - who have
not laid eyes on their homes since 1948.

Israel rejects the Palestinian refugees' right of return - pragmatically Israel argues that it needs to
remain a Jewish-majority state and morally it points to the similarly large numbers of Jews who
fled Arab countries after 1948. And all that against Resolution 194 of the UN which demands the
return of the millions of stateless refugees living in UN camps in neighboring countries.

But it is hard for the former residents of Iqrit and their descendants to understand why the
authorities block them - full Israeli citizens - from re-establishing their community in the village,
unless it is to avoid setting a precedent for other absentee Palestinians to return.

As Israel celebrates its annual jubilee - a date marked as the Nakba (The Catastrophe) by
Palestinians, Iqrit is certainly a testament to the enduring Palestinian desire to remain in touch
with life pre-1948, whatever the obstacles, and struggle to get back to their homes, lands and the
way they lived for thousands of years.

"I'm confident I will return to my home here," Nemi Ashkar, one of the younger organizers of
the Iqrit campaign, says with irony. "But I want to return alive, and not just to our cemetery.”