PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 65
was enough for the Jewish immigrants; they settled
in the houses of the Palestinians, surrounded by their
furniture, and never asked themselves any questions…
“divine will” was all the excuse needed.
Life in Nazareth under Israeli martial law became
more unbearable every day. On May 1, 1958, the
authorities forbade us to demonstrate. Their idea was
to have a big festival instead. They had invited impor-
tant people from the local society, religious leaders, the
mukhtars and sheikhs from all the surrounding villages,
as well as journalists from the foreign press to show
how happy the people were under Israeli military con-
trol. But the “happy people” were few in number, the
majority of those who came were scared or wanted to
be seen: fear and opportunism are good bedfellows in
such circumstances. Many others had refused to come.
The festival did not last long: some young people began
to throw stones at those who were pretending to cele-
brate; this was our “first intifada”, 17 our war of stones
within Israel. Two thousand people came from all the
surrounding areas and began to march in the middle
of the day on May 1st, leaving from the fountain of
the Virgin Mary. The march went on until midnight,
despite a few skirmishes with the army.
My friends from the Movement and I, we fought
against the laws established by the military adminis-
tration and for our rights as women, but also for our
survival as a Palestinian minority and for the right
to stay in our homes on that basis. We would go in
groups, on foot, around the emptied villages in order to
encourage those who had stayed to affirm their identity
and those who had left to return. And even if most Pal-
estinians have not gained the right to resettle in their
depopulated villages, 18 such as Al Mujaydil, Al Safiriya
and Ma’alul, those who returned decided to settle on a
hill near their old village. Their determination deserves
respect.
In Nazareth, the Israeli authorities tried to absorb
the Jewish immigrants from Europe and Russia by
building Nazareth Ilit (Upper Nazareth) in 1953,
which was meant to represent the development of the
Jewish repopulating of Galilee. 19 Nazareth covered
43,000 dunums, 20 Ilit took 36,000 of them. The idea
was not to mix the populations. The plan was this
close to working. Today, between 23% and 30% 21 of
the people of Ilit are Palestinian Israelis. And Naza-
reth, the main Arab town of Israel, is much appreciated
by Israelis of Eastern European, ex-Soviet Union and
Latin American origin. Even though they are Jewish,
their attachment to Christian traditions is particularly
in evidence at Christmas, their homes filling up with
fir trees and wreaths.
Over the years, the Movement became aligned
with Israeli organizations for the defence of women,
such as the mothers who refused to see their children
shaped by hate during their military service, or those
who advocated against the development of settlements.
Among them was Tzefira Yonatan, 22 daughter of a Jew-
ish Ukrainian professor who had fled the pogroms and
emigrated to Palestine in 1923; she herself was born in
Jerusalem and, after 1948, had advocated for the return
of her Palestinian friends to their villages, from which
they had been expelled during military operations in
1948. She was firmly opposed to the fact that Israel
renamed villages in order to erase their memory. I met
her in 1973, not long after the death of her 21-year-old
son in the Yom Kippur War, when her letter was pub-
lished in an Israeli newspaper: as a mother, she dared
to write that she did not hold a grudge against the one
who killed her son, that perhaps he was one on the
inhabitants of a village destroyed by the Zionists, that
she wanted to meet the mothers who were originally
from these villages… It was very courageous of her,
given the context, and it brought her a lot of criticism.
But she held on and, from 1974 onwards, like me, she
was part of the “Peace Bridges”.
In 1976, we took part in a strike for the World
Earth Day. It was just after the expropriation of 25,000
dunums of our lands in Galilee. The uprising was gen-
eral, and spread as far as the West Bank and Gaza. 23
All Palestinians were affected. In the same way, we felt
implicated in the First Intifada in the West Bank in
1987 and we advocated for an independent Palestin-
ian state for the Palestinians from the West Bank and
Gaza. We are no less Palestinian because we live within
the borders defining Israel.
In the 1990s, together with some Jewish women, we
started the “Women in Black”, 24 and the “Daughters
of Peace” (Bint Salam in Arabic). 25 It was our way of
making our voices heard during the peace negotiations
that culminated in Oslo in 1994.
But everything came to a halt in the early 2000s,
when some young Palestinians were massacred. 26 We
distanced ourselves from Israeli organizations which
had been our partners at the time of the peace move-
ments. It felt like we had reached a dead end on every
Samira
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