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 63