The following is a chapter from the important new book Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation. From the book’s website, “Shifting Sands brings to life the Jewish anti-occupation perspective through personal stories by activists such as Starhawk, Anna Baltzer, Jen Marlowe, Alice Rothchild, Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein (of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla) and others.” The book also includes introductory material from Cindy Sheehan and Amira Hass. Shifting Sands is available on Amazon.com.
“Where do you want to go?” asked the taxi driver, expecting to give me a short ride and collect a few shekels.
“Baqa’a,” I replied, “but it’s a bit of a project.”
The West Jerusalem neighborhood of Baqa’a was only a ten-minute drive from our location in East Jerusalem. The “project” was that the house I was looking for had existed 60 years ago, and time travel takes somewhat more detective work than the simple recitation of an address.
“I’m looking for a house from 1948,” I told the driver, who introduced himself as Abed. I handed him Munir’s diagram of a house that looked similar to hundreds of other old homes in the Jerusalem area.
“Is it yours?” he asked.
“No, a friend’s.”
I had recently discovered that my friend Munir, whom I know from Boston and had always known as Lebanese, had actually been born in Jerusalem. In 1948, at the age of four, he and his family, along with 800,000 Palestinian people, were forced out of their home by pre-Israeli forces. The family fled to Lebanon, where Munir’s father, Najeeb Jirmanus, had lived before moving to Jerusalem 20 years earlier. Nobody in the family had been back to Palestine since 1948, so I asked Munir if, on my next trip to Jerusalem, he would like me to try and find his house. He gathered some information, including a few nearby landmarks and a diagram of the house, which Abed was now studying. Abed agreed to help.
I sat quietly, hoping he knew the neighborhoods well enough to help me. I had planned to seek out an older taxi driver, possibly someone who spoke English so I could make sure to communicate every detail I knew. Abed was a young man who spoke very little English, but he seemed interested in and moved by the project. He immediately began to call all the older people he knew.
“Do you know where the Jordanian embassy was before 1948?” he would ask, offering up our major landmark.
“Yes,” one man told him, “but it wasn’t in Baqa’a.”
“No,” said another, “there was barely a Jordan at that time. How could there be a Jordanian embassy?”
So we began to drive, looking for the other smaller landmarks or for people who might recognize Munir’s father’s name. Abed would pull over next to every older person he saw (Palestinian or Israeli), and ask about the Ummah school, the Jordanian embassy, and the British army women’s headquarters. Some people were vaguely helpful, some not. A few informed us in a slightly insulted tone that they were not yet born in 1948.
We left Baqa’a and crossed the street to another, mostly Palestinian neighborhood. We thought we would have a better chance of finding people who wanted to and could actually help, having perhaps been in the neighborhood before 1948. Not two minutes later, we passed an old man and Abed stopped. We got out of the car, said hello, and explained what we were doing.
“You’re in luck,” said the man, “I know more about these neighborhoods than anyone else in the area.”
Before I knew it, his wife was serving me coffee in the middle of the street. The man suggested she and his daughters go ahead without him, as he would join us in the taxi in exchange for a ride home afterwards.
We drove for half an hour with little success, and then the man suggested we stop at an old house on the corner. We knocked on the door, and an old Israeli man answered. He took one look at the three of us and asked, “Are you looking for someone who used to live here?” He opened the door and let us in.
“You’re in luck,” he said, “I know more about these neighborhoods than anyone else in the area.”
So here I was inside a house with Abed the taxi driver and two older men, one Palestinian and one Israeli, who said they knew everything there was to know about this part of Jerusalem. They talked for a few minutes and argued amicably for a few more in a combination of Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The interaction had an air of pre-Zionism to it that is difficult to explain. They used language of “Arab” and “Jew” instead of “Palestinian” and “Israeli,” which many people do, but it seemed more appropriate in this situation than usual. As though nationalism and the way it has played out could not taint this simple human search for an old home.
I had started the trip late in the day. By this time it was getting dark, and I was running late for a meeting. We had gathered some information that might help us for next time, and I had a few questions to ask Munir. We took our leave, after writing down the name and phone number of the Israeli man so we could try again another day.
***
Two weeks later, with semi-clear skies above after a week of nonstop rain, I made plans to meet Abed in Jerusalem. This time, I was armed with more precise directions from Munir, including names of other people who lived and worked in the area and, most importantly, a photograph taken from their front yard in 1940.
Abed met me and excitedly said he knew where the house was, that he had gone back there after our last search. I showed him the photograph and we drove towards the area. We parked and began to walk around, holding up the photograph to each gate and entrance. We found one house that looked similar; however, there was a huge construction project under way directly on top of it. We approached and asked the Palestinian construction workers what they knew about the house, which wasn’t much. We were stopped on the way out by an Israeli manager. Abed explained in Hebrew that we were trying to find a house. The man glanced at the photo and said, “Yes, this looks like the house.”
Another manager came out and ordered us off the property. “This isn’t the house,” he said. “There was nothing here before 1948.”
Feeling torn, we stood outside for a few minutes and looked around.
“We need to find an Israeli to help us,” said Abed finally. “They think you and I are here to claim the house because I’m Arab and you have papers in your hand. They don’t know we’re only here to look and photograph.”
“We should take the house,” I replied, only half joking.
At this point, we realized this was probably not the house. The gate looked the same but we couldn’t figure out the angles in the photograph and it just didn’t seem right. Another older Israeli man on the street asked if he could help. Abed explained that we were searching for a house, and the man joined us for the next 20 minutes as we walked around the neighborhood. We kept finding similar sights, but none of them fit together. Finally he asked, “Are you sure the house is in the German Colony?”
“No,” I replied, “it’s in Baqa’a.”
Apparently, the older Israeli man who had helped us the first time had convinced Abed to come to this area and I, unfamiliar with West Jerusalem’s neighborhoods, had gone along for the ride. Realizing we were in the wrong neighborhood, we got back into the car and headed to the Israeli man’s house, where we had paused our search two weeks earlier. He answered the door and I shared my new information with him. The house we were searching for was near the Trans-Jordanian consulate, I told him, not the Jordanian embassy, and there was a road that went down from the main street towards their house. These two pieces of information were all he needed. He followed me out to the street, pointed, and said, “Go two more traffic lights. The Allenby building is probably what you mean, and that’s on your left. There’s a street that goes down from there on the right.”
We quickly drove those two blocks, turned right, parked, and started walking down. The streets were different than they were described to me, and the building supposedly on the corner wasn’t there. But sure enough, after a few minutes of meandering, I found myself in front of the large building that was in the background of the photo I was holding. I positioned myself exactly at the angle that the photo was taken from, and looked around. One street continued to go down, so I took it. To my right was a synagogue that I guessed was either Munir’s property or their neighbor’s. I hoped it was not his, that I would not have to tell him his house had been completely destroyed and replaced by a synagogue.
We passed the synagogue and stopped in front of the gate to the next house. This was it. Different from the photo, but with the same dimensions, and seemingly the right distance from the larger building up the street. We entered and found ourselves on the stone path described in the e-mail I had in my hand from Munir’s older brother: “…continue along the stone-paved path… some 8 meters, you reach the level of the house… Move some 10 more meters and you will have the six stone steps (to the left) that lead up to the veranda and you will then be facing the main door, entrance to the house.”
I was facing the main door, the entrance to the house. I thought about knocking on the door, but (in case we didn’t get a warm reception here either) wanted to take in as much as possible first. As I walked around the perimeter of the house, I wondered which plants and trees had been there when Munir was a child.
Finally, Abed knocked. No answer. We waited a few minutes and then left. About five minutes later, I came back alone to take more photos, and the door to the house was open.
I walked to the entrance, knocked, and said “hello?” A man appeared.
“My name is Hannah, I’m from the United States, and I have a friend who I think used to live in this house before 1948. Can I come in and look?”
He hesitated, then let me in, introducing himself as Israel. When I asked if I could photograph inside, he hesitated, but again agreed. I asked how long he had been living there, and he replied that it had only been a few years. He said he rented the place from a French Israeli man who has owned it for about five years. Before that, he said, the building was owned by a Moroccan Israeli family.
“Since 1948?” I asked.
“Well, the government probably had it first and then gave it to them, but yes, for a long time.”
I kept photographing, staying quiet as I worried he might change his mind. As I was putting my gear away and getting ready to leave, Israel turned to me as though he had something to say.
“The reason I let you in,” he said, “is that one time my sister went back to Morocco to find our family house. The man currently living there wouldn’t let her in. She cried and cried, and finally he let her in, but he wouldn’t let her photograph. This is why I let you in and let you photograph.”
Seeing this as an opening, I asked, “Would you want to return to Morocco?”
“No,” he replied, almost laughing at the suggestion.
“If the situation changed?”
“No, Morocco is for the Moroccans and Israel is for the Israelis.”
“What about the Palestinians?” I replied.
“We were here first,” he said, “thousands of years ago. This is our land; it says so in the bible.” I had noticed all the Torahs and other religious texts in the house, so it did not surprise me that he was religious.
“Sixty years ago my friend was living here,” I said.
“History doesn’t start in 1948,” he answered.
I briefly considered sharing with him something my Palestinian friend from Hebron often says: “It’s written in the Torah that Abraham came here to Hebron and bought a cave, right? Well, who did he buy that cave from? My great, great, great… grandfather!” Knowing, though, that this Israeli man’s argument was not rooted in, or concerned with, reliable historic analysis, I decided there was no use arguing with religion. We said an awkward goodbye (saying “thank you” did not seem appropriate in this situation), and I left.
My search for 1948 was almost over. But not quite yet…
***
After receiving the photographs I sent, Munir and his brother were thrilled to confirm that this was indeed their house and asked if I might be able to find any legal documentation to corroborate this. Not knowing where to start, I turned to a Canadian-Israeli friend, who agreed to help track down whatever she could. She visited the local Registry of Deeds in Jerusalem, which manages land deeds for the municipality. After being sent from office to office and compiling information about the current address and plot number (according to Israeli zoning laws, not the memories of the prior owners), she finally had the information she needed.
She returned to the Registry of Deeds. The clerk looked at the address and block number and said they had no record of the property before 1992. When she protested, he sent her to the microfilm, saying she could search through it all she wanted. So she did. After almost giving up, she came upon a document that seemed to be for the right property. The document was from the British Mandate period, and was thus written in English. She scanned the paper: 672 square meters, original owners’ names… and then, finally, proof of sale of the property in whole on January 6, 1932, to one Najeeb Jirmanus.
***
There is something about finding the land registry hidden in the microfilm of Israel’s archives (after being told in effect that the property did not exist before 1992) that reminds me that nothing lies too deep under the surface in this part of the world. Beneath every Israeli road lies the dirt of an agricultural path from centuries before. Below every kibbutz field lie the remains of a destroyed Palestinian village. Under all the modern-day addresses and block numbers in the Registry of Deeds office live the memories of a people who cannot forget an old front gate, the very number of steps to their front door, the views from their porch, the place that—despite Israel’s refusal to implement the right of return for more than 60 years—many still call home.
Hannah Mermelstein is an activist and aspiring radical librarian based in Brooklyn, NY. She has lived in Palestine for more than two of the past six years, and is co-creator of Birthright Unplugged and Re-Plugged, Needle in the Groove, and Students Boycott Apartheid. In Brooklyn, Hannah works primarily with the New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel (NYCBI) and the Palestine Education Project (PEP). She hopes to use library and archives skills to continue the search for 1948 and support the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
