Photo: Sarah Ziyad
“This is where mom would have walked back and forth between the house and our farm,” Dad said, gesturing from the sycamore tree towards the gently sloping hills.
We were mostly quiet. Dad picked up a stick and half-heartedly flicked the tall grass as we walked towards the tell-tale, lone palm tree in the middle of what is now an Israeli watermelon farm. We paused to search for figs from the beautiful, ancient “jamayza” tree, miraculously still standing in the otherwise-razed plain. This tree was a precious one to us—my grandmother used to describe it to us, over and over, even decades after she had left it behind.
I remember her, once daughter of the sheik of a modest but thriving Palestinian village, sitting on the floor of her meager apartment in Saudi Arabia, her final resting place after decades of exile in multiple refugee camps. She often told stories of her wedding day, her family life, her love of the farmland that brought forth so much bounty in season. As I picked my way around the GMO watermelons that have replaced the homes, graves, and fields which stood before 1948, I struggled to grasp the fact that I was literally treading on my grandmother’s memories. My dad handed me an unripe fruit from the jamayza, and as I bit into it I reflected on many other things that would’ve been sweet, if allowed to bloom. In the noonday sun, surrounded by vast commercial farmland, the only sound was the wind, blowing with a steady and solemn tune through the gently rocking jamazya limbs.
“Here it is, we are entering the village now.” Dad announced softly, coming to a halt next to a half-demolished well. My brother, father, and I shared a surreal moment, staring down into the large, wide opening, littered at the bottom with broken stones and debris. In a breathtaking surprise, a large, snow white owl appeared below, spreading its wings and lifting gracefully and silently towards us. I shivered a little at the unexpected, ethereal visitation. Dad pointed out the large pipe that was installed in the well in early 1948, before the war. The Hebrew markings in the metal were clearly visible; Dad told me how the village had a party to celebrate the new technology, bought from their Jewish neighbors, which would greatly increase productivity. It was an ultimately futile innovation, of course—a few short months later the entire village would be expelled from their homes, leaving their precious well to rot.
It is hard to describe the horror and sadness that this “homecoming” represented to me. The silent stones, crumbling and forgotten beneath a brilliant blue sky, like torn pages from a long-lost story book…one I know I would have loved to read, to enter, even. Were there ghosts in the tall grass? We know some of our relatives died there. I wanted to know if they were ever buried; the scattered ruins, even seven decades later, seem like a haunted, half-healed wound.
I swallowed hard to fight back the fire kindling in my chest. I reverently brushed my fingers against bark of the only other tree still standing, the majestic palm. My mind flashed back to the countless, flashy advertisements I’ve seen for the free “Birthright” trips offered to Jewish students in the States. According to the website, over 300,000 students from 54 countries have taken advantage of this offer for a free tour of Israel—yet my grandmother and her sons, after being forced out of their home in 1948, would never be allowed to return. My grandmother died a refugee after sixty years of waiting for justice; meanwhile, thousands of students enjoy free tours of her homeland under the pretense of their “right” to the land. Whence does this right come, and at what cost? How many are willing to believe that so many roads, so many lives, in Israel are built over literal and figurative graveyards?
There was no resolution. After about 3 hours of pacing, poking, and, in my case, praying, we retreated. We looked back often as we trudged away from the “village,” feeling a deep exhaustion and sorrow; even though we left in peace, without bullets at our back, the moment reeked of defeat. My dad murmured softly that we would’ve had olive trees “if…” The “if” was bigger than any of us. I thought I would choke on that “if,” the “if” that stole my grandmother’s youth, my grandfather’s life, my family’s legacy.
Two Israeli youth sped by on dirt bikes, kicking up dust on the country road and temporarily dimming our vision. As I glanced back for what I swore would be the last time, I wondered about hope and history and what it must have felt like to draw ones dying breath in exile.
stunning post. thank you so much for this sarah.
yes, Annie; Stunning, Sarah.
this statement is at what is, in my opinion, the ideological epicenter of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s deeply flawed Why Nations Fail.
After describing the evolution of of “Natufia,” the area around Jericho and encompassing Palestine that first developed sedentary farming around 9500 BC, ascribing the development to the emergence of “political institutions,” the authors conclude:
The passage encompasses many of the factors that make “Why Nations Fail” such a flawed book:
1. it’s assessment of success vs. failure is strictly limited to a dollars-value analysis — all that matters is money, not aesthetics, cultural richness, family cohesion, natural environment, etc.
2. the authors’ historical facts are obviously, provably, embarrassingly wrong. MIT & Harvard, meet Wiki, on Esdraelon:
Just like Sarah’s grandmother experienced: The land was desolate and barren.
And then along came “prosperity-making” “Jewish people with their high levels of education and easy access to technology”:
it’s assessment of success vs. failure is strictly limited to a dollars-value analysis
sad…so untrue
AllenBee, the articles you’ve printed bring in some interesting issues – more layers of the onion as it were, and metaphors for the discourse on this issue. In the first article we have one of many accounts of the fertility of Palestine long before Zionist settlement. Yet there are also many travelers’ accounts of the barrenness of Palestine which a hasbarist could dig up when necessary. Actually Mark Twain gave an account of how desolate and barren it was. So what was going on? It does not rain in the region for seven to nine months of the year. Travelers who blew through in the spring and summer reported lush and productive fields. Travelers who did the same in late summer and fall reported barren fields. It really does look different during different seasons. So, opposite but true accounts exist to be picked and used as necessary to make arguments. Hasbarists can in an instant bring out all the articles from the appropriate journals to prove that the Palestinians had no agriculture worthy of the name. So one lesson is that we must always be on guard for writings by tourist journalists who blow through an area for a few days and think they are qualified to write about it. Without a sense of whether their writings are informed by time and experience and context they could be accurately reporting what they see and yet be completely wrong in the larger context.
There are also areas of Palestine that never were and never can be cultivated. Many of these would be on the West Bank, on the hills overlooking the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley in the area of Jericho. This fact reinforces the Zionist agriculture meme to naive tourists: – within pre-67 Israel there are green fields and in large areas of the West Bank there is barrenness. The Dalai Lama, Bhudda help us, was the most recent to say that the Palestinians obviously need to learn something from the Israelis. He, for all his holiness, seemed unaware of the barren Negev, under Israeli control since ’48, or of the fact that the majority of the green fields he saw inside the ’67 lines were confiscated from Palestinians.
Certainly the Israelis made some advances in agriculture, in the past 60 years, but so did everyone in the region.
Now to anticipate the hasbarist barrage that might ensue about agriculture and the cherry tomatoes and eggplants and who domesticated the donkey first, I should make a point that a sharp minded Palestinian friend made long ago. He said to watch out for the whole phenomenon of setting the terms of the debate. It doesn’t matter if the place was cultivated or a desert. “It was ours and they took it.”
Actually Mark Twain gave an account of how desolate and barren it was.
Mark Twain was deliberately satirizing the foundation upon which Americans had constructed their notions regarding Supersessionism and Manifest Destiny. Samuel Clemens was a founding member of the American Anti-Imperialist League. He used the first Chapter of Tom Sawyer Abroad to ridicule the beliefs of Christians and Jews who thought that the Holy Land should be redeemed from its Arab owners by force.
Hilton Obenzinger said that even though it ought to be apparent that Innocents abroad was utterly fictive, Twain’s representations of Palestine as a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land in sack cloth and ashes continues to be cited in descriptions of 19th century Palestine, but not because his observations were accurate. See “American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania”, Princeton University Press, 1999, page 166
How the zionist describe Palestine before Israel does not jive with reports of numerous government officials who traveled that area in the 1800′s. They described it as a thriving ‘agricultural’ area. But like all other areas of the world it was subject to blights and droughts from time to time that disrupted their commerce.
It really is irrelevant. As it happens, I’m kind of into my yard, and it’s got a kind of ordered disorder and has lots of things growing in it — most of them wanted.
I might also choose to neglect it entirely. Neither condition would give you any right to take it from me.
“I might also choose to neglect it entirely. Neither condition would give you any right to take it from me”.
Exactly.
Exactly.
“The Dalai Lama, Bhudda help us, was the most recent to say that the Palestinians obviously need to learn something from the Israelis”.
The Palestinians have ALREADY learned plenty from the israelis. Everything that is sick, cruel and evil in this world, in one vile lesson.
The Dalai Lama also needs to “learn something” in his admiration of isra-hel. If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
AllenBee, the second article you posted deserves some further commentary as it also brings up a case in which both sides are telling opposite truths. I have discussed this phenomenon with Zionists. A hasbarist will produce evidence that they bought land in Palestine – at least in the early days before the full scale fighting and ethnic cleansing. And then these nasty Palestinian peasants kept attacking them. Well the hasbarist is technically telling the truth (except for the nasty part).
I don’t know the history of feudalism in Europe, but I do know that in the Middle East, a feudal landlord did not have the right to evict tenant peasants nor did a buyer have the right to do so. In fact this applies to individual houses as well. A landlord cannot change the rent or evict the tenants without cause. If someone purchases a house with tenants resident, these tenants likewise cannot be evicted without cause or have the rent increased. A buyer who wants such a house empty has to negotiate a payment to the tenants to buy the “key” from them.
Many Zionists will say with a straight face that they bought the land and thus had the right to evict the tenants. The native tenants however didn’t see it that way.
Worse was to come. These uprooted fellahin migrated to the cities where they began finding work. (Hasbara alert: “We gave them jobs.”) Alas, a campaign began to discourage Jewish employers from hiring non-Jews. One of the primary goals of the Histradut labor union was to make it difficult or impossible for the Jewish employers to do so.
These uprooted peasants and laid off workers eventually rioted …. and the rest is history.
I don’t know the history of feudalism in Europe, but I do know that in the Middle East, a feudal landlord did not have the right to evict tenant peasants nor did a buyer have the right to do so.
The Ottoman system was based on usufruct and it employed tax farmers, or so-called landlords just like some of the feudal systems in Europe, e.g. See Sabrina Joseph, Islamic Law on Peasant Usufruct in Ottoman Syria, link to brill.nl
The accounts of Herodotus and the book of Genesis provide illustrations of systems of usufruct, like the story of Joseph and the storehouses of grain that he collected for the Pharaoh.
“Many Zionists will say with a straight face that they bought the land and thus had the right to evict the tenants. The native tenants however didn’t see it that way…”
This is a transition in perception that happened elsewhere: in the Highlands of Scotland, for example. The clan chiefs suddenly became defined as the owners of the land, and thereby acquired the right to evict their followers, who were now their ‘tenants.’ See also the enclosure of village commons all over Europe. What had been communal land in a village dominated by a noble now became that noble’s property, pure and simple.
The notion of a single person having absolute title to a piece of land in all its aspects is really a modernism. On a given piece of medieval acreage, one person might have the right to gather firewood, another to keep bees, a third to pasture cattle, and a fourth to administer justice. There simply wasn’t a unitary perception of real estate as a single, inclusive entity.
So to jump rather cheerfully into land tenure in the Levant without knowing much of anything at all about it, I would suspect that the ‘tenants’ who were evicted were tenants primarily by recent definition. Yes, no doubt they had owed feudal dues to someone or rather further up the social ladder, but that didn’t mean the land wasn’t theirs — not until it was simply defined not to be theirs at some point in the Ottoman legal reforms of the Nineteenth century.
Those peasants lived on that land. They were its peasants. No one had any genuine right to order them off of it. Screw them out of all you can in the way of taxes and dues — by all means. But they stay on the land. That would go without saying.
You mention hope. I wish we could offer you some.
It’s a beautiful piece. It’s not much, but the Palestinians do have the luxury of being able to allow the raw facts to speak for them.