Lifta, Which Was His Home

Last summer, activist-journalist Ellen Davidson and I traveled the length and breadth of Israel/Palestine on a delegation with the California-based Middle East Children’s Alliance. We stayed at the Ibda’a Cultural Center guest house in the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem in Palestine; we talked with Palestinian and Israeli NGOs and grass-roots groups; we visited Palestinian homes, a Bedouin village in the Negev, and clinics in the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley; we walked around the ancient cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, and Ramallah, along with the newer city of Haifa and a very new suburb of Nazareth. We saw what Israel calls “settlements” in the Occupied Territories, new towns built by Jewish colonists in violation of the Geneva Convention that bars building by occupiers in lands under occupation; we saw the 30-foot-high concrete wall Israel is building, often between Palestinians’ homes and their farms and olive trees. We heard accounts of what Israel calls the “war of independence" and Palestinians call “al nakba”—the catastrophe—and its aftermath. This was one such account.

On a rocky hillside near Jerusalem, the shells of old stone houses cling to the steep slope. Once, they made up a village called Lifta. Yacoub Odeh points to one house: “This was my home,” he says. “Where I was born.”

At the bottom of the hill is the spring that provided Lifta’s water, along with the ruins of the village mosque and the communal oven and olive presses—two of them, so rich in olive trees was Lifta. The trees are there still, but no one has harvested their olives since the Palestinian villagers were chased away in 1948, during what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians call al Nakba—the Catastrophe. Yacoub was a child then. Now in his 60s, he’s the human rights and housing supervisor with the Land and Housing Research Center, an international human rights coalition. For these 12 days, he’ll be our guide to the West Bank.

Yacoub lives in Jerusalem now. Jerusalem residency is a special status for Palestinians—they carry neither Israeli nor Palestinian passports, but rather Jerusalemite IDs. This gives them a little more freedom of movement than Palestinians have in the Occupied Territories.

But Yacoub can’t go back to Lifta. No one can, because to build or rebuild so much as a doorway would require an Israeli building permit—and Palestinians don’t get those permits. Ever. Sometimes they build without them, and then the police or the Israeli Defense Forces come with Caterpillar bulldozers and demolish what’s been built and fine the Palestinians for the cost of the demolition. Yacoub knows this all too well; everywhere we go, he shows us the sites of demolished homes. No one can build or live in empty Lifta now. Its olives ripen and fall and lie on the stony ground.

Yet Lifta isn’t quite a ghost town. The ancient spring has some religious significance to the Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem, and they come there to picnic in the shade of Lifta’s olive trees and bathe in its waters. They’re here today, staring as Yacoub walks us around what used to be his village. It seems they’re not used to seeing Palestinians here.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak
Versions of this story appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of WIN,the magazine of the War Resisters League and in the online journal World War 4 Report.