Live from Palestine, 30 March 2008
The village of Suhmata before it was
destroyed in 1948 by Zionist militias.
Unlike the majority of Palestinian refugees
dispersed across the Middle East and beyond,
Wagih Semaan can drive a few kilometers from
his house, cross a ditch and a fence and sit in the
stones of the village he was driven out of at the
age of 11. But despite his Israeli "citizenship,"
he is no more able to return to live on his land
than the Palestinian sitting in Ein al-Hilwe camp
across the Lebanese border.
Wagih is one of more than 250,000 Palestinian
refugees who are internally displaced -- they
managed to remain in their homeland yet are
denied access to their lands and homes. Like
the rest of the million Palestinians inside Israel,
internally displaced live with Israeli passports
yet in all sectors are treated as second class
citizens. While the brutality meted out to residents
of the West Bank and Gaza demonstrates
clearly that Palestinian life is not valued by
the state of Israel, the second class status of
Palestinians inside the Jewish state shows the
inherent apartheid nature of a state defined as
Jewish. Israeli apartheid would not end even in
the (very unlikely) scenario that Israel totally
withdrew to 1967 borders. The case of the
internally displaced and land confiscation from
Palestinians legally defined by Israel as "citizens"
-- both in 1948, and continuing since that date --
undermines any Israeli claims that it functions as a
democracy for its Palestinian citizens.
The Semaan family come from Suhmata, a
northern Galilee village attacked by Haganah
[the pre-state Zionist militia that later became the
Israeli army] aircraft in October 1948. In addition
to more than one thousand inhabitants, by that stage
many hundreds of refugees exiled from other
villages already occupied were seeking shelter in
homes and olive groves. As villagers fled the
onslaught in terror, 16 were killed, as Wagih explains:
"they put a bullet in the head of one young man in front
of his father then left the body for the dogs to eat."
Some tried their hardest to stay to no avail.
"My father didn't want to leave -- he hid under the
trees. One time he had just moved and the tree
which he had been under was hit from the air. He
was lucky to stay alive," says Wagih. The village
was surrounded from all sides except the northern
direction to Lebanon. The message was clear --
there was no room for Palestinians in the new state.
Ninety-three percent of Suhmatans became refugees
in Lebanon and Syria, one famous village son being
Abu Maher al-Yamani, the deputy of the late resistance
leader George Habash.
Seven percent, however, succeeded in sheltering
with relatives in some of the few Palestinian villages
which were not destroyed in the Israel occupation,
finally becoming citizens in the new Jewish state.
But remaining in the homeland was not an easy option.
Creeping into the fields around their village, in the
first months Suhmatans saw some of their homes
dynamited. The oldest Semaan brother approached
the village to see that their home had been dynamited.
"He just could not bring himself to tell our mother,"
one of the Semaan brothers recalls. Other homes
were quickly occupied by a group of Romanian
Jews waiting for their own settlement to be built on
the land of the village. Within a few years the village
was destroyed -- Jewish settlers moved into the
new buildings -- and Israel believed it had shattered
the hopes of the refugees to return. "They even took
the stones from our houses to the new settlement,"
says Wagih.
From 1948 to 1967 all Palestinians remaining in
Israel, not just the refugees, were subject to military
law, similar to that imposed on the West Bank and
Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied in 1967. Military
rule brought curfews, restrictions on movement and
employment, and strict penalties for any political
activity. At this time the struggle was simply to
eat and to live, to stay alive. The Semaan family
lived 13 in one room in the village of Fassuta; as
Wagih explains, "lying next to each other we couldn't
move." As a young man Wagih was pursued by the
police for political activity with the Communist Party;
many people were just too frightened to even try to
speak out.
Although the days of military rule for Palestinians
inside Israel are over, a more sophisticated
system of surveillance and political control of this
minority remains in place. Many Palestinians
inside Israel today remain nervous of political activity,
fully aware of its implications for themselves and their
families, but an increasing number are prepared to
speak out. To draw attention to the continuing injustice
of the Nakba six decades on, the Suhmata Committee
in the Galilee has launched a new petition to protest
further settlement expansion on their land.
Individual village committees, and later an
overarching umbrella organization to promote the right
of return for the internally displaced, were formed in the
wake of Madrid Conference 1991, when Palestinians
inside Israel realized that their status was not to be
represented at the negotiating table. Having previously
relied on international movements for the liberation of
Palestine, many Palestinian political activists inside
Israel decided to take control of their own struggle,
to fight to be seen as an integral part of the Palestinian
people and not an Israeli "domestic" concern.
The Suhmata committee promotes awareness of
the village amongst remaining Suhmatans, running a
regularly updated website ( www.suhmata.com),
organizing visits and tours to the site of the village and
attempting to protect remains, particularly in regards to
the holy sites. Over the past decade villagers have
held events at the village -- today grazing ground for
settler cattle -- on Nakba Day, Land Day and other
Palestinian national events, summer camps for children,
renovation work in the graveyards. The village even has
its own play, performed in the ruins
(as well as other locations across the globe).
The current petition demands a halt to Israeli plans
announced in January 2008 for the building of
around 3,500 new housing lots on land of
Suhmata to expand the Jewish town of Ma'alot.
Ma'alot was founded in 1957 as part of Israeli
attempts to Judaize the Galilee which still had
a significant Palestinian population. The town
already overwhelms and confiscates the lands
of the still existing Palestinian villages of Tarshiha
and Mi'lia.
Villagers are under no illusion that a petition can
transform the direction of Israeli policy but see it as
part of the wider struggle to spread awareness of
the rights of all Palestinians to return and Israel's
continuing attempts to establish "facts on the
ground" and to dictate their own terms of any
future settlement -- a settlement which would not
bring justice to the refugees.
"Why is this land open to the Russian immigrant
yet forbidden to us?" asks Wagih.
"It is enough -- stop this project --
this is Palestinian land. We call on the conscience
of all good people, here and outside. They speak
about peace, but there will be no peace without a
solution to the problem of return; while they continue
to build on our expense."
Isabelle Humphries has worked for several
years with Palestinian non-governmental
organizations in the Galilee, and is completing
a doctoral thesis on Palestinian internally
displaced. She can be contacted at isabellebh
2004 A T yahoo D O T co D O T uk.
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