One home, two histories

The past of one property in Jerusalem
symbolises today's divisions between
Palestinians and Israelis

Visit The Palestine Video
Blog Here & watch The Video
Audio Show associated with this article.

The two-storey house is built
from hefty blocks of golden stone.
Tall palm trees tower over the front garden, giving shade from
the burning summer sun. There is a green, metal double gate,
guarded on each side by stone pillars adorned with handsome
metal lanterns. It is known as the Hallak house and it sits in a
smart district of west Jerusalem known as Talbieh.

This is a house of competing histories: a story of flight and
dispossession and a story of immigration and achievement;
the unresolved tragedy of the Palestinian refugee crisis and
the remarkable rise of the Israeli state built on the ruins of
the second world war.

On Thursday, Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary with
speeches, military parades, exhibitions and sports competitions.
The true story of the rival legacies of what happened in 1948 lies
in the history of buildings such as the Hallak house and in the
lives of people such as Wilhelmine Baramki and Reuven Tsur,
a Palestinian and an Israeli, born within two years of each other,
whose families have both called this house their home.

In 1948, Baramki was 13 years old, a child in a respectable
Christian Palestinian family from Jerusalem. In the early
1930s the family built the house, and named it after her
grandfather Hanna Hallak. As today, it was divided into
apartments. Her grandparents lived downstairs to the right
and at least three uncles and two aunts lived in the other
apartments. Other rooms were rented out to tenants.

Baramki, now 73, lived with her parents a few minutes away
in another Christian Palestinian district of the city, Baqa, but
she has memories of summers spent idly with her grandmother
Farideh and her uncles and aunts in Hallak house.

"There were fruit trees, a nice apple tree. There was a swing
where we used to play. There was an open veranda where we
used to sit with all flowers around," she said. "Those memories
were something for us. On Palm Sunday they used to pick all the
nice flowers they had to make our palms.
We used to love going there."

Then came the brewing conflict in the months after the UN's
failed attempt to partition British Mandate Palestine into a
Jewish and an Arab state. One spring day, Jewish officials
drove through Talbieh with a loudspeaker instructing the
Palestinians to leave their homes immediately -
there had been a shooting nearby.

Baramki's widowed grandmother and her uncles and aunts
grabbed a bag and left quickly, seeking refuge in the family's
other home in Baqa. They briefly returned but the shootings
and bombings continued. Once they were shot at on a bus.

"Every night there were bombings, every day it was almost
the same. My father told my mother: 'We can't keep going.
We'll be shot one day,'" she said. They left to stay with
another aunt who lived in the Old City, in east Jerusalem.
"Just for a few days we thought."

The war raged on and eventually they took refuge from the
fighting by crossing into Lebanon. Before they left, her
mother went back to the house in Baqa and with a maid she
washed and ironed the laundry and tidied it away for their
return. They locked the doors, carefully marking which key
fitted which lock. It was the last time the family houses
were theirs.

In Lebanon they rented a house in the mountains and as the
war escalated, weeks turned into months. A year and a half
later they finally returned to Jerusalem, at least to the
Jordanian-held east of the city. The west, including both
Talbieh and Baqa, was cut off by a ceasefire line and was in
the hands of the nascent Israeli state.

They were forbidden to enter. The Israeli state deemed them
"absentee" property owners and their houses, like the houses
of nearly all the other 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were
forced out in 1948, were given to Jewish Israeli families,
often to newly arrived immigrants, survivors of the horror
of the camps in Europe.

And so it remained until 1967. On June 4 that year,
Wilhelmine Khoury, as she was then, married another
Christian Palestinian, George Baramki, the son of a well-known
architect who had also lost properties and land in Jerusalem,
Jaffa and elsewhere in 1948.

The following morning, June 5, the couple were sitting aboard
a plane on the runway at Amman airport in Jordan waiting to
head off on honeymoon. They chose a bad day. Before dawn
Israel's air force launched a devastating pre-emptive strike on
Egypt, the start of the Six Day War that was to reshape the
Middle East. The pilot ordered the passengers off the plane
and out of the airport and the Baramkis left their luggage
and raced home.

Despite the fighting, they stayed on in east Jerusalem
desperate not to lose another property to another war.
Israel was quickly victorious, fatefully beginning the
occupation that continues today of Gaza, the West Bank
and the Golan Heights. In Jerusalem, Israel seized and
later annexed the east.

That meant two things to the Baramkis: they could now, for
the first time, go back to visit their family homes from 1948,
including Hallak house. It also left them refugees in their own
city, for they had no right to claim back what was lost.
"We always had hope, but nothing doing," she said. "Now we are
present-absent. We are present here to pay taxes and everything,
but absent to get back our property. This is the rule that they
have," she said.

They still occasionally drive over to the west and look at their
former homes. "It was difficult the first time," said Wilhelmine.
"Then you get used to it. But it doesn't mean we have forgotten
our claim to our houses and our land, too."

Ghetto

The second half of the story of the house began 75 years ago
and 1,200 miles away. Reuven Tsur grew up in a Hungarian-speaking
Jewish family in what was then Transylvania and is today the
Romanian city of Oradea. During the war, the family managed
to escape the ghetto into which they had been corralled and they
fled eventually to Budapest after his father, a prominent and
successful baker, had survived 16 months in one labour camp
and a brief arrest by the Gestapo.

His parents had for years been planning to emigrate, with
their hearts set on Australia. Eventually, and in large part
down to the cajoling of their son Reuven, they flew to Haifa,
new immigrants to a new Israel.

"We saw Haifa at night. We saw the lights," said Tsur.
"We were driving through the empty streets of Haifa and
my father saw the signs on the closed shops and the signs
were in Hebrew. For my father Hebrew was associated with
the synagogue and he told my mother: 'Look how many
synagogues.'"

The family were taken to a camp for newly arrived immigrants
and soon Tsur, who was just 16, was sent to a kibbutz, an ambition
he'd harboured for years.

His father set up a bakery and Tsur went to study English and
Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
He became a teacher in the city and eventually a professor of
Hebrew literature at Tel Aviv University, where he was a
leader in the field of cognitive poetics.

In 1957 he married Ilana, who was born near Tel Aviv.
The couple began to look for a house, somewhere with large
rooms where Ilana could run her physical education classes.
One day an agent showed them a small apartment on the
ground floor of a large and impressive Arab house in a street
now called Hovevei Zion (the Lovers of Zion). It was the
Hallak house.

"I only saw the palm trees from the outside and I said:
'This must be a mistake. It couldn't be that beautiful,'"
said Tsur. "It was empty and nobody wanted it."

They got a good deal, buying the apartment for 12,000
Israeli lirot, worth the approximate equivalent of £25,000
today, from two Jewish landlords. The three-room apartment
they had bought was part of the larger flat in which
Baramki's grandparents had been living a decade earlier.

The Tsurs admit that they didn't think of its former occupants.
Their neighbours were other Jewish immigrants from Europe
and the Arab world who had poured into the new, fast-growing
state of Israel. The Palestinians were long gone.

Then came the 1967 war, and Israel's capture of east Jerusalem.
"Sure enough after a few weeks comes a very prominent gentlemen
wearing an English suit and he said: 'OK, my parents lived here and
I would like to see the apartment,'" said Ilana. The gentleman was
almost certainly Wilhelmine's late uncle, Victor Khoury. Ilana
showed him around, answering his questions about how much
they had paid for the flat and what had happened to the grapefruit
tree in the back garden.

"Emotionally I felt awkward. I had no time, I was working at
that moment and I couldn't say I was very nice," she said.
After the visit, she had the front door lock changed but she has
to this day kept the original key still attached to her key ring.
There were more visits from the Khoury family in the months
and years ahead, all well-mannered and the two families, Israeli
and Palestinian, sat and drank tea in the house they both
called home.

When the Baramkis and the Tsurs talk of the future they
share a striking pessimism about the prospects of peace. The
Tsurs argue, like many Israelis, that the Palestinians would
not stick to any peace agreement that is made. The Baramkis
argue, like many Palestinians, that Israel is more interested in
colonising the land with settlements than in striking a genuine
peace deal.

The Tsurs say they would give up their apartment in Hallak
house if it truly meant peace would come and if they were given
a comparable apartment in return, an offer rarely heard in
today's Israel and perhaps shaped by their own so far fruitless
attempts to claim compensation from the Romanian
government for Tsur's family house in Oradea, which was
confiscated by the Communist regime. They strongly believe
that financial compensation alone is enough and that allowing
the Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948 to reclaim
them is unacceptable.

"There seems to be a big difference between them and us
because we don't want to go back and we don't want to have
anything of it," said Reuven. "We want to disconnect and they
don't want to disconnect."

And on the other side of the city, the feeling is completely
the reverse. "It's our land," said Wilhelmine. "We have a right
to come back to our home."