By Isabelle Humphries*
On the same day that Mahmoud Darwish was given full honors at his funeral in Ramallah, a much smaller gathering met by an Israeli petrol station in an industrial zone off the road to Acre. Carrying sheaves sof wheat and Palestinian flags, we climbed a winding track up the Galilee hillside, behind a coffin carried at the head of the procession.Hearing of the passing of Mahmoud Darwish I immediately thought of the overgrown cemetery of al-Birweh, perched overlooking the fertile plain which reaches the sea. In the summer of 2005, three villagers had taken me there: two who remembered life in this village paradise, a third born in the 1950s in the zinc shacks in which his parents sheltered. Following Israel�s 1948 occupation of al-Birweh, many villagers were forced across the border to Lebanon, where they still wait in camps and cities to return home. Hundreds of other villagers, however, including the family of Mahmoud Darwish, managed to stay in the area, and now live less than three miles away from al-Birweh, in the overcrowded village of Judayde.
Despite the fact that they were given Israeli passports, �internal� Palestinian refugees are no more able to return home than those who fled to Lebanon. Even in death, villagers are forbidden from being buried in the cemetery that is one of al-Birweh�s few surviving landmarks. The extensive land of al-Birweh, including the area where the villagers� now-destroyed homes once stood, today is divided between kibbutz Yas�ur and the farmers of Ahihud. Thus the coffin carried by the few hundred mourners on that Wednesday afternoon in August was empty. But while Mahmoud Darwish�s body remains in death, as in the last years of his life, in Ramallah, his soul is forever in al-Birweh.
Three years ago, on my previous visit, the al-Birweh refugees had brought me to the cemetery to tell stories of 1948 and their attempts to prevent the destruction of all that remained there�the four village cemeteries. Indeed, the week before Darwish�s death the case regarding one of the cemeteries had reached the Israeli High Court. A decision is pending.
The villagers assured me in 2005 that they had negotiated with Israeli authorities the right to visit this particular cemetery�as long as we did not enter on a Saturday, as the Yemenis of Ahihud are religious Jews. The Arab identity of these settlers only adds to the bitter irony for the villagers who live so near, yet so far, from their ancestral home.
The fact that our visit took place on a Sunday, however, did not stop an older man from approaching us, accusing us (in Arabic) of trying to steal his cows, and demanding we leave at once. The Yemeni Ibrahim, it seems, with his property and cow sheds bordering the cemetery and covering over the site of the long-destroyed church, is well known to the al-Birweh villagers. This was not their first encounter with him. We were in fact leaving when he accosted us, but the moment Ibrahim attempted to force us to go, the al-Birweh villagers chose to stand their ground against a man who symbolized the theft of something far greater than cattle.
In response, the Israeli farmer bolted a gate across the road, preventing us from driving away, and promptly called the police to arrest us. Knowing that in this case we theoretically had the law on our side, we too called the police to demand that the Israeli be forced to release us. After an hour a lone police officer arrived who merely rebuked Ibrahim gently, issuing our captor no penalties or fines. I wondered how long it would take, and how many armed Israeli police would arrive, if a Palestinian locked five Jewish Israelis in a cemetery.
In August 2008, however, the mourners reached the top of the hill, where only the gravestones and a few cacti and isolated pomegranate trees remain. Somewhere further away Darwish�s childhood schoolhouse survives. Standing around the coffin, mourners read his poetry, including �ID Card.� On the oud someone played the music famously set to the poet�s words by Lebanese musician Marcel Khalifi.
The eulogy was delivered by Hanna Abu Hanna, himself a renowned poet and comrade of Darwish from the days of military rule over Palestinians inside Israel�days when poetry was one of the leading forms of resistance. People covered the coffin with wheat, flowers and olive branches, and mourners lit candles at the foot of the grave, securing them in place with large stones, then paused for a moment. As the Galilee sun set once more, we drifted off down the hillside, poetry ringing in our ears and the dust of al-Birweh clinging to our shoes.
And so 60 years after the villagers were dispersed, Ibrahim remains in Ahihud/Birweh and Mahmoud Darwish joins the long line of Palestinians buried away from home. But as the hundreds of young people in both al-Birweh and Ramallah showed, the dead and the land are far from forgotten. Despite increasingly draconian policies, Israel has failed miserably to destroy the spirit of Palestine and Palestinian identity, which continues to live on in a whole new generation from Lebanon to Gaza, from the West Bank to the Galilee.
* Isabelle Humphries is completing doctoral research on internally displaced Palestinian refugees.
