From The Holy Mountain (60 page)

But he didn't apologise.

Nazareth,
22
November

Before I left Jerusalem I had bought a bus ticket to the Egyptian border. From there I planned to make my way to Alexandria. The bus was due to leave in two days' time, but before I left Israel I had a promise to keep.

On my last day in Beirut I had promised to visit Kafr Bir'im, the village from which the Christian Palestinian family I had met in the Mar Elias refugee camp had fled in 1948. The Daous had felt they would be safer if they temporarily left their homes, and as a result of that decision had spent forty-six years in exile in a succession of squalid refugee camps. I wanted to know what would have happened to them if they had decided to stay. Would their life have been any easier in the new State of Israel?

In a general sense I already knew the answer. Compared to their compatriots who fled or were expelled - or indeed those on the West Bank who had been conquered by the Israelis in 1967 and were still under military rule twenty-seven years later - the Palestinian Christians who had stayed on and become citizens of Israel in 1948 had been very lucky. They had Israeli passports, and could vote in Israeli elections. They had access to Israeli educational facilities, enjoyed Israeli civil justice and could even, if they so wished, join the Israeli army. True, there were complaints about land expropriation and discrimination: the councils of Arab towns were said to receive less than a third of the funds available to those with Jewish populations. Yet compared to the dismal fate of those who still languished in refugee camps, the Israeli Arab Christians had been very fortunate indeed. Unlike their counterparts on the West Bank, relatively few have emigrated, and since the foundation of Israel their numbers have quadrupled, from the thirty-four thousand left in their homeland in 1949 to around 150,000 today.

But what I wanted to compare with what I had heard in Beirut was more specific: the fate of the Daous' neighbours in Kafr Bir'im who had stayed on. Samira Daou had told me that when Israeli planes had bombed Kafr Bir'im, her friends and neighbours had taken shelter in the nearby town of Jish. What had happened to them?

After leaving Ein Fara, I got Sami to drive me through the occupied West Bank, past Biddya and Ariel, to Nazareth in northern Israel. Then this morning, after breakfast, we set off north again towards Jish. The drive led past the Sea of Galilee, with its ancient Byzantine churches clustering around the shore, and up, over stark hillsides of black volcanic stone, on towards the north and the Lebanese border.

The countryside was dotted with Israeli
kibbutzim
energetically scratching a living from the harsh soil. But as we drove, Sami pointed out the sites of some of the 385 Palestinian villages - many of them Christian - which had preceded such Israeli settlements in Galilee, until they were systematically depopulated and destroyed by the Jewish Haganah during the war of 1948. It was the cactus plants that always gave the old villages away: however efficiently the Israelis had bulldozed the buildings and erased the Palestinian communities from the map, the old villages' cactus hedges had deep roots, and kept sprouting again and again to mark the sites of the former garden boundaries and the shadows of former fields.

'That was the village of Faradi,' said Sami at one stage, pointing to a few blocks of stone and some cactus plants by the side of the road at the bottom of a hill. 'Now the Kibbutz of Farud farms that land.'

As we climbed the hill, Sami's battered old Mercedes labouring behind a convoy of slow military trucks, the kibbutz's cowsheds and farm buildings came into view, their solar panels glinting in the morning light. Beyond, the low hills and plains of Galilee spread out before us. Despite the mass immigration of the 1920s and thirties, in 1948 the Jews had still formed less than a quarter of the population of this area, and the displacement of the Arab majority had been achieved only by a process which Yigal Allon, the commander of the Jewish military forces in Galilee (and later Deputy Prime Minister of Israel), himself described as 'cleansing'. 'We saw a need to clean the Inner Galilee,' he wrote in his memoirs, 'and to create a Jewish territorial succession in the entire area of Upper Galilee. We therefore looked for means to cause the tens of thousands of sulky Arabs who remained in Galilee to flee
...
Wide areas were cleansed.'

In the process of this 'cleansing' of the Galilee, the Christian Palestinians had offered less resistance than the Muslims, and consequently were better treated. Moreover, Israel was careful not to offend public opinion in the Christian West by over-zealous 'cleansing' in the more famous Christian towns and villages; indeed, special instructions were issued by Ben Gurion himself not to loot Christian holy places such as Nazareth. As the Brigade Commander who captured the city later wrote: 'The conquest of Nazareth has political importance - the behaviour of the [Israeli] occupation forces in the city could serve as a factor in determining the prestige of the young state abroad.'

In nearby Beit Shean (then known by its Arabic name Beisan) the inhabitants were divided in two: Muslims were bussed across the Jordan into exile, while the Christians were given the option of fleeing to Nazareth. Canon Nairn Ateek was eleven when he was expelled from his family home in Beisan. 'When the Israeli army came into the town there was no resistance,' he had told me when I had visited him at St George's. 'Then quite suddenly a fortnight later we were given two hours to pack up and leave: the soldiers came around from house to house and said, "If you don't leave we will kill you." We were allowed to take only what we could carry.' Ten years later, in 1958, when travel restrictions on the Israeli Arabs were lifted, Ateek's father took the family back to see their old house. They knocked on the door, but were sent roughly away by a Polish man armed with a rifle. They never went back again.

An hour's drive beyond Nazareth, the road turned a corner and we found ourselves looking down over thick conifer forests to the tower blocks of Safad. 'Before 1948 it was a mixed town,' said Sami. 'There were Muslims, Jews and Christians. Now it's exclusively Jewish. The Christians and the Muslims were driven out by force and were never allowed back again. My mother had cousins there, but most of her family were killed when the Haganah bombarded the Arab part of the town with mortars. A few made it to Lebanon, but we haven't heard from them since the invasion of '82. We don't know whether they are alive or dead.'

Jish lay a short distance beyond Safad, a little higher into the hills. It was a scrappy-looking place, the few old stone houses surrounded by many more new bungalows, the minaret of a mosque and the spires of two churches. Unsure where to begin my enquiries, I asked an Arab woman in a pinafore the way to the priest's house. I was directed a short distance down the street.

The door was opened by Fr. Bishara Suleiman, the Maronite parish priest. He was a tall man with a short clipped goatee beard, and he spoke excellent English (and French, as I later discovered: he had studied theology at the Sorbonne). Unusually for a Middle Eastern clergyman he was dressed not in formal black robes, but in a T-shirt and slacks. I explained the reason for my visit to the town, and he immediately invited me in. At the same time he called to his nephew, John Suleiman, to go and fetch some of the old men from Kafr Bir'im.

We took seats on a balcony, looking out onto the village's olive groves. Fr. Suleiman's wife produced a thermos of strong Turkish coffee from the kitchen, and while we sipped the scalding liquid I asked the priest if he would tell me the full story of what had happened to Kafr Bir'im after the Daous had left it in 1948. Would they have been better advised to stay?

'Very few of our villagers did flee in '48,' said Fr. Suleiman. 'We had always had good relations with the Jews and the British: so much so that in 1936 [during the Palestinian revolt] we were accused of collaboration and had to beg the British to protect us. They sent some Tommies who set up camp on the edge of the village, and after that we had no trouble. We had always helped the Jews entering Palestine from Lebanon, and we thought that if there was any trouble they would help us. That was why most of the villagers stayed on, despite all the stories we heard about Deir Yassin and other massacres nearer here.'

'Such as?'

'The Haganah massacred seventy Arab prisoners at Ein al-Zaytun near Safad. They tied their hands behind their backs. Then they shot them. But we thought nothing like that would happen here, partly because we were Christians and partly because we had always been friendly towards the Jews.'

At this moment Fr. Suleiman's nephew returned with the old village schoolmaster of Bir'im, Elias Jacob.

Elias was a thin, wizened old man. At seventy-five he was a little uncertain on his legs, but still absolutely clear in his mind. He was, said Fr. Suleiman, the best authority on the history of Kafr Bir'im; and as if to prove it, Elias produced from his pocket a slip of paper on which were written the main dates and facts of the story. He didn't want anyone getting anything wrong, he said. He took a seat, threw back a small cup of Turkish coffee, and at Fr. Suleiman's invitation began to talk.

'The Haganah soldiers arrived in our village on 29 October 1948,' he said, checking the date against his notes. 'Most of us remained in our houses, but the old men and the priest received the troops at the entrance of the village with a white flag. We offered them bread and salt, the symbol of friendship and peace.'

'Were they equally friendly?' I asked.

'They were,' said the old man. 'They were very good, very polite. We gave them food and they occupied some houses. They stayed for fifteen days. Then on 13 November 1948 an order arrived that we all had to leave.'

'Were you surprised?'

'We were amazed. At first we refused to go. But then a new officer arrived and he was very different. He said we had twenty-four hours to get out. Then we were afraid. He gave no reasons. He just said that we had to be five kilometres from the village or we would be shot.'

As Elias was speaking we were joined on the balcony by another old man, Wadeer Ferhat. He was a big, high-spirited man with a huge walrus moustache. When he discovered what we were talking about he began shouting in a series of angry outbursts of guttural Arabic. Sami translated.

'Mr Wadeer says that they threw the people out from their homes into the countryside. They had no tents. Some found shelter in caves. Everyone else just squatted under trees or in the fields. It was November, but much colder than this year. By December there was thick snow. He said several babies died from exposure.'

Wadeer continued shouting, hands flying in the air in a series of graphic gestures.

'He says he was thirty-five at the time, but that both his parents were very old, over seventy. He says that they cried for many days because they had lost their homes and their land.'

'What Wadeer has not said,' pointed out Elias Jacob, calmly consulting his fact sheet, 'was that before we left, each of the 1,050 villagers was given a number, granting them Israeli citizenship. We tidied and cleaned our houses because we thought we would soon be allowed back. After a time the Minister for Minorities, Mr Bichor Shitrit, came here. He saw that we were living under trees and ordered that we be given the houses here in Jish which had been vacated by fleeing Muslims. He said that we should wait for just fifteen days, and after that, when the area was calm, we could go back to Kafr Bir'im. In the meantime he allowed a few old men to stay in the village to guard the houses and the crops.'

'What happened then?' I asked.

'Six months later the old men were ordered out of the village, and it became clear that we were not going to get our houses back. So we decided to take the matter to the Israeli High Court.'

'The people of Bir'im have never resorted to violence,' said

Fr. Suleiman. "We have always fought by law and by Christian principles.'

'In 1953 we finally won the case,' continued Elias. 'The court ordered that the evictions were unjust and said we should all be allowed back to our homes and to farm our fields.'