Summary
Palestinian village in the Tulkarem subdistrict of Mandatory Palestine, now inside Israel’s 1948 borders, approximately twenty-seven kilometers north of Tel Aviv: the site of Zochrot’s first tour on Land Day in 2002, of the 2009 Zochrot-BADIL workshop that began “The Practicalities of Return”, and of the countermapping and staged-return plans Kelly documents (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.179-189).
Details
- In 2005, on the fifty-seventh anniversary of the Nakba, internally displaced Palestinians from Miska established the Committee of Miska’s Uprooted; their first act was a village visit with Zochrot, planting olive and fig saplings that authorities uprooted a few days later, barring the village school’s door (PDF p.187).
- After the school hosted Salman Natour’s play Memory and a cultural event with Sami Michael, authorities surrounded it with barbed wire and tore down protest artworks; after Uncle Matta, a story of the Nakba for children, authorities bulldozed the school building and planted orange trees to hide the ruins; in May 2007 the first Nakba commemoration without the school building was held (PDF p.187-188).
- The 2010 countermapping workshop of village refugees and nearby Israelis drew over aerial photos from 1948 and today a public cultural center at the village center, neighborhoods, a college, a swimming pool, the neighboring kibbutz of Ramat HaKovesh in place, and “instead of fences they want to open the fence and plant some flowers” (PDF p.185-186).
- Ahmad Barclay documents four stages of re-emergence for Miska, from signposting and “planting catalysts” to densification and solidification of the urban fabric on families’ return (PDF p.187-188).
Related pages
Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, Zochrot, BADIL, Ahmad Barclay, Right of Return