Summary
A civil engineer living in Ayn Hawd al-Jadida, the unrecognized village built by the expelled residents of Ayn Hawd on their own pastures outside Ein Hod, and the founder and director of the Association of Forty, which campaigns on behalf of the Palestinian unrecognized villages inside Israel (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.292-293).
Details
- On his family’s attempts to return to Ayn Hawd: “Mostly there were unofficial attempts to talk to this or that Jewish official to get permission to return, but they all failed,” and after 1951, when a cousin of his grandfather tried to enter his home and the police threw him in jail, “After that, no one tried.” (PDF p.292-293)
- On non-recognition: “It means that your village doesn’t get any services at all — no electricity, no running water, no schools, no medical clinics.” “When it comes to harassing us, we exist and are in communication with the various offices of the state administration. But when it comes to giving us anything at all that could make us feel that we are in some way part of this state, we are forgotten.” (PDF p.293)
- On the Israeli artists living in Ein Hod: “the people who live in our homes and on our lands in the original Ayn Hawd do not like to hear about us because they do not want to be reminded of what happened.” (PDF p.293)
- On the cypresses planted around the new village by the Israel Land Administration and the Jewish National Fund, which suffocated its olive and fruit trees: “To this day I hate cypress trees” — planted, he says, to close the village in, shut out the air and block the view of the sea, they killed its fruit trees (PDF p.294)
- “I am a native of this land, and this is actually my country — the stranger is the one who came from outside and refuses to recognize me.” (PDF p.294)
Related pages
Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, Ayn Hawd, Association of Forty, Unrecognized villages, Present Absentees