In Two Lost Villages, Israeli-Palestinian Struggle Over Land Hits Home

IKRIT, Israel —  On a rain-lashed mountaintop near Israel’s northern border, the people of this vanished Arab village cling to its sole surviving building--a small, square church--and stubbornly insist that the government right a half-century-old wrong. They retell the tale they have repeated endlessly over decades to anyone who will listen.

“On Oct. 28, 1948, the Israeli army came into our village, and we welcomed them,” recalled Aouni Sbeit, 65, a poet who was 17 when soldiers of the new Jewish state arrived. “The commander claimed that there would be military operations on the border and said they feared for our safety. They asked us to leave for 15 days.”

That was more than 47 years ago. The villagers of Ikrit have been asking to come back ever since.

The saga of Ikrit, and of another village nearby called Biram--both evacuated and then razed by the army--has come to symbolize for Israelis and Palestinians the essence of their deadly struggle over what each refers to reverently as “The Land.”

For Israelis, the villagers’ possible return raises the specter of hundreds of thousands of Arabs--who fled or were forced from their villages when the Jewish state declared its independence--claiming the right to return to their homes.

For Palestinians, the plight of those from Ikrit and Biram represents the injustice that they felt they endured when the Jewish state was born. This wrong, Palestinians say, can only be redressed by allowing them to return home or accept compensation.

As Israel makes peace with its neighbors, this conflict is beginning to move from theory to the negotiating table. And that is why Ikrit and Biram remain such potent symbols for both Israelis and Palestinians.

For the people of the two lost villages, the uprooting is a deeply personal tragedy that has destroyed and scattered two close-knit communities.

Those from Ikrit and Biram insist that things can be made right only if Israel restores the property they lost. But most of their village lands have since been broken up and given to Jewish collective farming communities established after the villagers were told that their displacement would be temporary and were evacuated.

Caught between the villagers and the Jews who now live in the area have been successive Israeli governments, which for decades have ignored a 1951 Supreme Court decision requiring the return of those from Ikrit and Biram to their homelands.

That decision, however, was made moot by then-Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, who ordered a young Israeli commander, Yitzhak Rabin, to bomb and dynamite the villages decades ago.

As the years went by, and the villagers of Ikrit and Biram refused to abandon their claims, first Labor-led, then Likud-led governments set up committees to study the problem. None reached a decision that was adopted and implemented. When Labor formed the current government in 1992 and accelerated Israel’s peace talks with the Arabs, the villagers hoped that the time had finally come for the Jewish state to do right by them.

Israel has since signed peace accords with the Palestinians and Jordanians and is negotiating with Syria.

Israel has never been more secure or more ready to heal old wounds, Israeli supporters of the Ikrit and Biram villagers say.

Until now, wrote Dani Rabinovitz in the Hebrew daily Haaretz, “all the governments of Israel have viewed the Ikrit and Biram case in apocalyptic terms. These two villages were the domino piece that was to lead to a whole territorial, moral and strategic collapse of Israel--soon to collapse under the flood of such requests that were bound to get a foot in the door once the process began.”

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The current government, he wrote, “makes it clear that whatever the agreements signed with its neighbors, there still can be no total and balanced solution of the regional conflict without dealing with the problems of the refugees and the disinherited and the uprooted.”

If only it were so simple, said Dedi Zucker, a member of Parliament and strong defender of the villagers’ right to return: “Some people look at this as a way to heal a wound, and others see it as a reopening of a wound.”

It is the villagers’ bad luck, he said, that Israel is to begin talks with the Palestinians in May on such issues as the return of refugees who fled Israel in 1948 or the West Bank and Gaza Strip when they came under Israeli occupation in 1967. Although the government insists that any decision to return Ikrit and Biram villagers to their homes will be taken as a humanitarian gesture, some legal experts fear the Palestinians may see it as a precedent that will help them press the claims of Palestinians living outside Israel who seek to return.

Despite the sensitivity of the timing--a few days before Christmas--the latest government committee dealing with the two villages issued its recommendations, which seemed to take the boldest step yet by an Israeli government to return the people of Ikrit and Biram.

Headed by Justice Minister David Libai, the committee said the villagers should be allowed to return to their homes. But to the dismay of the villagers and their supporters, the committee said that only some of the villagers would be allowed to go home; those who returned would be allowed to settle on only a fraction of the land that once was theirs.

“It was not a happy Christmas for us,” said Entanass Soussan, 55, who asserted that Biram’s villagers are united in rejecting the government offer.

“It is not human,” said the teacher, who has spent most of his life in Jish, an Arab village south of Biram. The committee, which also proposed to limit the number of children allowed to return, “did not take into consideration the customs of the Arab family, the ties among family members. To divide families in such a severe way, we cannot accept this,” he said.

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In Jerusalem, Zucker notes that about 80 Arab villages in the Galilee, Israel’s northern region, were destroyed and their inhabitants uprooted when the Jewish state was born. What makes Ikrit and Biram unique, he said, is that their residents were Israeli citizens when asked to leave; they got a written commitment that their evacuation was temporary.

They are also members of the only two villages that obtained a Supreme Court decision ordering the government to let them return; the two villages are the only ones that continued to fight for that right.

“There is simply no other example where the people just didn’t give up,” Zucker said. “Every child of these villages has been baptized in the village churches. Every villager who dies, even if he dies abroad, is buried in the village cemetery. They go to their churches on every holiday. They care for the cemeteries. It is very impressive.”

Earlier this month, Libai’s committee announced that it is reconsidering its proposal and might eliminate restrictions on the number of villagers allowed to return.

“We are 900 people now,” said Sbeit, the Ikrit poet. “We have waited a long time to come back. . . . If the government gives us our rights as citizens, we will be happy. If they don’t, we will continue our struggle.”