来源:Palestine chronicle :阿伊莎 译
(伊克利特的圣母教堂)
“我不想揭开所有伤口……”Maher Daoud说。他是伊克利特难民后裔。我们正驱车前往他父母曾驻足的村庄。我的心被他的话刺痛，我向他道歉，我知道这个话题对他来说有多艰难。
1948年，约350个巴勒斯坦人村庄惨遭种族清洗，完全被毁，伊克利特是其中之一。那里的居民被禁止回家，只好连夜进入建在他们自己国家中的难民营。
43岁的Maher和我表姐Njoud结婚，他们住在加利利的Mi’ilya村。他们经常开车到伊克利特，这里的教堂是目前唯一幸存的，用来作圣诞节和复活节的宗教庆典，方便人们到伊克利特墓地看望死去的亲属。我们此行的目的是让人忧伤的：Maher的母亲两年前过世，我们借耶稣受难日来看看她，这是巴勒斯坦基督徒的习俗。
(逝者坟墓上的花，Ismail Shammout)
从我的村子Fassouta开车到伊克利特只要20分钟。两个村子都在加利利，位于曾经的巴勒斯坦的北部，距离黎巴嫩边界几公里。1948年，在以色列的 “独立战争”、巴勒斯坦人的大灾难(Nakba)中，伊克利特和附近的Biram的居民因“安全原因”——可能是以色列为了保护其北部边境——被赶出家园。伊克利特的居民被用车子拉到20公里外的加利利南部的Rama村，被告知要待上几个星期，等情况安全稳定就能回家。但他们再没能回家。
1950年圣诞夜，以军炸了伊克利特的所有房子，给遭他们驱赶的基督徒居民一个及时的“圣诞礼物”。我的父亲当时12岁，从远处看到浓烟从村中升起，他惊恐地慌忙告诉一个同样来自伊克利特的名叫Tu’meh的人，他在Fassouta避难。Tu’meh的眼中噙满泪水。
1951年，以色列高等法院作出裁决，村民可以回家，“只要没有紧急法令”反对。和冰冷的预想相同，政府很快发布了反对法令。1953年，以军又炸了 Biram的房子，两个村子只有教堂被剩下。两年后，盗窃成功：伊克利特16000德南(4000英亩)的土地、Biram12000德南(3000英亩)的土地被没收，用来建犹太人定居点，就是现在的Even Menahem，Shlomi和Shtula。
我过去读过这些故事：在大灾难(Nakba)期间，以色列残忍无情地摧毁了350个巴勒斯坦村庄，让70万巴勒斯坦人变成无家可归的难民。我曾参观过一个叫Suhmata的村子，所以对即将展现眼前的一切有所准备。
尽管如此，此情此景，还是惊恐万分。这时，我表姐小声说：“就在这里。村子从这里开始的。”
她所说的“村子”“开始”的地方，是路边的一堆乱石。Maher很快又指着远处山上的教堂说：“那是伊克利特。”
(伊克利特)
同样的难以置信，我曾经经历过。当时一个老亲戚指着长满树的山告诉我：“就是这里。这就是Suhmata。”
事实上，完全是一幅超现实主义画：你看到的净是灌木、树丛，厚厚的绿色带着加利利的野性。唯一让你感觉说话者没有神经错乱的，是偶尔点缀其间的几堆乱石。
Maher开着车，蜿蜒上山。我看到旁边有几堆新鲜的乱石。他说：“几年前，我们在路上铺上沥青，只是为了能开车到墓地——老人走不了这么远。但犹太定居者来到后，毁了路。隔几米你就能看到一堆乱石。”这就是以色列的拒绝和恐惧——巴勒斯坦人可能行使他们返回被窃取的家园的权利：就算是一条通往墓地的路也要毁掉，以免他们成功。
(伊克利特的墓地)
我们到了墓地，带着鲜花和蜡烛，献上我们的敬意。我注意到在入口处有一个很大的石头，上面写道：“我们记住并永不忘记——此石为纪念我们在伊克利特教堂静坐抗议的父辈们而立。如国家最高司法机关的判决，他们渴望活着返家，重建决策者毁掉的家园。但滥用权力和没收土地的政策不允许他们回家，他们在自己的土地上，作为难民死去。”
(参加伊克利特“返家”静坐者的纪念石)
我读着下面的名字……Elias Yousef Daoud, Atallah Mousa Atallah, Elias Diab Sbeit, Najib Jiryis Khayyat……18个人名绝望地试图摆脱以色列人带给他们的残酷命运返回家园，但只是徒劳，死后才得以返家，被葬在自己的村庄。
即便这也未必能实现：从1948年伊克利特遭到种族清洗到1972年，分散各地的居民甚至不能够被葬在村里。这是个严重的问题，他们不得不寄望于Rama 居民的善意，给他们匀出一点墓地。突然间，死亡不仅仅是种悼念，也是种担心。Maher给我讲了一个悲惨的故事，一群年轻人曾决心打破惯例，带着逝者的尸体连夜葬在伊克利特。以色列士兵听闻后，跟踪他们，然后强迫他们挖开坟墓，拿出灵柩到别的地方埋掉。
生者的生活也不容易。伊克利特人在Rama的生活很艰难。突然流入的难民，令每日的生活拥挤而困难，很难找到工作。一夜之间失去一切的痛苦和新的现实艰难交织在一起。比如Maher，他是伊克利特村首领(mukhatar)的孙子。他的祖父非常富裕，拥有一家商店、一个橄榄油压榨厂，还做烟草生意。转眼间，失去家园、土地、生意变成无家可归、身无分文的难民，这种震惊让人难以承受。Maher的父亲不肯接受现实。“多年来，我渐渐长大，父亲却拒绝油漆房子，或者进行任何必须的修缮。为什么?因为他害怕这样做，会被认为适应了新家，忘记了伊克利特，忘记了回家的希望。”
伊克利特人在Rama证明了自己——从事卑微的工作，忍受艰难困境养家。终于，后辈们可以搬到海法或者别的地方寻找工作。
他们现在感到与Rama的联系了吗?把它作为替代的家乡了吗?我问Maher这个问题，他说：“当然，我是在Rama出生长大的，我有那里的回忆，有种归属感。但我不是Rama人，我是伊克利特人。”他告诉我，Rama人也增加了他这种感受：比如当他向人问路的时候，人们总会在指路前回答：“哦!那个伊克利特人……”而“那个伊克利特人”已经在Rama住了60多年。
当Maher要为自己和家人建座房子的时候，他再次感受了不适。Maher结婚后，在Kfar Veradim租了套公寓，位于他工作的巴勒斯坦人村庄Tarshiha附近的犹太人的地方，他在那里住了很多年。后来租金太贵，他搬到了附近的另一个阿拉伯村庄Mi’ilya，在那里买地建房。接着，他遇到了从未想过的麻烦：Mi’ilya的一些居民不欢迎他。他是个陌生人，他拥有村里的土地引起了骚动，包括对他的恐吓和诽谤。Maher痛苦地说：“如果我还在伊克利特，祖父的土地足够用了。我就不必乞求别人，借个角落给我的家人居住!”
(希望，Ismail Shammout绘)
“每一天，我都觉得，自己见证着对我们的不义。”他说。我问他如何平衡自己的内心——和抢走他村庄、造成不义的人一起生活在以色列。“这太矛盾了。”他痛苦地说。“他们对我做了这一切，又是我鹰嘴豆沙(Hummus)店的顾客;我需要他们来生活。”他发现，从情感上很难将公私分开。有时，他和以色列顾客讨论政治，但感觉沮丧——他不能畅所欲言。他讲述了住在Kefar Veradim时的一个故事。一个邻居来他的店里买东西，“那么，在我们这儿住感觉怎么样?”Maher快速扫了她一眼回答：“事实上，是你们住在我的地方。你们是这个国家的客人，是不受欢迎的。”这个顾客再也没有光顾。
对于返家的决心，伊克利特人异常团结、坚忍。被驱逐出家园60年来，他们仍在自己的教堂祈祷，把逝者葬在伊克利特，每年在伊克利特为孩子们举行夏令营，给他们讲述自己村庄的故事。Aouni Sbeit是位著名的伊克利特诗人，一次伊克利特人在以色列总理办公室前示威时，他告诉记者：“如果你把耳朵放到伊克利特孕妇的肚子上，你会听到胎儿在说，我们会回家的!”
(伊克利特人修缮伊克利特教堂，伊克利特社区联合会2010)
多么铿锵有力的言辞。但这些难民何时才能返家?没人知道。尽管一直在进行合法抗争，以色列仍不允许他们返回——这会开巴勒斯坦难民返家的先河。1998 年，当时的司法部长Tzachi Hanegbi建议内塔尼亚胡政府，“不该为被疏散者返家设置任何障碍”。1995和1996年给他们的最终解决方案是，依据长期土地租约，伊克利特和 Biram重建为共有定居点。换言之，居民们不得不从国家那里“租用”自己的土地。正如所料，他们拒绝了。事情就此陷入僵局。Maher痛苦地说：“关于伊克利特的文章有多少啊……送去了多少材料啊……我们还是不能回家。”
伊克利特的故事讲述了家的力量，归属感。没人能够把这拿走——就算是以色列。巴勒斯坦人世世代代居住在这片土地上;这种关系切不断、无法取代的。他们没有别的家，只要求最基本的人权：回到被残忍驱逐出的家园。“我的父亲64年来一直处于临时生活状态。”Maher说，“64年来，他一直坐在自己的行李箱上，等着回家。”
(伊克利特标识牌)
关于：
Fida Jiryis，巴勒斯坦作家，来自加利利的阿拉伯村庄Fassuta。她的新书《重返加利利》即将出版，该书记录了她从离散地(Diaspora)返回以色列的过程。
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=19275
By Fida Jiryis
'I don't want to open all my wounds…,' says Maher Daoud, a descendent of Iqrit refugees, as we drive to the site where the village of his parents once stood. I wince and apologize, aware of how difficult the subject must be for him.
Iqrit is one of the 350 or so Palestinian villages that were completely destroyed and ethnically cleansed in 1948, its residents barred from returning but turned, overnight, into internal refugees in their own country.
Maher, 43, is married to my cousin, Njoud, and they live in Mi’ilya, a village in the Galilee. They regularly drive up to Iqrit, whose church is all that remains today, to partake in religious celebrations at Christmas and Easter and to visit dead relatives in Iqrit’s cemetery. The occasion of our visit now is sombre: Maher’s mother passed away two years ago, and we are here to visit her grave on the occasion of Good Friday, as is the custom among Palestinian Christians.
The drive to Iqrit takes a mere twenty minutes from my village, Fassouta. Both are in the Galilee: the north of historical Palestine, a few kilometres from the Lebanese border. During Israel’s “War of Independence” in 1948, or the Nakba (Catastrophe) as Palestinians refer to it, the residents of Iqrit and Biram, another nearby village, were uprooted from their homes on “security grounds,” presumably for Israel to protect its northern border. The residents of Iqrit were bussed to Rama village, twenty kilometers south in the Galilee, and told it would be for a few weeks, until the security situation was calm and they could return. But they never did.
On Christmas Eve, 1950, the Israeli army blew up all the houses of Iqrit, in a timely “Christmas gift” to its expelled Christian residents. My father, a boy of 12 at the time, saw the smoke rising above the village in the distance, and, in panic and haste, told a man named Tu’meh from Iqrit, who had taken refuge in Fassouta. Tu’meh’s eyes filled with tears.
In 1951, the Israeli High Court ruled that the villagers be allowed to return “as long as no emergency decree” existed against the village. With cold predictability, the government was quick to issue such a decree against the Iqrit evacuees. In 1953, it blew up the houses of Biram, too, leaving only the churches of the two villages standing. Two years later, the theft was completed: the land of the two villages - 16,000 dunams (4,000 acres) in Iqrit and 12,000 dunams (3000 acres) in Biram - was expropriated for establishing Jewish settlements, which are there today: Even Menahem, Shlomi, and Shtula.
I’d read about this before; Israel coldly and ruthlessly destroyed about 350 Palestinian villages and turned close to 700,000 Palestinians into homeless refugees during the Nakba. I had visited Suhmata, another such village, already, so I was prepared for what I expected to see.
Nothing stopped the flood of goose bumps, though, when my cousin whispered: “Here it is. The village starts here.”
“The village” that she was referring to “started” as a small pile of rubble by the roadside. Maher was quick to point to the church atop a hill in the distance. “That’s Iqrit,” he said.
I experienced the same sickening disbelief I’d felt when an old relative had pointed to a tree-covered hill and told me: “Here it is. This is Suhmata.”
In fact, it is completely surreal: all you see are shrubs and trees, thick greenery as is characteristic of the wilderness of Galilee. The small piles of rubble dotted periodically around are the only small reason to believe that those speaking to you are not deranged or delusional.
As we climb up the winding road in Maher’s car, I notice piles of fresh rubble by the side. He says: “We put asphalt on the road a few years ago, just to be able to drive up to the cemetery because the old people can’t walk up this far. But the Jewish settlers came and tore up the road. You can see the piles every few meters.” Such is the refusal and phobia of Israel that Palestinians may exercise their right of return to their stolen homes: even a simple road to get to a cemetery is torn apart, lest it become a precedent
We reach the cemetery and walk in with flowers and candles to pay our respects. I notice a large stone at the entrance with these words on it: “We remember and will not forget - This stone was erected in memory of our fathers and mothers who staged a sit-in in Iqrit Church, in the hope of returning alive, as the highest judicial authority in the country deemed, to rebuild what the hands of decision makers have destroyed. But the policy of rights abuses and land confiscation did not allow them to do so, and they died refugees in their own land.”
I start to read the names that follow… Elias Yousef Daoud, Atallah Mousa Atallah, Elias Diab Sbeit, Najib Jiryis Khayyat, and on it goes… Eighteen names of people who tried desperately to undo the cruel fate that they had been dealt by Israel and return to their homes, but whose efforts were in vain, until they could only return as dead to be buried in their village.
In fact, such was not even the case: from the time Iqrit was ethnically cleansed in 1948 until 1972, its scattered residents were not even allowed to bury their dead in the village. This posed a serious problem, for they had to rely on the kindness of the people of Rama to give them a space in its cemetery. Suddenly, a death was not only cause for mourning but for logistical worry as well. In a sad story that Maher told me, a group of young men once decided to break the rule and took the body of one of their dead for burial at night in Iqrit. Israeli soldiers heard of the matter and followed them, then forced them to dig the ground again, retrieve the coffin and take it to be buried elsewhere.
Life for the living wasn’t much easier. The people of Iqrit settled in Rama in harsh conditions. With the sudden influx of refugees, daily living was crowded and difficult, and jobs were scarce. The pain of having just lost, overnight, everything that they owned was compounded by this new and harsh reality. Maher, for example, was the grandson of the mukhtar, or head of the village, of Iqrit. His grandfather was very well off, owned a shop and an olive oil press, and traded in tobacco. The shock of losing all that he owned - his home, lands, and businesses - and being turned into a homeless, penniless refugee overnight was overwhelming. Maher’s father lived in denial. “For years, all the time that I was growing up, my father refused to paint the house or do any badly needed renovation to it. Why? Because he feared that in doing so, he would be seen as acclimatising to his new home, having forgotten Iqrit or his hope of returning.”
The people of Iqrit proved themselves in Rama, taking menial work and enduring difficult conditions to support their families. Eventually, the next generations moved to Haifa and elsewhere in search of work.
Do they feel a connection to Rama, now, as their surrogate home? I pose the question to Maher and he says, “Sure, I was born in Rama and grew up there, I have memories there and feel some belonging. But I’m not from Rama. I’m from Iqrit.” He tells me that the people of Rama also add to this feeling; when he asked for directions to someone’s house, for example, the man in the street responded with: “Oh! The man from Iqrit…” before giving him directions. This was despite the man in question having lived in Rama for more than sixty years.
Maher was sorely reminded of this misfit when he decided to build a house for himself and his family. His father had no land in Rama. When Maher got married, he rented a flat in Kfar Veradim, a Jewish locale near the Palestinian village of Tarshiha where he works, and lived there for a number of years. Then, with rent becoming too high for him, he moved to Mi’ilya, another nearby Arab village, where he bought land to buy a house. He then faced a problem that he had never thought of: some residents of Mi’ilya did not want him. He was labelled a stranger, and an uproar ensued on his owning land in the village, including threats and slander against him. Maher comments bitterly: “If I were still in Iqrit, my grandfather’s land would have been more than enough. I would not have needed to beg anyone for a corner to live in with my family!”
“Every day, I feel that I’m a living testimony to the injustice that was done to us,” he continues. I ask him how he reconciles, internally, living in Israel, alongside the people who took away his village and committed this injustice. “It’s a huge contradiction,” he says painfully. “They are the ones who did this to me, to us, yet they are my customers in my hummus shop; I need them to survive.” He finds it emotionally difficult to separate work from the personal, though. Sometimes, he enters into political discussions with Jewish customers, but is frustrated because he can’t say everything he wants. He cites an incident that took place when he was living in Kefar Veradim. One of his neighbours had come to his shop to buy food and inquired, “So, what’s it like living in our place?” Maher quickly looked at her and replied, “Actually, you’re the ones living in my place. You’re the guests in this country, and unwanted ones at that.” The customer did not return.
The people of Iqrit are remarkably tight-knit and steadfast in their resolution to return to their village. Six decades after they were ousted from their homes and lands, they still pray in their church, bury their dead in Iqrit, and hold summer camps there annually for their children, to teach them about their village. A famous poet from Iqrit, Aouni Sbeit, was once quoted telling a reporter, during a demonstration of the people of Iqrit in front of the Israeli prime minister’s office: “If you put your ear to the belly of a pregnant woman from Iqrit, you will hear the baby saying that we shall return!”
Powerful words, but whether they will ever come true for these internal refugees is anyone’s guess. Despite an on-going legal battle, Israel will not allow them to return, lest it set a precedent for the return of other Palestinian refugees to their homes. Despite the fact that, in 1998, then-justice minister Tzachi Hanegbi recommended to the Netanyahu government that “no obstacles should be placed in the way of the return of the evacuees,” the final settlement offered to them in 1995 and 1996 was that Iqrit and Biram be re-established as community settlements on the basis of long-term land leases. In other words, the residents would have to “rent” their own lands from the state. Not surprisingly, they refused. The case has since been at a stalemate. Maher remarks bitterly: “How many articles have been written about Iqrit… How much material circulated… And we still can’t go home.”
The story of Iqrit, though, illustrates the power of home and belonging. No one, not even Israel, can take that away. Palestinians have been connected to this land for generations; it’s not a connection that they can sever or replace. They know no other home and ask only for their basic human right: to return to this home that they were so cruelly ousted from. “My father has lived a temporary existence for sixty-four years,” Maher says. “Because, for sixty-four years, he’s been sitting on his suitcase, waiting to go home.”
- Fida Jiryis is a Palestinian writer from the Arab village of Fassuta in the Galilee. She is the author of the forthcoming book, '˜My Return to Galilee,' which chronicles her return from the Diaspora to Israel. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: [email protected].
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