It will never be just

The State of Israel this week took another step forward in formalising the mass theft of Palestinian property and lands, writes Khaled Amayreh in the West Bank, Al-Ahram Weekly

The right-wing Israeli government has started a process that will make irreversible the dispossession of millions of Palestinian refugees of their land and homes in what is now Israel. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon this week gave a green light to a proposal by a quasi-governmental committee, known as the Gadish Committee, to transfer the ownership of land in Israel from the state to Jewish individuals.

The committee reportedly proposed allowing Jewish home-owners to register their homes under their own names. Nearly all homes in Israel are leased by the state to citizens, usually for 99 years. Until now, the ownership of many of these homes legally belongs to Palestinians, many of whom still retain property deeds dating back to the Ottoman and the British Mandate authorities. The same thing applies to thousands of square kilometres of mainly arable land the deeds of which are still in the possession of the original Palestinian owners.

In 1948, the newly established Israeli government, headed by David Ben Gurion, decided to confiscate up to 90 per cent of lands that had been owned by Palestinians for many generations. In all, 18,8650,000 dunams, or 18,865 square kilometres (about 93 per cent of Israel's area) was seized by the so- called Custodian of Absentee Property. A few years later, the lands were transferred to the Development Authority and then to the Land of Israel Authority, a quasi-government agency answerable to the Jewish Agency.

Earlier -- a few months after Israel's creation -- Ben Gurion sold 2.4 million dunam (one dunam is equal to 1,000 square metres) to the Jewish National Fund. Most of the original owners of these lands were expelled at gunpoint or terrorised into leaving by Jewish forces. Indeed, massacres such as Deir Yassin, Dawaymeh, Tantura and Qastal, to name but a few, cast fear in the hearts of Palestinian villagers who became convinced that they would be murdered en mass if they stayed. In addition to those refugees, tens of thousands sought refuge in larger Arab towns inside what became Israel.

Even those "present" and not "absent" were treated as "absentees", their land confiscated on the grounds that they were no longer in the country. The number of those "present absentees" living in Israel now is estimated at 250,000, or 23 per cent of the total size of the Palestinian minority in Israel.
KEY OF RETURN
By Sami Abu Salem
GAZA,May,15,2005,(WAFA)-Different sizes of woody "key of return" ornamented with brand names of Palestinian cities, was hanged in the tent of Nasser Flaifel 34, in Gaza.
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Other various Palestinian antiquities, including maps of Palestine, scattered at his small table and on the wall behind him. The sound of traditional Palestinian added a historic sense over the atmosphere.
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Flaifel was so busy in writing brand names on the keys with electric branding machine, said that the key is a symbol of Palestinians' "Right of Return" to their homeland.
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"On the 57th anniversary of NAKBA, the Palestinian people reiterate their adherence to their Right of Return, everybody expresses his adherence on his own way," Flaifel said, "it is my own way, making keys to remind ourselves and the world that we will never forget our right to return to our houses".
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NAKBA, is an Arabic term which means, "disaster", "catastrophe", "cataclysm" or "calamity". It is the term with which Palestinians usually refer to the 1948, when thousands of them were slaughtered and hundreds of thousands were forcibly expelled by Zionist gangs.
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Two metal old keys were on the Flaifel's table. He said that the small one is the key of their house in the city of Beer Sheva while the big is the one of the garden. "These two keys are of our house in Beer Sheva, they are a valuable part of the patrimony my grandfather left for us," he said while carrying the two keys in his hand.
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Flaifel's grandfather and all of his family were forcibly expelled from their house, in the city of Beer Shiva, in 1948 by Zionist gangs. The sons and grandsons of the family are still keeping the documents of possession of the house as well as their father's ID issued by the Palestine Government in 1938. "My grandfather left the key to my father, my father left it to me and I will leave it for my son, we will never ever forget our house, we are still waiting for the implementation of the UN resolution 194 and to return to our homeland" .
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In 1999 Flaifel, and his family, visited their house in Beer Shiva, they were astonished to realize that the Israelis turned it into a synagogue. The garden also was still around it.
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In the Palestinian traditions, on the wedding parties, the bridegroom gives a symbolic gift to the congratulators. Flaifel gave them the woody key.
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He said that he tried to arrange his wedding party on 15 of May which marks the anniversary of the Palestinian NAKBA, but he changed his mind as it coincides the third anniversary of the death of his father.
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Flaifel proudly said that the he presented the first key he made as a gift to the late President Yasser Arafat. "I was so proud when President Arafat was staring at my key and hanged it in his office in al-Moqata'a in Ramallah," he said.
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Flaifel, is preparing to arrange his first exhibition, "for not to forget" which would include keys and artistic antiquities and symbols of Nakba.
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Flaifel, was arrested several times by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in the 1987 Intifada. "I was 17-year-old when I was arrested, I spent four years and a half in Israeli prisons, on the charge of fighting Israeli occupation. Through making keys, I feel as I am still fighting for my rights.".
. He said that his "biggest dream" is to return to his grandfather's house. "I hope the UN resolution 194 will be implemented, to be able to return to our home and to be a warded compensation for tens of years living as a refugee.".
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The key
I see a line on his hand
The line is a key
And if we find the lock
To rest a hand on the bolt
We know a man's home
Where his family protects
the line on his hand....

Through a key-hole
I can look
Also the key itself
Has a loop
Through which, as a lense,
You can see the glance
I may give you.
For I will never give up
My key
My key fits a lock in a door
A door to my soul
That you try to inhabit.
It is my soul
Born in the light,
This door
A door to the soul of humanity.

Your depraved mind
Stained by violence
As if by ineradicable inks
Is recorded
In the diaries of history
Defacing the innocence of mankind.
Before or behind this door
You cannot ever find the dark to hide in.

jocelyn braddell©