David Grossman - Sleeping on a Wire - Conversations with Palestinians in Israel

“Officer Ya’akov Kara gave his military word of honor, which is always the truth, and promised that we would leave the village for fifteen days only, and afterward each one of us would return to his home. Each family was allowed to leave one person to guard their house. The priest was also allowed to stay, to guard the church.

“The army itself evacuated us in its vehicles to Rama. Did you hear that? We didn’t flee. The army evacuated us , and we had an agreement with the army that after they finished off Qawukji they would bring us back.

“Fifteen days later we went to the authorities and they said fifteen more days. We returned to Rama and waited. Fifteen days later we again went to the authorities, and they said come back in fifteen more days. On and on. We spent six months in Rama. All the people of Ikrit. They gave us the keys to the houses of people from Rama who had fled.”

“You mean that you lived in the houses of people who had also left their homes?”

“Precisely. That hurts a man at his most sensitive spot. Because what can justify my leaving my house and going to live in someone else’s house? We didn’t know the people of Rama at all. Then it wasn’t like today, where there’s a car and you drive over. Nor did we know where they had disappeared to. They showed us houses and said go on in. We went in. We saw that the houses were already empty. Thieves had entered and taken everything.”

The people of Ikrit were lucky. They had roofs over their heads. The residents of Biram, another Maronite Christian village on the Lebanese border, were also asked by the army to leave their village for a few days, “until hostile forces are cleaned out of the area,” the army explained to them, and they obeyed. They also knew the soldiers who evacuated them. In the weeks preceding the request to leave, the soldiers had lived with the villagers. Every house in the village assigned them a room. They slept and ate together, and the children of Biram, who have grown old in the meantime, still remember those meals, with the rifles leaning against the wall. Before the evacuation, the villagers cleaned their houses and put them in order. Then, one after another, they handed the keys over to the officers.

They left on foot in a long convoy to go to their ancient olive groves, on the mountains overlooking the village. There they lived for two weeks. It was November and there were heavy rains. The families slept on the ground. The lucky, or perhaps the strong, found caves to live in. During the day everyone would gather under the olive trees, gazing down in concern and incomprehension at their village, which military trucks kept entering and leaving. Two weeks later their patience came to an end. A delegation of elders set out for the village to ask the army to return them to their homes, as they had been promised. When they entered the village all seemed to go black — the doors on their homes had been broken. The houses were empty. Shattered furniture lay abandoned in the street. The soldiers they met ejected them, aiming their rifles. “This land is ours now,” they said.

“The betrayal cut us like a knife,” wrote Elias Shakur, a former resident of Biram, in his book Blood Brothers . Shakur was then a young boy. “Father and mother seemed as baffled as children because of that merciless betrayal. I think it was beyond their comprehension.”

We pass by Alkush, a moshav— a Jewish farming settlement — built on the site of the former Arab village of Dir Elkasi. Then we pass another moshav . Even Menahem, the former Kalat Elraheb (“the monk’s fortress”). Aouni Sbeit points all around. “Everything you see around us was ours. All this was Ikrit’s land.” They had had 16,000 dunams, most of it rocky. In the distance we could already see the Ikrit church, a white dome jutting up from the top of a hill.

“We saw that they weren’t going to bring us back,” he continued, “and we decided to turn to the law for help. We went to a lawyer in Nazareth and brought him the deeds. In May 1951 he petitioned the High Court of Justice, and the court began to hear the case in July.

“In July we traveled to Jerusalem. We were perhaps two hundred people from Ikrit. The case was between us and the government, over the question of whether we resided permanently in Ikrit. The court ruled that Ikrit had to be returned to us immediately.”

The High Court of Justice, Israel’s supreme judicial body, did not accept the state’s arguments and ruled in favor of the petitioners. “We believe that the respondents [i.e., the state] can no longer deny that the petitioners are permanent residents,” the court ruled, although it postponed execution of its verdict to a later date. It seemed that a barrier had been lifted and that the villagers would return to their village very soon.

“We danced with joy the entire day. In Jerusalem and in the buses home. We returned to Rama. We began to pack our things. The court said that we were residents of Ikrit! The army came and distributed keys and locks with which to lock the houses we had lived in in Rama, and we made preparations to leave for Ikrit. There were only two cars in Rama, but we were willing to walk. Then a sergeant suddenly appeared and notified us that a letter had arrived from the army to the mukhtar of Ikrit, and in the letter the army notified the mukhtar that Ikrit was now a military zone and no entry was allowed until further notice.”

The army’s maneuver will never be studied in military textbooks. It went like this: In court the army had argued that the villagers were not permanent residents of Ikrit because they had not been in their village when the area was declared a security zone. The High Court of Justice ruled that it was illegal to prevent their return, because the residents of the village had been asked by the army to leave, and for this reason could not have been in their village when it was declared a military zone. The army had lost the battle but was not going to lose the war. Immediately after the court announced its decision, the army got smart and sent the evacuees, who were then in Rama, “exit orders” (expulsion orders in all but name) from Ikrit. In other words, the army addressed the evacuees as if they were still living in Ikrit, as if nothing had happened, and notified them that it had now been decided — for the first time, as it were — to expel them from Ikrit. To the villagers’ surprise, it turned out that not even the court could do anything to block this military ploy — formally, it was a legal and totally legitimate finger on the scales of justice.

“We didn’t know what to do. If the Supreme Court made a decision and the army violated it, the story must be over for us. But we still didn’t give up. Not for a minute. Just as the Jewish people suffered and were persecuted for 2,000 years, and always hoped, until they returned, so we hope also. We still do.”

We pass the rusty sign announcing that this is a military zone. We turn onto a dirt road. The Lebanese border is close by. In Israel’s early days this border was an excuse for evicting no small number of Arab villagers from the area — defense officials feared that the people would try to aid the enemy across the border. They feared that the people of Ikrit and Biram would forge ties with their Christian brothers in Lebanon. Today a Christian militia supplied by the Israeli Army defends the north of Israel from the other side of the border.

Aouni’s son, Halil, jumps from the car and opens a barbed-wire fence for us — a barrier meant to prevent the flight of Yehuda Dari’s cows, which graze there. “The last thing we need is for a cow to escape,” Aouni Sbeit mumbles.

In September 1951 the village of Ikrit was suddenly destroyed by the security forces. All the houses were blown up and the site was plowed. The church, which the destroyers did not mean to blow up, was hit also. The date for leveling the village was carefully chosen — December 25. “What a Christmas present for the village!” Aouni Sbeit sighed. “While we held in our hands a court decision saying that we have a right to return as soon as it is no longer part of a military zone. Why? Because. They wanted us to give up. To hurt us when it hurt most.”