This haunting piece, which was posted by umkahlil on Friday, March 23, 2007, would resonate with any Palestinian carrying remembrances of a previous life taken away during the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. After the forced evacuation of numerous villages and towns, many were later destroyed, bulldozed into the ground in the attempt by the Israel government to erase them from history. Memories, however, are not so easily erased, and the memory of Kfar Bi’rim, just one of over four hundred Palestinian towns and villages emptied by force, remains.
umkahlil provides this short narration,
Kfar Bi’rim was completely destroyed in 1953. The village church was left standing (please notice the pictures). The villagers must now pay a fee to enter their own property, as recorded (with permission) by Palestine Remembered. Every year the internally displaced villagers (Israeli Arabs) return to their village.
In a moving video, Summer Camp in Bi’rim (if you don’t get to the site directly, scroll down to “Summer Camp in Bi’rim), one of the returning villagers speaks the words below (and the song by Amal Murkus, La Ahada Yalam, that accompanies the video is moving and exquisite):
Your beauty is God given
Your beauty is God given
A human being strains to describe it.
North, south, east, west
Vistas of hills and valleys
When you tire on the way and feel thirsty
You may drink of al-Safra from the well
And on a dessert of figs you may feast
Feast on a dessert of figs of Bayad and Ghazzali
Tarry as you near the grapes
And when you approach the vine
Give thanks, and lift up your voice
Your people, Bir’im have not died
And will not forsake a grain of sand from you
As long as you have men like these
As long as you have men like these
Who continually strive for justice
they do not care what others may say
And they always say to the oppressor
Our Bir’im is more precious than money.
And the return will never disappear
We will return contented
We will forget the bitter days.You may also download a new book, Returning to Kafr Bir’im, which is the story of the villagers continuing attempts to return to their village from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948.
http://www.badil.org/Publications/Press/2007/press439-07.htm
Reproduced by permission of umkahlil.