10th December
Bayt Jibrin.
Travelling past the ‘Bayt Jibrin’ Camp in Bethlehem, I glance over to the small first floor flat of the family whose land we are going to visit. The problem for them, and the reason they live in a refugee camp, is that Bayt Jibrin is land that was taken by the Israeli army during the ethnic cleansing carried out in 1948.
Around half an hour’s drive away, Bayt Jibrin, or ‘Bet Gevrin’ as it is now signposted, is an area that lies not far from Bethlehem, yet the new generation of the family are not able to see it. Since the second Intifada, when Israel stopped allowing most Palestinians into the land it occupied in 1948 and particularly since the construction of the separation barrier, these people have been confined to the area they now inhabit, the area they were forced into over sixty years ago. So, in order for them to see what their homes looked like, we agreed to go and take some photographs of the areas in which they used to live.
Even before we arrived at Bayt Jibrin, I came to understand better why this is land that was fought over. As you travel West from the Jerusalem and Bethlehem area, you drop in altitude and the land becomes more fertile, flat and better irrigated – all things that make it good for farming, or producing crops.
This is valuable land, and the families that lived here prior to the ethnic cleansing were, I suspect, among the wealthiest of Palestine. The few buildings that still stand today indicate this both in their size and their quality of build. These houses of Jerusalem stone were built to last, and standing on the slopes overlooking the fields were surely the pride of their owners - life here was good. Overlooking the fields back in 1948 was surely better than now too. The addition to the area of an Israeli filling station does not improve the view.
Over the past few months, I have stood in the ruins of various houses, most of which have been recent demolitions courtesy of the Israeli army. But standing in the ruins of an entire community, scattered rocks lying all around, conjures different feelings.
Of course I could identify with the individual suffering, particularly as we were going for lunch at the home of one of these many displaced families, but more striking was the sense of emptiness. I took many photographs, too many to post, but what best captures the spirit of this place are these short videos I took. The first is taken in a house that was owned by one of the cousins of this family. It is one of the few still standing, and is now in the grounds of a kibbutz that we followed another car into, in order to avoid the electric gate. Before being asked to leave, I filmed inside this house and at the end of the video, the football pitch of the kibbutz can be seen. What are the children who play football here told? Whose house was that? - they must ask. I’d like to know the answer they get, because it seems to me that if you knowingly play football in the garden of someone who was ethnically cleansed from his land, you may as well dance on his grave.
The second video is taken in the ruins of ‘The Summer House’ - the eerie silence portrays the complete desolation, while the ruins all around betray the Zionist lie that prior to the creation of Israel, Palestine was ‘A land without people, for a people without a land’.
