The Palestinians who can’t return yet can’t forget
gaza — Only 16km separate the elderly Palestinian couple’s first home from what may be their last, but the short journey is one they may never make again.
That is because one is a Palestinian town inside the blockaded Gaza Strip and the other no longer exists.
All that remains of Hiribiya, the village where Saber and Huda Deeb were born in 1940s colonial-era Palestine, are two old Arab buildings in an area that is now an Israeli kibbutz, Zikim.
Now grandparents living in Sheikh Radwan, the couple were only six and eight years old when they were forced to flee Hiribiya and make the short but lifelong journey south to Gaza to escape the fighting between Jewish and Arab forces that marked the birth of the State of Israel 70 years ago.
Like two thirds of Gaza’s two million Palestinians, they are refugees, and may well remain so until they die. But still they talk of the village as home.
“I dream of Hiribiya all the time, sometimes even while I am awake. I imagine the places where I used to hang around,” said 78-year-old Huda Deeb. Her 76-year-old husband, a retired taxi driver, is no less effusive. “Hiribiya is the bride of the north — vineyards, apples, grapes, guava, farms that you can’t describe,” he recalls.
Records show that more than 2,000 people lived in Hiribiya before 1945. There were also about 60 Jewish residents who lived in a cluster of houses on the edge of the village, said the father of 11, adding that they would come to his family’s farm to buy fruit. As a long-running Gaza border protest builds to a climax in the coming days, it is the passing down of memories such as these that fuel the demonstrations.
May 14 is the 70th anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel in the western calendar. The following day is when Palestinians traditionally commemorate the events of 1948 as the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed.
The protest campaign, dubbed The Great March of Return, began on March 30 and has revived a longstanding demand for the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their former towns and villages.
Successive Israeli government have ruled out any right of return, fearing the country would lose its Jewish majority.
For the young, the right of return is a principle. But for those who can remember pre-1948 Palestine, it is more tangible. —