Chris hedges AND george Monbiot ON THE IGNORANcE - ColdType

A Daughter’s Tale
to the
bemusement of
the israeli soldiers
on guard, she
sometimes throws
a bouquet of
flowers over
the fence.
Jonathan Cook
is a writer and
journalist based
in Nazareth,
Israel. His latest
books are “Israel
and the Clash of
Civilisations: Iraq,
Iran and the Plan to
Remake the Middle
East” (Pluto Press)
and “Disappearing
Palestine: Israel’s
Experiments in
Human Despair”
(Zed Books). His
website is www.
jkcook.net
This article
originally appeared
in The National,
published in
Abu Dhabi
46 thereader | November 2008
is buried gets harder to bear,” she said. “I
want him to know that I exist and that I
miss him. Is that too much to ask?”
Over the years she has lobbied members
of the Israeli parliament, written to the defence
ministry and sent countless letters to
the local media – to little avail.
“The nearest I can get to him is looking
through the base’s perimeter fence at a
forest that hides my view of the cemetery,”
she said. To the bemusement of the Israeli
soldiers on guard, she sometimes throws a
bouquet of flowers over the fence. On one
occasion, she said, she found the courage
to approach the base’s gate and asked to be
let in. An officer told her to address a formal
request to the defence ministry. “But
I’m not going there with a gun, only with a
bunch of flowers,” she said.
This month a government spokesman
finally responded, calling Mrs Qupty’s request
to visit her father’s grave a “complex”
matter that had been referred to the defence
minister, Ehud Barak, for a final decision.
Ministry officials were reported to have decided
that her visit should be blocked on
the grounds that other Palestinians who
seek to return to the villages from which
they or their ancestors were expelled in
1948 might use it as legal precedent.
During the war, 750,000 Palestinians fled
from more than 400 villages, all of which
were subsequently levelled. Most of the
refugees ended up in camps in neighbouring
Arab states. Unlike them, however, Mrs
Qupty’s mother managed to remain inside
the borders of the new Jewish state, along
with about 100,000 other Palestinians, and
eventually received citizenship.
Today there are 1.2 million Palestinian
citizens of Israel, one fifth of the country’s
population. Of those, one quarter are internal
refugees, or officially classified as “present
absentees”: present in Israel in terms
of citizenship but absent in terms of legal
redress over their forced removal from their
homes.
Isabelle Humphries, a British scholar
who has interviewed many families ex-
pelled from Malul, pointed out that the
refugees’ Israeli citizenship conferred on
them no more rights to access their former
village than refugees living abroad.
“Most cannot make even short visits to
the ruins of the villages, to their places of
worship or their graves. Often the lands of
the destroyed village have been declared
military zones or are now in the private
hands of Jewish communities.”
Ms Humphries said Israel had repeatedly
used the excuse that making any concessions
to individual refugees would open the
floodgates to the return of all the refugees.
“If Israel were to admit that internal refugees
have rights to the land and property
confiscated in 1948, policymakers know
that it would draw further attention to
Israel’s continuing refusal to recognise the
rights of refugees outside the state.”
Mrs Qupty, a social worker supervising
children in protective custody, said her
work had increased her understanding of
the trauma that the events of 1948 had
done to Palestinians.
“My mother was left with nothing after
the war. I was born in a tiny room in Nazareth
and we lived there for many years. My
older brother and two sisters had to be
placed in religious institutions because she
did not have the means to care for them.
We grew up hardly knowing each other.”
For several years after the war, her
grandfather secretly returned to Malul by
donkey to grow crops on his land, though
he was fined when he was caught doing
so. On a few occasions Mrs Qupty accompanied
him, but never saw the cemetery
where her father is buried. “By the time I
was old enough to understand what had
happened to my father, the military base
had been built over the cemetery.”
Finally convinced that Israel is unlikely
ever to concede a visit, Mrs Qupty said she
would turn to the courts. But human rights
lawyers regard her chances of success as
slim. The Supreme Court rarely overturns
government decisions taken on security
grounds. CT