THE PALESTINIAN VILLAGE OF NABI SAMUIL

NOVANEWS

To understand that the Wall is not being built for security purposes but in order to finalize Israel’s future borders, a mere look at the map suffices. A clear line passes east of the ‘green line’ with the sole purpose of including in Israel as many colonies (i.e. settlements) and land as possible, and excluding – respectively – as many Palestinian villages and the least amount of land.

Between the colonies of Giv’at Ze’ev, Giv’on and Ramot, along the route of the main Jews-only road, one small village remains which the Wall has not succeeded in peeling away from this terrain. One Palestinian stain in this contiguous Judaized terrain. The village of Nabi Samuil.
Issa was sixteen, Kamal fourteen and Hajje Shukriya in her late thirties when, in 1967, the bombings began. The memory of the 1948 massacres was vivid and close, and people feared what would happen when the Jews come. Many fled to Jordan. The brothers of Issa and Kamal and many others from this small community. Above their heads the bombs flew from side to side. Issa and his mother and brother and other members of the extended family hid in a cave near Bir Nabala. When they returned to their homes after ten days, they found their homes looted by the soldiers. Jars of honey had disappeared, mattresses, crockery. Everything was stolen. The houses were empty of any belongings.  Which wasn’t very much, after all, they say.
And the houses themselves, but for some slight damages, had remained intact.

And they went on with their lives. Issa and his mother, Kamal and his mother and brother and stepfather (Issa’s mute brother) and Hajje Shukriya and her parents (with whom she lived after her spouse died and her daughters married), all of them more or less resumed the lives they had led earlier. The village houses were mostly scattered near the old mosque compound. It had been a small village even back then. Built near the remains of the old village, ruined during the fighting between the Turks and the British in 1917. The ruins are still there. There were 162 inhabitants registered there before the (1967) war.

On March 23rd, 1971, at five or six in the morning, army troops arrived with trucks and bulldozers to demolish the village of Nabi Samuil. You have one hour to evacuate, they were told. They took whatever they could which wasn’t much, and the army began to demolish their homes with their belongings inside. To the ground.
Hajje Shukriya’s black dog refused to come out. They tried to drag him, called him, and he refused and was crushed in the rubble.
Why are you demolishing our home? asked child Kamal, and was beaten in response. Go over to those houses, yelled the soldiers and chased them away to a group of houses further off, at the rim of the village, belonging to people who had fled to Jordan in the war and stood empty.  And they went over there.
Issa’s mother and her family were given one room. Likewise, Kamal’s mother and family. One room next to another. The village was razed to the ground. And the whole area was renamed a ‘park’.

You may build outhouses of corrugated-iron sheets, they were informed. And they did. And since then, they are not allowed to build anything. Anything that is built is demolished. No permits. Because they are not given permits. People are forced to build without permits because they cannot refrain from building, for this is their land, for they have children. And the children want to sustain their own families, too. For they request building permits and do not receive them, time and time again, systematically. And then the Occupation forces demolish any ‘unlawful’ construction, ‘by law’. Except for the ‘Mukhtar’ (head of the village).
The Mukhtar is a collaborator.

The changing colonial authorities appointed one of the inhabitants of the village to be their lackey, and gave him the title ‘Mukhtar’. He has special privileges, and in return he serves the regime’s purposes against the villagers. Thus, for example, the current Mukhtar and his family are the only people in this village holding a Jerusalem blue ID (resident), unlike the rest of the community that holds a Palestinian ID. Thus they are allowed to enter Israel to work, and are free to come and go as they please. Thus he – the Mukhtar – may build, unlike the other villagers, and his home is not demolished. While the house that had stood at the same spot earlier was demolished by the authorities, ‘by law’.

At Nabi Samuil the Mukhtar’s main role is to help the authorities take over the land and conduct the silent transfer of its inhabitants. He counterfeits signatures of deceased villagers to appear as though they had sold their land before or after their demise, he finds false-witnesses and arranges ‘photocopies’ of checks without the person who supposedly holds them, as proof of sale. And because Israel’s ‘law’ enforcement forces are not interested in putting a halt to this deceit, false witnesses are trusted without a shadow of a doubt even when obviously something is wrong and the inhabitants’ filed complaints of forgery are torn up and buried, and one plot of land after another is falsely sold to Jews.

Of the entire area, perhaps five percent have really and truly been sold, we’re told. All the rest is counterfeit.
The villagers have written evidence of this outrage. However, despite their attempts to report it to the police, the authorities are not willing – they tell us, painfully – to take up any action when the complaint is against Jews.
Kamal tells us that he was born in 1957, some months after the death of his father who, in 1956, was murdered by Jews while harvesting the olives of his family’s grove in Lifta. Harsh living conditions in Nabi Samuil forced him to seek his life and fortune in Jordan when he grew up. That is where he married and fathered his children. Then one day, his mother who had lived all the while in Nabi Samuil read in the newspaper that he had sold his land to Jews. Which is not done. And of course had not taken place.

Apparently a forged document was found in which Kamal’s father had sold his land to Kamal in 1954, three years prior to his birth. And another document showing that Kamal had supposedly sold this land to someone else, and even received a sum of money in return. Kamal says that the fact that the Israeli legal system was willing to accept an argument so odd, so outlandish, the claim that a father bequeathed land upon a son unborn… And how would he know that he would father a son and what this son’s name would be… while there are yet other sons in the family who had already been born, and he could have bequeathed the same land to them… And why to him, of all the children, born after the death of his father. The family argues this is pure fiction. How can such a lame claim possibly suffice? he asks.
And this is proof for him that the law, the powers that be, are part and parcel of the same conspiracy. That the legal system is not interested in refuting these false claims, that the takeover of the village lands and their transfer into Jewish hands is an objective of the courts of justice as well. The police and the army and the courts. All alike.
For Israel simply does not want Nabi Samuil there where it is. Year after year, throughout the West Bank, conditions are getting increasingly difficult. Nearly no one has work any longer, for their livelihood in the past had mostly depended upon their employment inside Israel and now most Palestinians of working age are not permitted to enter Israel and work. They are prevented. They sneak in through the fields in their attempt to seek work despite the risk of being hunted and caught by the soldiers, and harassed, mostly, and being forced to pay steep fines and spend time in prison, and they keep trying again and again, for they have no choice.
The only exit from the village is to road 436, an ‘apartheid’ road for Jews only so that no one from Nabi Samuil is allowed to travel it. Nowadays, for an apparently short time, the villagers may only reach the Ramot Checkpoint which is situated on this road. And only there. And at this checkpoint, at the soldiers’ whim, they may or may not be allowed to continue into the neighboring enclave, and from there make their long and winding way to Ramallah and elsewhere.

No one is allowed to come or visit the village. Only people who are registered in their IDs as Nabi Samuil inhabitants. Thus, for example, Issa’s daughter’s spouse may not join her for a visit to her family.
People hardly ever go out any more, for any excursion takes hours instead of minutes. For they are required to go through Ramot Checkpoint which, as all the other checkpoints, is there to prevent and harass. Issa has not visited his son and family for over a year and a half now, as they have relocated to close-by Bir Nabala, since their home was demolished. Everything has just become too difficult and time-consuming. Issa’s grandson has been traveling to school on the family she-donkey for over a year. Young people who marry tend not to return to the village. They wouldn’t be able to live there anyway for they would have to build, there’s no other way, and their homes would be demolished, as they always are. Several people have already died of a broken heart.
Nabi Samuil residents are living there on ‘borrowed time’. In fact, when the erection of the wall will be completed around the enclaves of Biddu and Bir Nabala, they will be living in a literal prison. Closed off on all sides. And one cannot be certain what will happen, how many of them will survive this flagrant land-grab, the intentional abuses perpetrated simply to make them leave.
Issa told us: I want to tell the Jews not to purchase the lands of Nabi Samuil. It’s all one big scam. Even if it says it’s legally registered, that’s a lie. They shouldn’t buy. It’s not legal. I want them to know. Issa is certain that if Jews knew they were purchasing stolen land that actually belongs to the villagers of Nabi Samuil, they would stop doing so. And give the land back to its owners, from whom it was robbed.
Just before we left, a man wearing a fancy hat approached Kamal and Issa and said he was on his way to sneak through the fields and try his luck seeking work in Israel or in one of the colonies, and asked them to read in the Qur’an for him, for luck. There is something powerful and heart-rending in the way Hajje Shukriya’s black dog that would not leave his house and land, and sacrificed his life, has become a memory and a symbol in this little village.
Translated by Tal Haran

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