ISRAEL: Israeli Arabs displaced from the town of Iqrit demand to return 60 years on

Record ID: 397203

  • Title: ISRAEL: Israeli Arabs displaced from the town of Iqrit demand to return 60 years on
  • Date: 14th May 2008
  • Summary: WIDE OF IQRIT VILLAGE
  • Embargoed: 29th May 2008 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Israel
  • Country: Israel
  • Topics: History
  • Reuters ID: LVA5BX66I1TSF27B6BIGYVRFVP8
  • Story Text: A Palestinian priest visits his village of origin from which he and his family were made to flee during the 1948 war which led to the establishment of the state of Israel.
    Father Suhail Khoury is an Israeli citizen. He comes from a little known village near the Lebanon border called Iqrit.
    Today it is within the internationally-recognised boundaries of the state of Israel, but 60 years ago it was just another Arab town in British Mandate Palestine.
    As a Palestinian who holds Israeli citizenship -- also referred to as an Israeli Arab -- Khoury lives in Nazareth but regularly makes the trip up to the village his family was displaced from in 1948 and is still not allowed to return to.

    "There are no (Israeli) settlements inside the village but they recently built one on the outskirts. The land is in use -- peach trees, apple trees and vineyards. It's also a grazing ground for cows. The cows are allowed to be there but we are not," the priest remarks bitterly as he drives along the road from Nazareth to Iqrit.
    Khoury is among the descendants of the 120,000 Palestinians who remained in what is now Israel after hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes when Israel was created in 1948.
    They now number 1.5 million people, and one in five Israelis is a non-Jewish Arab.
    Although granted Israeli citizenship, many prefer to be called Palestinians like their kin outside Israel, and accuse their government of institutionalised discrimination.
    Israel denies it discriminates, arguing all citizens have the vote and are equal under the law. Arabic is an official language, alongside Hebrew.
    A 24,000 dunam village (5,930 acres), Iqrit was destroyed in 1951, three years after its 400 inhabitants fled to nearby Rameh and Nazareth.
    An Israeli high court verdict recognised their "right of return" to the remains of Iqrit in 1972, but made it contingent on "security", and although other border towns inhabited by Jews -- like Shimora -- continue to flourish in the Galilee, it is still deemed unsafe for the former inhabitants of this Palestinian Christian village to go home.
    A sign of Israeli double standards, they say.
    67-year-old Atef Khoury recalls their flight as an amorphous memory, almost a dream.

    "I remember it like a dream. I remember how they expelled us from the village. I remember how they put us on the military cars and drove us out of here. We were young children. We sat on the car bonnets. We did not know what was going on. We were children," he says.

    "On the third day they told us we had to leave for fifteen days.
    We asked why and they said they were worried for our safety because our village was on the border. Because of the war, they said we had to leave for fifteen days," says Widad Hadad, 72.
    Villagers still gather in their hometown on the second Saturday of each month to spend time with relatives and hear stories of pre-1948 Palestine.
    They attend mass at the local church, one of the few buildings still standing, and pay their respects at the village cemetery.
    As Israel turns sixty this week it holds fast to claims of being the only multi-cultural democracy in the Middle East, but its Arab citizens say institutionalised racism and illegal killings of Arabs are on the rise.
    A recent poll by Israel's parliamentary TV station showed 76 percent of Jewish Israelis give some degree of support to transferring Palestinians living inside Israel to a future Palestinian state outside Israel -- an option most Arab citizens strongly reject.
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