Interview with Yakub Odeh: Lifta refugee

 Yakub Odeh was forced to flee Lifta with his family at the age of 8 in 1948. Today, he lives in East Jerusalem, just a kilometre away from his former home.

 

How does it feel to live so close to Lifta?

 

It’s very painful, every day, to know I’m so close to my own house and land, but that I cannot live there.

 

Where do you live now?

 

In East Jerusalem, about a kilometre from Lifta, in a house that I built with three other families. The house is in my wife’s name. Four months ago, the court said we must each pay half a million shekels, because we built it without a permit. If we don’t pay, they can demolish our homes. But if we’d applied for a permit, we wouldn’t have got one. Only 5% of Palestinian permit applications succeed, so really we are just wasting our money by applying – it costs $35,000. Also, we have to wait five or six years for them to process the application. It’s very expensive to build a house in Jerusalem anyway, which is why I had to do it with three other people.

 

What other restrictions do Palestinians face in building homes?

 

Palestinians are allowed to build only two floors with a garage; the Israeli homes meanwhile have six floors of more. And Palestinians can build only on 75% of the plot.

Since the state of Israel was created, 86% of Palestinian land has been confiscated; only 14% remains. Since the occupation, we have built 37,000 houses, on 7% of that area – so you see we are being squeezed off the map. We have no room left to build the houses we need for the future. The average occupancy in a Palestinian home is 6.5 to 7.5; for the Israelis, it’s no more than 3.5. They say it is the way we prefer to live, but actually we have no choice.

 

How is daily life in East Jerusalem?

 

We need 23,000 housing units to solve our housing crisis there; we are very overcrowded – an inmate in prison has more space than a Jerusalemite. Living conditions are bad. We have poor facilities and no amenities. Our streets are dark; we have no public spaces; no gardens. For every one shekel that’s spent by the authorities on East Jerusalem, 10 shekels are spent in West Jerusalem.

We pay 35% of our income in tax in East Jerusalem, yet we get only 5% of the city’s services. Meanwhile, 60% of us live under the poverty level of $2 per day.

Can you imagine, they confiscated my land to build a road, but I’m not even allowed to use the road! South African apartheid continues in Palestine.

When our kids go to school in the morning, we don’t know if they’ll come back alive. Then when we need to travel, there are at least 10 checkpoints around Jerusalem. If I just want to go to Ramallah, I have to stand and wait in the sun or the cold for two hours, along with heavily pregnant women and little kids, while the police laugh and joke with each other. It’s not good for our mental health. But these are the facts of our existence.

 

What memories do you have of Lifta?

 

My strongest memories are of going to school in the village and of playing beside the spring with my brother and sister. Our house is just 35 metres from the spring. And then we’d sit on our verandah and look at the panaroma of the village you can see from our house. I remember the last funeral in the village – that was Ahmed Zucker, killed in front of his car while trying to move his kids to safety. They shot him in front of his children. Women were crying, it was the afternoon. Soon after we had to leave Lifta. It happened one day when my mother was making the fire – the militia started to shoot, and my little brother grabbed my mother’s legs, and she moved us to the lowest storey of the house, where we kept the animals, and we hid in the corner there. After that, the adults moved the kids out, nine families in one big truck. They covered us with a blanket because they were afraid they would shoot us. But I peeked out of the blanket and I remember everything was very green. It was spring. I was only eight, but I remember it as though it were yesterday.

 

 

Where did you go when you left the village?

 

First we went to Ramallah – it wasn’t a camp, because we slept in the open until we were given a tent. We were followed there by a military plane. We went to open air school there that someone managed to improvise in a circle of stones; later, my mother and sisters lived in one room, while I slept with my father and brothers under the trees. My father died two years later – he was still young, but stress killed him.  In time we moved to Jerusalem to be nearer to Lifta. We built a house in a place called French Hill. Later, the militia demolished it.

 

What did you take with you from Lifta?

 

When our parents had carried us to the truck away from the shelling, the militia shot at my father. He wasn’t hurt, but he was wearing traditional dress, and there were two bullet holes in his robe. When she had to leave, my mother kept the robe, and she also took the house key with her. In 1969, when the militia demolished the house we had built in the area known as French Hill, we lost both; my brothers returned to the rubble and found the key, but there was no trace of the robe, unfortunately. Our father died early, so it was our mother who became our teacher. I’m so proud of my mother!

My philosophy is, you have to love all mothers as though they were your own mother, all children as though they were your own children. If you don’t do this, then you don’t love your own mother, your own children.

 

Do you still hope to return?

 

Yes I do. And my children do too. We go for picnics in Lifta, and I tell my kids all the village stories – about their grandfather, the neighbours, the animals. I sometimes think Lifta memories are even more vivid for them than for myself. And my own memories seem to get fresher – it’s as if the place reveals more and more of itself to me. There are 37 Lifta refugees in East Jerusalem and Ramallah, and we have a Lifta Association; and now the internet makes it possible to keep in touch with those that have moved further away. We all want to return to our village. I’m sure we can achieve our dream through peaceful means. There’s a study by Sleman Abu Sitar (?) that shows that all the Palestinians can go back, and there’s enough room for us all to live together with the Israelis. We will never give in. They say that every human being is born in the land, but for us Palestinians, our land is born in us.

Interview with Khaldun Bshara: Palestinian architect

 

Director of the Conservation Unit / Riwaq Centre. Awarded a Bachelor of Architectural Engineering from BirZeit University, and MA in Conservation of Historic Towns and Buildings from Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. Author and co-author of number of books and articles; Ramallah, Architecture and History; “Breeze from the North”; Riwaq’s Guidelines for Maintenance and Restoration of Historic Buildings in Palestine. kbshara@yahoo.com.    

 

Preservation under occupation:

 

 

"Perhaps more than any other aspect of Palestinian material culture, the Built Heritage is experiencing a rapid loss of its distinctive character. Particularly disturbing is the state of negligence to old buildings all over Palestine. Valuable historic buildings are being bulldozed or abandoned, and allowed to collapse only to be replaced by new constructions that echo no link with the past architectural heritage. Traditional construction methods, building crafts, know how, and skills are nearing extinction with the retirement and death of master builders and craftspeople. The rest of the natural environment is also undergoing devastating changes. The beautiful rocky landscape and stone-terraces, typical of Palestinian landscape are being replaced by badly finished concrete buildings."  (Riwaq's brochure)

 

Palestine has always had a particularity that is not applicable to other countries regarding safeguarding and conserving built cultural heritage. This reality neither stems from unique building techniques nor from stone types used in the historic buildings of the Holy Land, but rather from the objectives and goals foreseen of these conservation works.

 

A quick review of conservation works, implemented in Palestine for the past two decades, indicates undoubtedly that the main objective of these operations if not the sole, was the struggle against the Israeli occupation. The issues of land liberation and putting down obstacles in front of Israeli occupational measures played a major role in directing the largest portion of conservation works in Palestine. This applies to the rehabilitation works done in Hebron by the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee to protect the Old City from the Jewish Settlers. It also applies to the rehabilitation works implemented by the Welfare and the Waqf in the Old City of Jerusalem to boost up the Palestinian presence in the City to be used later as a pressure card in the peace agreement negotiations. Nonetheless, the Bethlehem 2000 Committee implemented restoration works which shows not only the interest in the place of Jesus birth but also it has been looked upon as a political commitment to the Peace Process. Riwaq-Centre for Architectural Conservation, as well, has been engaged in the Job Creation through Restoration projects since 2002, a project with its main goal is to alleviate poverty and help improvement of the economic situation of the Palestinians affected by the Aqsa Intifada.

 

In preservation works under occupation, cultural heritage has been in the heart of the Israeli-Arab conflict. A process doesn’t consider built heritage as a possible reconciliation driving force, but as a substance for conflict and a substance for making visible in space the historicity of the struggling sides.

 

 

(ON) Lifta project

 

From architect conservator point of view, Lifta stands as a reminder of a typical evacuated Palestinian village during Arab-Israeli war 1948. Hence it has values that vary from historical, architectural, and social values. Lifta provides us with a reminder on one hand of the Palestinian lost landscape and dispersed community, and on the other stands as ethnically cleansed village to be located soon on the list of gentrified villages discriminating again the original founders and owners of these spaces.

 

Hence, we should advocate the preservation and restoration of Lifta village as an example of the very few Arab villages remained intact in the heart of the conflict. It also represents a social history reflected in the architecture and urban setting (the mosque, the square, the spring, the oil press…). The place is inseparable from its community and can not be understood without the people who made it and used it. The ultimate success of a plan for Lifta would be the return of the owners of these houses and let them get connected to their past. In so doing, a reconciliation process could start not only among the Palestinians and their history but also among the Arabs and Israelis. Any solution which doesn’t take into account the correction of the historical mistake of uprooting the Lifta citizens will be of no value especially know to all of us that there are many Liftawis living some kilometres from their homes in Jerusalem and under the Israeli jurisdictions.  

 

An international protection of the village is needed. It could start with media campaign to shed light on the village and the discrimination policy of Israeli state against the original Liftawis. A possible way also is to engage the UNESCO in the protection of Lifta by nominating to the WHL, this process has to do with the state and may be complicated. However, other possibility is to put and nominate the village on the most 100 endangered buildings by the World Monument Watch. We as professionals and the original owners could put together a nomination form which has nothing to do with the state of Israel.

 

I believe also that the original owners living inside Israel could go through Israeli courts supported by international bodies, and Israeli ICCOMOS and Universities to halt the project. Sending the case to the Supreme Court will be the ultimate confrontation with the State policies.