Return to Ikrit

Third-generation descendants have come back to reclaim their lost village in the Galilee

By JUDITH SUDILOVSKY
Ghassan and Samer Toume521 (photo credit: Debbie Hill)
Ghassan and Samer Toume521
(photo credit: Debbie Hill)
University exams are coming up and Samer Toume, 23, a biomedical engineering student at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and his cousin, Ghassan Toume, 24, an information systems and statistics student at Haifa University are itching to pull out their computers and papers so they can start studying. This weekend, as they have been doing most weekends since classes began, they will be hitting the books not at a library or at a bedroom desk, but on a table set up amid the ruins of their grandparents’ homes.
The two students, who live in Haifa, are part of a larger group of some 15 third-generation Ikrit villagers who have come back to reclaim their grandparents’ homes and land in the Upper Galilee. The group of young men have been maintaining a daily presence – in shifts, and larger on the weekends – in the destroyed village for almost a year.
There was a wedding in the nearby village of Rameh on the weekend, so most of the group are sleeping off the celebration at their parents’ homes in Haifa, Rameh or Fassouta.
Outside, where the cousins slept the night before under the branches of towering trees with the stars peeking through, blankets are neatly folded on mattresses fitted onto old wooden cots. With a towel swung over his shoulder, tall and lanky Samer comes out from around the corner of the side of the church – the lone building left standing in this Melkite (Greek Catholic) Christian village on a hilltop near the Lebanese border.
“This is my part, this is the place where I was meant to grow up,” says mild-mannered Ghassan, pointing down behind him towards the hillside where the remnants of a stone wall can be made out under the tumble of overgrown weeds. “These are the buildings and the church that are all we have left.”
All along the sides of the hill, and circling the church on top, are the broken remains of the stone walls of the village homes, which the cousins’ grandparents left as children in 1948 at the request of the Israeli army – along with the rest of the village’s 490 residents.
On October 31, 1948, as part of an operation aimed at securing the northern borders of the nascent Jewish State, Israeli forces entered the village in full coordination with the village elders, meeting with no resistance from the villagers. After a week, the villagers heeded the army’s request that they leave for two weeks for security reasons, taking only basic necessities with them and leaving behind 50 men to guard the village.
Six months later, the village was declared a closed military area; the village guards were removed from the area and they were all banned from returning.
On Christmas Eve 1951, despite a decision earlier in the year by the High Court of Justice, which ordered that residents be allowed to return to their land as long as there was no emergency decree in place (the government promptly issued one), the army destroyed the village’s 70 homes, leaving only the church standing. Two years later, the village lands were expropriated for Jewish settlement.
Though they have rebuilt their lives, working and sending their children to school, the Ikrit villagers have spent the past 65 years living as internally displaced refugees in various cities and villages in the Galilee, all along fighting a legal battle for the High Court’s decision to be upheld. Their connection to and affection for their land, and the sorrow of having lost it, has not dissipated with time.
A 1995 government committee recommended the limited resettlement of Ikrit and Biram – a Maronite village that has a similar story and is involved in a separate struggle – but the decision has yet to be carried out, partially because the evacuees rejected the proposal as inadequate. A parliamentary bill designed to readdress the villagers’ demand was presented to the Knesset in March by the Meretz faction. The bill has been presented at least five other times, but it has never been discussed, obviously, said one Meretz parliamentary aide, out of fear of setting a precedent for the Palestinian demand for the right of return.
The bill sets out clearly who would be eligible to return, how the reestablishment would take place, and what the financial and technical responsibilities would be of each government ministry. There will be no precedent set if the villagers are allowed to return, the bill notes, because “there is no similar case.” The people are demanding that “the Israel Defense Forces carry out its promises that are backed by the High Court ruling,” the bill says.
“The question at hand is not that of recognizing the right of return and damaging the Zionist ethos, but rather, taking the right decision, moral and just, to prove that Israel respects and upholds its promises, has legal decisions, and respects a legitimate democratic struggle,” the bill also states.
The villagers’ descendants now number around 1,500, with only 40 of the original residents still alive. They still bury their dead in the cemetery at the bottom of the hill; and once a month, hundreds of members of the Ikrit community come to the church for mass. Two years ago, a group of the villagers came to take part in a five-day workshop to renovate the church as a sign of their continuing connection.
Before the early summer sun heats up too much, eight-month-pregnant Majdala Ashkar, 36, whose father left the village as a three-year-old, has come with her husband to visit the grave of her father who died six months ago. She too, in her younger days, was part of a group of young people who came to stay for a few months in the village a little over a decade ago.
“They are stronger than us. They are here for months,” she says of the young men. “We didn’t make sure to sleep here, to eat here.”
As a child, she heard the story of Ikrit and especially of her grandfather, who, during the War of Independence, was buried alive by a group of Muslim fighters for refusing to turn over weapons he was hiding for Jewish fighters from a nearby Jewish settlement.
He was found two days later by his fellow villagers, but he died three years later from the aftereffects of his ordeal.
“The people of Ikrit helped the nearby moshav a lot,” says Ashkar, recounting the stories she was told. “When the moshav was under siege, the village people sent over supplies. To this day, they remember it; and so till this day, they help us with the summer camp [supplying water and other necessities].”
The yearly summer camp that is held at the village for the descendants of the villagers, and brings the third and soon-fourth generations of the village to their lands, has formed a strong bond also among the younger generations, even though they are dispersed around the Galilee, says Ghassan.
“My role is to protect my history,” says Ghassan, who today serves as a counselor at the camp. “A person without history is someone who is lacking an existence.
Everybody needs to feel a connection to somewhere, and this country does not let me feel a connection to the state, so at least I can have a sense of connection to this place. Maybe we have this feeling because something was taken from us.”
Their grandparent’s generation is fearful of what might happen, but their parents’ generation, which has been spearheading the efforts to have the lands returned until now, supports them because they realize the young people are doing nothing illegal, notes Ghassan. “When I look at our grandmother, I still see fear in her eyes when we speak about Ikrit,” he says. “She is still suffering from the trauma. She says, go and do, but take care of yourselves. They are afraid, as if this were still the time when there was danger here.”
“We really support all their efforts and we are giving them all the tools so they can continue,” notes Ikrit Committee Chairman Attallah Ibrahim, 50. “We also need to continue with other avenues.”
Next to the entrance of a makeshift building adjacent to the side of the church that used to be the house of the priest, tomatoes are ripening on a mass of green plants heavy with leaves. A few yards away, a few scraggly stalks of wheat are growing on a small patch of dry earth. Near the entrance of the village, at the end of the rough steep road that leads up to the village, the cousins found a grape vine and have nursed it back to health.
They had chickens and rabbits too, but after the coop and hatch were destroyed by the Israel Lands Authority, they were unable to repair them properly and foxes or jackals ate them. They are not allowed to make any physical changes to the landscape. Though a Jewish farmer rents part of the land to graze his cattle, a request by an Ikrit villager to rent land here to grow grapes for his new winemaking venture was denied, the cousins said.
Trees they had planted and replanted earlier in the year have been uprooted as well, and they have come to a sort of equilibrium with the authorities whereby they don’t build anything new on the land and the authorities from the Maaleh Yosef Regional Council have been turning a blind eye.
Spending the cold months in the church and the old priest’s house, at first they had to rely only on generators for electricity, but then the Ikrit Community Association purchased a solar electricity system for them, placing the solar panels on the church roof. The association also connected water for them and built a bathroom.
Though today their lunch will consist of pasta and tomato sauce with canned corn, sometimes they call their mothers or grandmothers to find out how to make traditional dishes such as manaqish, a homemade pita sprinkled with za’atar and olive oil. “Last week, we tried to make stuffed vine leaves,” says Samer. “There are lots of plants here that we try to use… like our grandparents did. It is another step to connect us to our roots here.”
They just want to bring public awareness to their story, he says. In the 1990s, there was a similar movement of young people, but that lasted for only a few months. This time, says Samer, they are not leaving. “We hope for change,” says Ghassan. “[The government] thinks that they can just leave us here until we get tired, until there is no one here; people get married, living here is not for everyone, but we will wait for as long as needed.”
Though they are surrounded by Jewish moshavim and kibbutzim, they maintain that most of their ancestral agricultural land remains uncultivated and could easily be returned to them. Only the fear of setting a precedent for other refugee claims to have lands returned is keeping the government from following through with the decades-old court decision, Ghassan says.
“It is not enough to stay home and fight for our rights. We need to stay here and fight from here. We have our role. Our work is divided between the Ikrit Committee that is following legal channels and we who are here,” Samer says. Until now, no one from the government has come to see them, however representatives of some European ambassadors recently visited Ikrit.
Although in 1995, police arrived on the site when the villagers opposed a nearby Jewish farmer’s attempt to use some of the village’s lands for his crops, theirs has always been a non-violent struggle to regain their lands, says Samer, adding that they have no desire for violent confrontations. Just as the older generation has carried out their struggle all these years without violence, they too will continue the same route, he adds. “I am here to protect this place,” Ghassan says, noting that the church bell has been stolen twice for scrap metal.
While they have not encountered any attempts to remove them from the site, they realize it is a possibility, says Ghassan. “We have to continue our struggle, to be here and pass on the story to the next generation so in case we don’t succeed, they won’t forget,” says Samer. “Our role is to show that we will never forget what was taken.” 


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