When I was in Israel back in March, I noted here that the Weekend Haaretz had had an interesting little article about some of the fine, originally Palestinian homes in West Jerusalem.
Recently, I heard from George Bisharat, who teaches at the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. He told me it was his grandfather, Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat, who had built and owned one of those homes– indeed, the one that some time after Israel’s takeover of W. Jerusalem in 1948 became the home of PM Golda “there are no such people as Palestinians” Meir.
George wrote me that some years ago he had published an article about the home, and he gave me permission to republish it here. But before I introduce that text, I want to catch up with the portion of that JWN post in March where I’d noted that in and after the 1948 fighting there was almost complete ethnic cleansing of both halves of Jerusalem– what became the Israeli-controlled Western half and what became (at that point) the Jordanian-controlled Eastern half… In March, I did not have to hand the numbers of people thus “cleansed”. Now I do. According to Michael Dumper’s 1997 book The Politics of Jerisalem since 1967 (Colubia U.P.), approximately 60,000 Palestinian residents fled or were expelled from West Jerusalem and the surrounding villages that year, while around 2,000 Jewish residents fled or were expelled from East Jerusalem.(Dumper, p.65)
After Israel conquered East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in 1967, it not only regained control of the properties from which Jews had left in 1948, but also seized considerable additional properties into which it started implanting large numbers of settlers– quite illegally. Those settlers now number more than 200,000 in East Jerusalem, a number that is seldom counted at all in the US media which tend to focus solely on the 230,000-plus settlers implanted into areas of the West Bank that are not in the (unilaterally expanded) boundaries of East Jerusalem.
And were descendants of the 60,000 Palestinians who left West Jerusalem in 1948 given any reciprocal right to return to the homes they had fled there? Ha-ha-ha. Reciprocity? You gotta be kidding!
Anyway, withour further ado, back to Geroge’s piece:
RITE OF RETURN TO A PALESTINIAN HOME
by George Bisharat, 2004
On May 15, the 56th anniversary of the Palestinian “Nakba” (Catastrophe), when one people gained a homeland and another lost theirs, I was thinking of a home in Jerusalem.
It was the residence occupied by Golda Meir — author of the famous quip that “the Palestinian people did not exist” — when she was Israel’s foreign minister. It was also the family home built in 1926 by my grandfather, Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat, “Papa” to all of us.
I went to visit our home for the first time in 1977. Although he was a Christian, Papa named the home “Villa Harun ar-Rashid,” in honor of the Muslim Abbasid Caliph renowned for his eloquence, passion for learning, and generosity. Painted tiles with this name were inset above the second floor balcony and over a side entrance.
EXPLOITS IN THE ORCHARD
When Papa first built the home in what became known as the Talbiyya quarter of Jerusalem, few other residences existed nearby. As I grew up, my father regaled me with tales of his boyhood exploits in the surrounding fields and orchards. Two of my uncles were born while the family lived there; one uncle succumbed to pneumonia in Villa Harun ar-Rashid. The young boys went to school up the road at the Catholic-run Terra Sancta College. My uncle Emile told me of a wager he made with his younger brother, George (for whom I am named), that he could not stand on a swing on the front porch and swing with no hands – – with predictable, but fortunately mild, consequences…
The wall enclosing the front yard was a fledgling design effort by my father’s twin, Victor, later a successful architect in the United States, whose buildings helped galvanize the urban renewal of Stamford, Conn.
My grandparents eventually suffered a reversal of fortunes, and in the early thirties, leased the house to officers of the British Royal Air Force, expecting to return in better times. Frescoes on the interior walls were plastered over to accommodate the tastes of the British officers. My family moved a short distance away to a more modest house on the Bethlehem road. Little did anyone appreciate at the time that the move signified the family’s final departure from Villa Harun ar-Rashid.
A sense of foreboding gripped many Palestinians in the years leading up to the war in the region. Under the gathering clouds of unrest, my father and uncles came to the United States to pursue higher studies, while Papa shifted his business activities to Cairo. Thus, the family was outside of Palestine on May 14, 1948, when Israel declared independence and war with the Arab states commenced. Our fortunes were better than most of 750,000 other Palestinians who were driven out or fled their homes in terror during the fighting.
Villa Harun ar-Rashid was picked by Zionist armed groups for the commanding view it offered from its roof. No blood was shed in taking it, as the British officers simply handed over the keys to the Haganah. Like most Palestinian families, we were subsequently stripped of title to our home through a law passed by the new state of Israel called the Absentee Property Law.
HOUSE DIVIDED
Villa Harun ar-Rashid was divided into several flats. During the 1960s, Golda Meir occupied the upper flat. Anticipating a visit from U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammerskjold, it is claimed, she ordered the sandblasting of the tiles on the front of the house to obliterate the “Villa Harun ar-Rashid” and thereby conceal the fact that she was living in an Arab home.
When I went to Jerusalem in 1977, I had only a photograph of the home, and a general description of its location from my grandmother. It was summer, hot and dusty, and I paced back and forth through the neighborhood inspecting each of the houses, occasionally asking for directions. All the street names had been changed to those of Zionist leaders and figures from Jewish history, and the hospital that my grandmother had described as a landmark apparently no longer existed. As I was resting against a wall in the shade, I saw a home that resembled Papa’s. As I hurried across the street, I could just make out the name in the tile: Villa Harun ar-Rashid. I guess Golda’s sandblasters had been a little rushed.
TENSION AND FEAR
I was immediately flooded with emotion — anger, sadness, and most of all — tension, tinged with fear. I walked through the garden toward the front staircase, putting my hand on the stone banister, as I knew Papa and my own father must have done countless times. I rang the bell.
After a long wait, an elderly woman opened the door. I explained my visit by saying that my grandfather had built the home, displayed my American passport, and asked if I could briefly see the interior. Virtually her first words were: “The family [meaning my family] never lived here.” Later I would understand this as part of a way of rationalizing the seizure of our property – – easier to swallow, in moral terms, the expropriation of a speculative business investment by some rich absentee landlord than to contemplate the taking of a family’s home.
HUMILIATION OF PLEADING
At the time, I was speechless, as I had never confronted this claim. As I recovered my wits I was tempted to apprise her of the truth. But I feared she would deny me entry. The humiliation of having to plead to enter my family’s home with this woman from I know not where — Eastern Europe, perhaps — burned inside me.
We were soon joined by her husband, now-retired Justice Zvi Berenson of the Israeli Supreme Court, one of the drafters of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. He permitted me to enter the foyer — but no further, saying there was no need to see any more of the house, as it had all been changed anyway. The couple insisted that the house had been in terrible repair, and that they had done much to fix it up, a claim I had no reason to doubt. Some 10,000 Arab homes in West Jerusalem were looted and seized in the months preceding the war between Israel and the Arab states in 1948.
Justice Berenson told me that he found the ceilings and walls stained with soot — a memento, perhaps, of the Haganah troops’ cooking fires. Yet this narrative of renovation also embodied an urban and smaller-scale version of the myth that Zionists had encountered a barren wasteland and “made the desert bloom.” I later learned, via research of an Israeli friend and colleague, that Justice Berenson had upheld laws facilitating Israel’s acquisition of Palestinian lands through what amounted to legalized theft.
IMAGINING VOICES
The house was cool inside, and as I stood there, I tried to imagine the sounds of my father’s and his siblings’ voices, and the smells of my grandmother’s cooking. I left after no more than five minutes. Walking back out into the blazing sun, I felt no specific hostility toward the old man and woman living in Papa’s home. But hospitality, such a strongly held value in Palestinian culture, is hard to uphold when guests become usurpers.
In 2000, we made this same pilgrimage as a family. As we stood across the street, I recounted the story of Golda Meir’s defacement of the tiles to my son and daughter. I was overcome. Instantly my little son embraced my leg, then my daughter hugged my waist, and finally my wife my upper body, and briefly, we stood there huddled together, tears streaking all our faces. Shortly, we composed ourselves, crossed the street and wound through the garden to the front steps.
The front door swung open and a man smilingly offered: “May I help you?” Somewhat startled, I thanked him for his kindness, and he explained, “Many tourists come to see this house. It’s included in walking tours of the city.” The man, an American from New York, permitted us to enter, and venture through more of the first floor than I had seen before. But when I said that my father’s family had lived in the home, he was incredulous. This time, I was not surprised as he protested, still congenially: “But the family never lived here.” He had gleaned this from a newspaper article, he maintained. Repeatedly, he insisted, it seemed a half dozen times: “The family never lived here.”
THE FAMILY DID LIVE THERE
Of course, the family did live there, notwithstanding the denials, justifications, and obfuscations we have faced. So did hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians “live there.” The keys to their homes there still adorn the walls of apartments, houses, rooms, and refugee hovels throughout the world. We have not disappeared, nor have we forgotten, our existence a reminder that one people’s liberation was founded on another’s dispossession.
At home in California I have a thick file that is the documentary record of my family’s efforts to regain Villa Harun ar-Rashid. We have not prevailed, of course, nor have we ever received any acknowledgment of the injustice we, and countless others, have suffered. Our homes and properties were long ago transferred to the ownership of the state or quasi-governmental agencies that, even today, do not lease or sell land to non-Jews.
Recently I found my daughter lingering over photos of my father as a boy in his Jerusalem home. I know now that she and my son both are heirs of the truth about Villa Harun ar-Rashid.
(ends)
I have been going over George Bisharat’s list of publications, and it seems to me he is richly paid on the public dole for producing nothing more than Palestinian victimology. Even Edward Said had the decency to write literary criticism for a few decades before turning into a shill for the impossible “one state solution.”
So Eurosabra, when you can get beyond the ad-hominem name-calling (which is not friendly at all!) what do you actually have to say about the content of what GB has written there? Do you seek more clarifications on key points? Do you contest some of what he wrote?
Did you engage with it at all?
… Well, you haven’t so far. Please keep your future comments courteous, fresh, helpful, and to the point. You might want to go back and read the guidelines. Okay?
One has only to flip open the real estate sections of the Jerusalem Post or Ha’aretz, to realize that “Arab” homes are sold at a premium. A “garden apartment in an Arab building” is a selling point, as are such key words as “historical, original house, century old building, old olive trees.” Just recently I spied a rooftop apartment for sale “In an 1930’s Arab house”, 36 sq. meters (plus some rooftop) for 430 000 USD!
My family was forced to abandon their property in 1944, when Soviet Russia invaded. The Soviet empire collapsed, Estonia became an independent state, and the original owners had their property resored to them. I am living on property today that my family abandoned in 1944. Empires do collapse, even the mightiest.
One has only to flip open the real estate sections of the Jerusalem Post or Ha’aretz, to realize that “Arab” homes are sold at a premium. A “garden apartment in an Arab building” is a selling point, as are such key words as “historical, original house, century old building, old olive trees.” Just recently I spied a rooftop apartment for sale “In an 1930’s Arab house”, 36 sq. meters (plus some rooftop) for 430 000 USD!
My family was forced to abandon their property in 1944, when Soviet Russia invaded. The Soviet empire collapsed, Estonia became an independent state, and the original owners had their property resored to them. I am living on property today that my family abandoned in 1944. Empires do collapse, even the mightiest.
I saw ONE article on criminal defense procedure in his list of publications, the rest is all woe-is-me “My Beautiful Old House” style-stuff. So he’s really a professor of Palestinian-ism. I have heard G.B. speak and he DOES engage both Israelis AND the Israeli reality more forthrightly than EWS ever did, moreover, I often wondered why the Israeli consulate had detailed a “minder” to contradict a few of his minor points about the history of West Jerusalem, which was cleared of its inhabitants after someone in Talbieh and Katamon began mortaring Jewish Jerusalem. That Bisharat did not find himself buried under concrete and quicklime in his own basement after returning to his house is a testimony to the fundamental decency of the Israelis, who could tell you a think or two, not courteous, but fresh and to the point, about the expulsion of the Jews of the Arab world. Feel free to ban me if you like.
Sorry about the reference to deep-sixing Bisharat, I’m in an exceptionally grim mood today. G.B. could, of course, submit a claim for his home with the Custodian of Absentee Property, and it would be interesting to see him litigate it in an Israeli court. I suppose claims could also be made for Jewish property in the Old City and Hebron abandoned in 1948, since those are the analogous properties, however, I am fairly certain that they would be recovered only because of the Israeli administration in the territories, if at all. (And most surviving descendants of the Hebron community have been adamant about disavowing resettlement, although that leaves property claims undecided. But certainly no one ever recovered property from the Jordanian government, and the Iraqis rewrote their law, in violation of their constitution, to strip emigrating Jews of their property, while the Jordanian citizenship law of the 50s stipulated “except for Jews” in the paragraph on supercession of Mandate citizenship…)
I suppose claims could also be made for Jewish property in the Old City and Hebron abandoned in 1948, since those are the analogous properties
Actually, the analogy does not hold at all in this particular case. Most of the Jews who were ethnically cleansed from Hebron in 1929 had been born in those homes, which their families had lived in for generations. “Villa Haroun ar-Rashid”, on the other hand was built by Hanna Bisharat in 1926. Given that his grandson clearly states that the family had to move out following financial reversals in the early thirties, the entire family saga around this house actually lasted for four or five years at best, after which it became – to put it bluntly – simply a source of rental income.
George Bisharat doesn’t mention what happened to the family’s property in Cairo, to where his grandfather apparently moved prior to the “nakba”. I wonder what happened to that. I have a suspicion that somehow the sting of disposession is less when it is the result of nationalization by a pan-Arab, revolutionary government.
By the way, one thing that rarely gets mentioned is that the land on which Hanna Bisharat and others (including Edward Said’s uncle) built their mansions in Talbiyya in the 1920s was never, in a strict sense, Palestinian, and was not part of the Muslim waqf of Palestine. In fact, Talbiyya was built on Greek Orthodox trust land that was part of that church’s millet during the Ottoman Empire. Following the October Revolution, the secular Communist regime of the Soviet Union decided that they had no business supporting the Greek Orthodox, or any other church in the Holy Land, and stopped the practice of financing the Patriarchate in Jerusalem, which had been the custom since the Capitulations. Unable to support itself, the Church was forced to sell the usufruct rights to portions of its not insignificant holdings in Jerusalem.
That Bisharat did not find himself buried under concrete and quicklime in his own basement after returning to his house is a testimony to the fundamental decency of the Israelis
Some did. In Lebanon after partition my parents met family survivors of a Palestinian who was killed by Israelis when he tried to return to his home in West Jerusalem.
And several Syrian Jewish women attempting to escape to Israel were raped and murdered. And that in the 1970s.
Incidentally, as long as we are on the subject of swings, in _A Tale of Love and Darkness_ Amos Oz recounts his disastrous attempt to play Jewish Tarzan and impress a young Arab girl, with disastrous results for the girl’s cousin. Obviously a dire consequence of his attempted deviation from his accepted role as a dhimmi by an incipient Zionist Colonialist(tm).
And “In the Land of Sad Oranges”, the narrator’s uncle barges into the house of a Lebanese Jewish family and screams “Go to Palestine!”
Far more Arab Jews (ca. 950,000) were expelled as a consequence of the 1948 war, with the benighted exception of Syria, which chose to ransom its community in dribs and drabs. The State of Israel has re-housed its refugees. Why are the Palestinians still in refugee camps? Perhaps they, like George Bisharat and Edward Said, prefer the endlessly stoked melancholia of a dutifully-maintained exile?
My mother taught at a girl’s school in Beirut that accepted all confessions. The Jewish kids there were under pressure to get out not from their classmates but from other Jews. In 1950 you were a bad Jew if you didn’t go to Israel.
My view of the times may be narrow, based as it is on my parents’ reminiscence, but it’s at least based on things they directly observed. They didn’t talk a lot about the Palestinians but what they did say contradicted the powerfully publicized fantasy of the “fundamental decency” of Israeli behavior during partition.
One more comment on the “fundamental decency of the Israelis”. The recent poll published by BBC shows that almost 50% of Israelis believe that torture is acceptable, the highest percentage in any country surveyed. Italians, in contrast, are 81% AGAINST toruture. Israel resembles the Stalinist Soviet Union more and more, where everyone “confessed” before they were tried and shot.
Oh, yes, the Lebanese, the creators of THAT muddle and ongoing national disaster have a LOT to teach Israelis about Arab Jews. It was the slaughter of the heads of various Jewish communal organisations by Hezbollah that brought about the final flight that even the Israeli invasion did not produce.
On a lighter note, what would be an appropriate utopian response to the arrival of one’s own refugee family? (I can write this without fear of being supplanted because the land I lived on in Israel was duly rented from its owner, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchy, and the building constructed sometime during the 50s.) If we are dealing with actual cases of “beiti beitak” and Resolution 194, there is nothing to prevent Israelis and 3rd country Palestinians from living together except for rage, bloodlust, desire for vengeance against history in the person of one’s neighbors, and a few minor emotions that I’m sure the “transitional justice” crowd can help them work through.
Since we are dealing with people and neighborhoods largely cushioned from the conflict since ’48–the Israelis by the State of Israel, Bisharat’s and Said’s later losses due to Nasser’s seizure of Christian properties, etc–there is slightly more fertile ground for reconciliation here.
Kassandra, there are several hundred thousand Jews from Arab lands in Israel, most of whom don’t agree with your single bit of andecdotal evidence (many of whom also have stories about their “Beautiful houses”). You may, for example, want to investigate where and why Benjamin Ben Eliezar picked up the name “Fuad”.
There are also several hundred thousand Israelis today who, apparently unlike you, actually lived under Stalin in the Soviet Union. Most of those who I know would, I believe, find your comparison ridiculous.
Sorry, the first part of the post should have been addressed to No Preference rather than Kassandra.