The graves of Palestinian refugees ... evidence on the ground and the case

Mervat Sadiq - Ramallah

The shrine of Haji Fatima Abdullah Al-Afghani from the city of Ramla, and near it the tomb of Wajih Mustafa Al-Ramahi from Al-Muzayri'a, then Maryam Okasha from Al-Safaria, and the tomb of Ziyad Al-Hattab from Annaba, and Haj Ibrahim Ibrahim Shalash Zaid from Beit Nabala. God in the West Bank).

In the cemetery north of the camp, and on the land of Birzeit, refugees from the Jalazoun camp - whose origins date to 36 destroyed villages in the Nakba of 1948 - document the names of the deceased, the martyrs, their cities and their original villages on their graves, in a phenomenon known as the refugee camps in Palestine and the diaspora, and even the graves of refugees. Palestinians in Europe sometimes.

And with the different forms of graves over the years, and the identity of their dead, and the circumstances of their departure, vary between ordinary death or Israeli killing; The refugee village's original village notation remains fixed in the tomb called "Martyrs' Cemetery." Here, there is no single grave written in the village or city column "From Jalazoun Camp."

Musa Anbar, who is one of the camp’s teachers, and was also the director of the elderly house in it, mentions how his mother, Asma Abdel Razek, deported two years ago as she wished to bury her in her native village of Wadi Hanin, Gaza District, from which she was abandoned at the age of 12 in 1948. Her wish was not fulfilled, but the name The family village is written on its grave.

And because the demand is out of reach, Anbar says that many of the camp's sons who were born in villages that were covered by the Nakba, were visiting their villages in secret, if they could reach them, and bringing with them soil from their lands to keep it in their homes or requesting an atom on their graves if they left before returning to them.

Palestinian sources document the displacement of more than 530 Palestinian villages after they were attacked by the Zionist gangs in the Nakba in 1948 and most of them were destroyed later. About 13,000 Palestinians were killed, and more than 800,000 were displaced, most of whom became refugees outside their homeland, in one of the largest historic ethnic cleansing operations.

"To Palestine, take me with you."
In his diaspora, Iyad Abu El-Ela, son of the refugee family from the town of Shafa Amr, remembers the Haifa district, to the Yarmouk camp in Syria, and the refugee in Sweden now; His uncle, Robin Abu Al-Ella, was killed in an assassination operation carried out by the Israeli Mossad in Beirut in 1980.

When the body of the martyr was transferred to the Yarmouk camp, which was known as a responsible for the security of the Palestinian camps in Syria, the family recorded on his shrine the crime of his assassination and his hometown in Shafa Amr and his command that "his remains be returned to them upon return" with the verse: "To Palestine, take me with you."

The family now does not have a picture of the grave of its martyr, and it will not have it, after the martyrs' graves in the Yarmouk camp were destroyed by ISIS militants who took control of the camp years ago, and the graves of the Palestinians were reportedly exhumed, by Russian elements in search of the remains of Israeli soldiers captured there In the past.

In addition to Shafa Amr, the people of Yarmouk wrote the names of Haifa, Nazareth, Acre, Saffuriyya, and dozens of villages and cities from which they were displaced. They continued to write the names of their original towns on the graves of the deceased, old or young, until they were displaced and displaced again because of the war in Syria.

Not only that, Iyad Abu Al-Ala notes the codification of the name of the deserted Loubia village, Tiberias District, on the grave of the son of the Yarmouk camp, Ahmed Hamdan, who died and was buried in Sweden months ago, "hoping to transfer his remains to Palestine one day," as his friend said.

Evidence in Lebanon
In this narration also we find a picture of the tomb of the Palestinian writer, martyr Ghassan Kanafani, in the cemetery of the Palestinian martyrs in Beirut, on which he wrote his date of birth in the city of Acre in 1936 and his martyrdom in Beirut in 1972. Also the tomb of the martyr Ali Hassan Salama "Abu Hassan Salama" who recorded He must have been born in the Palestinian village of Qoulia in 1942 and his martyrdom in 1979, and the Palestinian militant Ahmed Hussein Al Yamani, who was born in Sehmata, Akko District in 1924, who died in Beirut in 2011.

With these photos, Palestinian activist in Lebanon, Yasser Al-Ali, transmits what was written on the wall of the cemetery of Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon: "We promise you that we will carry your remains with us."

The living cemetery
In the memory of this memory, there is a long research project that a professor of philosophy and cultural studies at Birzeit University, Abdul Rahim Al-Sheikh, has been working on for years, and it is titled "A Living Palestinian Cemetery."

In our interview with the Sheikh, he says that since the Nakba of 1948 the Palestinians have been struggling to restore the three components of their national identity: the occupied geography, the demographic that was dispersed in the world, and the cultural being wiped out.

"After dispersing them from their country, Israel continued erasing the culture and history of the Palestinians by removing their villages and their names. On the other hand, the Palestinian became, in the places of asylum, neither the land in which he was buried, nor the political entity that expresses his historical narration, although the PLO later carried out this work." Partly (...) the refugees took it upon themselves to find alternatives to preserve the holdings of their national memories. "

The Sheikh believes that the camp's cemetery was part of these alternatives, as it became a space free from the control of the authorities and control over what is written in it, as it is neither an archive nor a newspaper nor a public place that needs official permission to practice naming policies, and in it the relatives of every deceased are free to write on his grave according to His will.

This is part of the resistance in the context of what are known as the "death and life policies" that the political authorities are exercising against the Palestinians inside occupied Palestine and in the diaspora.

Refugees have found in gravestones - according to the sheikh - "a place to restore the name of the land and exercise their right to tell their historical story", whether in the camps and gatherings of the diaspora outside Palestine, or inside it.

The issue is not only about confirming their legal right to return - as he says - but rather what he called the "temporary" aspect that refugee quotes show on their graves, i.e. the desire for this to be just "temporary soil", and the desire to return their remains to their original homes even after death.

In his project on the "living Palestinian cemetery", the sheikh stops at the mass graves and large numbers of martyrs who were buried "with dynamic names" without their real names, especially from the martyrs of the Palestinian revolution in Lebanon, and some were accompanied by names whose numbers were lost later in the significance of some of the documents of the revolution.

Although there are cultural and political influences that have historically influenced the declaration of graves and writing on them, the sheikh always records the exclusion of the martyrs from any differences, as the incident of their martyrdom and their political affiliation and their countries of origin has documented visible evidence, and political, cultural and social changes have not affected them.