Since his birth in 1923, the oldest architect of the Palestinian village of Rantis, Hajj Amara and Wahdan (Abu Saleh) carried four personal cards belonging to British colonialism, then the Israeli occupation, and Jordanian rule, up to the Palestinian Authority card.
Abu Saleh does not know which card will be held in the event that Israel decided to impose its sovereignty on his village again, as expected from the "Israeli annexation plan for the West Bank" after the American peace plan known as the "Deal of the Century".
After the Benjamin Netanyahu government announced its intention to implement a "annexation plan" for large areas of West Bank lands and its eastern foothills in the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea early next July, Israeli researchers published unofficial maps late last month that showed Rantis (west of Ramallah) among dozens of expected villages It was included in the complete "Israeli sovereignty".
Abu Saleh sits in his house built before the Nakba of Palestine (1948), on which he hung several maps drawn on his walls from the lands of his village, those of which about three thousand people still live in a small range of them now, and also that Israel confiscated early in the Nakba and before the occupation of the West Bank Its villages and towns in the 1967 war, and he says that "the annexation schemes here started a long time ago."
The maps documented by Abu Saleh show the divisions of the lands of his village and the neighboring villages from the district of Lod and Ramla that were abandoned and destroyed in the Nakba, and some of these maps were transferred to the people of Rantis in Jordan, and others were suspended in the schools of the village so that the students could learn geographically from their country.
In his activity two decades ago, the man drew the land of Rantis - which spanned an area of 40,000 dunums - divided by a black line known as the "armistice line", in which more than two thirds of the village lands were confiscated and confiscated in the occupied areas in 1948, leaving the population with less than a third of their property in the occupied lands in 1948. 1967, while the confiscations continued to this day.
And recorded in each division of the lands of his village, which extended to the coastal plain in the west and Jaffa in the north, the names of the families who own the land and the names of fields and fields and their limits.
Despite his old age, Abu Saleh asks about his fate and the fate of the rest of his land and the people of his village in the "new annexation" as he calls it, and he does not receive an answer.
Abu Saleh was known as one of the villagers who came to defend it and the neighboring villages in the Nakba, and he fought alongside the well-known Palestinian leader Hassan Salameh, who was martyred due to his injury in what was known as the Battle of Ras Al-Ain in May 1948.
He says that in the year 1948 the village lost its livelihood in the plain plains, and "we have nothing but mountainous land and a few fields", so the people were forced to search for their livelihood and were displaced to Jordan, then in the sixties and seventies to the Arab Gulf states, adding that "there is no longer There are only 500 of its people after they counted more than two thousand people before the Nakba. "
The man worked with his family in agriculture before confiscating his land, then at industrial workshops in Lod and Ramle, and in the city of Jaffa in particular, and he says, "I know Jaffa and all its streets." He drew a map of the city, which is still hanging in his house, and the village students benefit from it.
Abu Saleh continues, "I took jealousy and anguish over my village, and I know it all along the borders of the Palestinian coast, so I drew it so that the young people would become aware of the rich fertile land of their country even if they were deprived of it."
After decades, the people repeat the phrase “our land in the plain” and “our land in the plain” as Abu Saleh says, “12 dunums next to the railway near the park of Saadat and the land of Zaki Amer, and it was planted with grains,” and for his family also about two thousand acres in the coastal plain, all of them "It was lost in previous Israeli plans."
Sheikh Shaker Abu Salim - who is one of the village notables - says that the people of Rantis were returning to their lands until the 1970s to inspect them, and many of them still possess Ottoman and Jordanian documents of ownership confiscated from them during the Nakba and after the setback.
Abu Salim believes that the new annexation will target the lands primarily without the residents, especially since most of the remainder of these villages are non-cultivated mountainous lands, and based their annexation on the old laws regarding abandoned properties, which constitute a gain in expropriating them in favor of settlement expansion.
He recalls the statements of Israeli officials that he follows daily, which say that "tens of thousands of Palestinians in the areas threatened by annexation will not constitute a demographic burden on Israel."
And the same Israeli estimates indicate that about 100,000 Palestinians will be affected by plans to annex large areas in the West Bank.
Abu Salim believes with many that the people of villages threatened by annexation will be treated as "residents of the state of Israel", which means, as Jerusalemites are currently being treated, "that is, they are not citizens."
He adds that "the lack of clarity generates legitimate concern among the people who remain confused, and are considering the possibility of closing them with iron gates, as in the villages of Beit Iksa district of Jerusalem and Barta'a near Jenin in the north ..."
However, experience puts people in worse estimates. They believe that annexation will mean confiscating land, expanding settlements, and gradually providing evictions to Palestinians by restricting their livelihoods and building permits for them.
The annexation of oil also
. In 2004, the occupation not only confiscated the entire lands of Rantis, but rather modified the route of the separation barrier that began building it for "security reasons as announced" on the areas separating the lands of 1948 and the lands of 1967, to include this time new areas where three oil fields were discovered on Village lands.
While the Palestinian Authority has planned to invest these fields, whose depths can be estimated at distances of up to ten kilometers inside the West Bank, but Israel has for many years begun to withdraw its capabilities through ground pumps and private carriers.
The head of the local council, Rantis Hassan Wahdan, says that the local councils have no answers to people's questions about their fate, as these bodies did not receive any new maps or instructions from any Palestinian or Israeli party.
According to Wahdan, Rantis residents live on about 9,000 dunams (most of them classified as “C” under Israeli security control according to the Oslo agreement), and they receive water and electricity services today from Israeli companies but only through the Palestinian Authority, and without direct contact with the occupation.
The occupation took advantage of the Corona pandemic in recent months to demolish agricultural barracks, as it preceded it by bulldozing and closing the main entrance to the village, and preventing the establishment of agricultural roads or any expansion movement on the outskirts.
Wahdan says, "Every citizen of this country has lost part or all of their land since the Nakba and is still under threat of that until today."