It has been more than 70 years since the people of Safad were deported from their city and the population weight of the Palestinian people moved since the great catastrophe in 1948 from their historic homeland to the diaspora.

Today, and at the beginning of the year 2021, the people of Safad will meet again to get to know each other, exchange stories and document symbols about their city, villages and districts, but in the virtual world through "Diwaniyah".

Diwaniyah is a Palestinian cultural documentary program launched by the Turkish Association for Solidarity with Palestine "Fidar", whereby it allocates an electronic forum each time to meet the people of a particular region and learn about the lives of those who lived in it, its families, symbols, struggle, talents and achievements of its sons and daughters in their exile.

The diwaniyya has an established idiomatic concept in the Arab mentality, which borrowed the use of the word from the meanings of the word “diwan,” and it is the place where people meet to discuss issues and important matters of interest to them, not the least of which is the search for the history of birth in the secrets of a lost homeland.

Back to the roots

In this homeland, Safad appeared as a title in the memory of the oldest cities that the Canaanites founded in the arms of the high Jabal al-Jumayk on the peaks of northern Palestine, this is a testimony of geography, as for history, his testimony on Safad relates to the Pharaonic inscriptions that bore the name of the city since the 14th century BC, while the Romans knew it as "Summer" means fortress.

Muhammad Mchinch: The idea of ​​the diwaniyya is inspired by the Palestinian parents' diwaniyas, where people gather to exchange news and chat (Al Jazeera)

Safad defied the Crusaders until they occupied it in the tenth century AD, before it was regained by the conqueror Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi in the twelfth century AD, to move after that between the eras of the different countries that succeeded northern Palestine until it fell under the Israeli occupation in 1948, and its population at that time increased More than 13 thousand Palestinians, while the number of villages in its brigade exceeded 60.

The Safadids were displaced from Safad and dispersed in exile in the land, but they kept looking at each date that unites them to mention it, just as in the diwaniyah, which Mahmoud Mechenich describes as "one of the addresses of achieving communication between the people of villages scattered in the countries of the diaspora."

Mechinch - who is in charge of the diwaniyah in the "Fidar" Association - told Al-Jazeera Net that the idea of ​​the diwaniyah was born within the continuous national education program "Ajyal" that the association launched to maintain the continuity of the Palestinians in the diaspora with their national roots.

Diwaniyah in the diaspora

In turn, the association’s president, Muhammad Mashenesh, affirms that reviving the Palestinian diwaniyya is an imperative in these difficult times the Palestinian cause is going through, indicating that its idea is mainly inspired by the diwaniyas of parents in Palestinian villages and cities, where the people of the village or city gather to exchange news and important matters. .

The head of "Fedar" confirmed to Al-Jazeera Net that Diwaniyah attracted the people of Safad and its villages from more than one place in the diaspora, such as Turkey, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Lebanon, who provided an introduction to their villages, families and whereabouts.

The smell of home

The Safadids spoke in their diwaniyas about the history of industry, agriculture and trade, which depended on the cattle wools that Safad was famous for, and they mentioned the history of their ancestors in the work of tanning leather, dyeing fabric, making chairs and mats, which were known as professions in which the city specialized.

The participants in Diwaniyah showed pictures of the Safad plateaus that they had not seen, and of the four rivers, Hasbaya, Baniyas, Dan, and Al-Barijith, which flow from underneath to flow into the Jordan River, and they recalled accounts of its most famous landmarks such as mosques, markets and homes that testify that this land is Palestinian and that everything on it is for Palestinians.

According to Chench, the condition of the Palestinian diaspora and the dispersal of families across multiple countries led to a state of loss of identity and separation of the members of the same family, so the idea of ​​the diwaniyah came in light of the open media space that crosses geography, which helps to unite families within the virtual world.

The Palestine Diwaniyah meeting on Safad on the Zoom app with wide participation (Al-Jazeera)

Wide interaction

Mechinch explains that the "Diwaniyah of Palestine" aims mainly to link the generations to each other through the various paragraphs it provides, including the definition of the country, customs, traditions and folklore, in addition to the nature of the public address that includes all age groups, explaining that 3 generations of the Palestinian people are the grandfather and the father And the grandson participated in the diwaniyya of Safad.

The participants did not disagree on the feasibility of the diwaniyah, nor on the importance of its timing, as Ibn Safad Ibrahim al-Ali described it as a means of connecting Palestinian generations in light of the challenges facing the Palestinians in their multiple calamities that threaten the identity and belonging to Palestine.

Tales passed on for generations

As for Hajj Mustafa Issa - who was from Safad in the year of the Nakba - he painted artistic paintings inspired by the memory of his father and grandfather of the neighborhoods and markets of the city that he saw with his heart without his eyes, while the journalist and activist Bashar Zaghmout reviewed the most important events that took place in his village, Safad during the Nakba. Palestinian.

It is the diwaniyah, then, with tales passed down through generations from Safad, from which the martyr Muhammad Hassan Hegazy, one of the Red Tuesday Knights executed by the British Mandate government for Palestine, for their participation in the Al-Buraq Revolution in 1929, the heroism that the "lovers" immortalized in their legendary "epic" from Acre prison And whose words are transmitted by the Palestinians from generation to generation, to remain the bell that rings in the world of oblivion.