BENVENISTI MOURNS THE FORGOTTEN RURAL HERITAGE OF ISRAEL
Daniella Cheslow
Green Prophet
July 1, 2009
For readers who have driven or hiked past unmarked, run-down old stone
buildings in Israel, former Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Meron Benvenisti’s
Sacred Landscape (University of California, 2000) will reveal a layer
of Arab ghosts inside Israeli towns, cities and the countryside.
Born in 1934, Benvenisti spent his childhood accompanying his father
on geographical tours of Mandatory Palestine. The elder Benvenisti
traveled in order to rename the Arab features of the map with
Hebrew monikers, but his son saw an enchanting world of Palestinian
villages. Meticulously researched with zealous attention to detail,
Sacred Landscape asks the question of how the rural Palestinian
fabric within Israel’s 1948 borders ceased to exist both on land
and in the minds of the Israelis who replaced it. The first step,
according to Benvenisti, was a cadre of Jewish geographers, including
his father, who collected the names of towns, rivers, hills and
springs and painstakingly redubbed them. Drawing from the minutes
of naming committee meetings, Benvenisti reports that some names
were Hebrew versions of the Arabic, some were taken from the Bible,
others were named for Zionist leaders. For Benvenisti, the loss of
the Arab map was tragic. "The wealth of Arabic toponymy [place names]
is astounding in its beauty, its sensitivity to the landscape, its
delicacy of observation and its choice of images … The people who
chose these names had no need to articulate their love for their
land in vast lyrical creations or to sing songs of longing from a
distant Diaspora. They expressed it by naming a piece of land the
Setting of the Moon; a spring of pure water, the Blue Spring; and
a picturesque village, the Charming Village." The new Hebrew names,
however, still referred to a primarily Arab landscape until the 1948
war, during which nearly 400 villages were depopulated. Benvenisti
equivocally points out the Israeli and Palestinian claims as to
who began the war, and then explores its consequences. The first
three villages destroyed in the war were Qastal, Talunya and Saris
on the road to Jerusalem. Their residents had either helped the Arab
troops who laid siege to Jerusalem, or the villagers abandoned their
homes, and the Arab Legion used them as bases. Benvenisti writes
up the pre-war history of Qastal, population 150: "They inhabited
about twenty-five stone houses and cultivated some 100 dunams of
fruit trees, fifty dunams of olive groves, a few score dunams of
vegetables and additional plots of field crops. There was no school
in the village. Its single shop and coffee-house sat beside the main
road to Jerusalem and were the property of an Armenian named Abu
George. Most of the younger villagers had taken an active part in the
Arab Revolt of 1936-39 under the command of ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini
and remained loyal to him in the 1948 war as well." The refugees left
behind them intact villages, sometimes with food still in the cabinets
and animals in their pens. While some Israeli leaders planned to
settle immigrants in these abandoned homes, the houses often were not
heated or connected to a water supply, and made for an uncomfortable
first home for the thousands of immigrants from the Arab world who
were settled there by the government and moved out as quickly as
possible. In time, the empty houses became an uncomfortable reminder
that the refugees might come home. During the 1950s and early 1960s,
Jewish Agency head Yosef Weitz spearheaded an effort to demolish
most of the village remains. The Arab presence was thus wiped out
of Caesaria, the Achziv beach, and hundreds of other places on the
Israeli map. Israeli history taught about the Crusader origins of the
buildings that remained, ignoring the more recent Arab past. Finally,
Benvenisti explores what became of mosques, churches and graveyards,
which were spared the devastation visited upon village houses. Most
of the village cemeteries became straggly untended fields strewn
with garbage. Mosques are used today as anything from stables to
synagogues. Saint’s sites have been Hebraicized and appropriated.
Benvenisti is 75 and lived through the rapid Judaization of the
Israeli/Palestinian geography. Although he participated in building
kibbutzim on the sites of destroyed villages and served in the Israeli
army, the experience of watching his neighbors disappear marked him
permanently with a sense of guilt. Although Benvenisti deals in loaded
terms of ethnic cleansing that may turn off some Israel sympathizers,
he also catalogs the Arab aggression towards the establishment of
the Jewish state, and the ongoing tension between Arabs and Jews
that simmers around the fateful events of 1948. He plumbs national
documents to see what motivated the Jewish leadership to eradicate
the villages, and sifts through the literature of Israel’s greatest
writers to see how they handle the moral weight of the process. While
he takes Palestinian geographers to task for expecting a return to
individual villages long obliterated from the landscape, his largest
critique is reserved for the country in which he was born: "It is
ironic that the Israelis – who have managed to thwart every attempt
in the past fifty years to bring back the refugees, who altered
the physical reality in a manner that ruled out any possibility
of restoring the Palestinian landscape, and who have perhaps even
compelled the Palestinian leadership to acquiesce to the status quo –
are still hounded by the nightmare of ‘the return.’" Readers looking
for an account of why the Palestinian leadership failed in protecting
the countryside will not find a total recount here. But Benvenisti
offers an eye-opening look at the step-by-step process of Israel’s
renaming and transforming the Palestinian landscape, colored by his own
experiences as a child and later as a researcher in the villages. He
portrays little-known aspects of pre-State Palestinian life, such as
the Bedouins who raised water buffalo and lived in reed huts in the
North. His lucid and flowing writing makes the factual historical
reference read like a gripping novel. Sacred Landscape will change
the way you read the Israeli landscape. It is a masterpiece that
sensitively mourns a rural life forever disappeared.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
