Tour group assaulted by Israeli onlookers while visiting depopulated Palestinian village of Lifta
Friday, September 10, 2021 at 01:52PM Press Release 30 August 2021. ZOCHROT/ Mondoweiss
YAQUB ODEH GIVING A TOUR OF LIFTAEditor’s Note: The following press release was issued by Zochrot. Mondoweiss occasionally publishes press releases and statements from organizations in an effort to draw attention to overlooked issues.
On Saturday, August 28, we held a tour of Lifta to express our solidarity with its refugees and our opposition to the destructive plan that seeks to eradicate the Palestinian village once and for all. As in all our tours, we presented the injustices of the Nakba to the participants, above all the uprooting and denial of return of some 85% of the Palestinians living in the territory that became the State of Israel. We also emphasized the realization of the refugees’ right to return as a prerequisite for a just future in the region.
Several dozens of Israelis, Palestinians and internationals took part in the tour, including Lifta refugees who fascinated the participants with important stories about the village’s history – memories that are still alive and form a clear statement about the refusal to forget the Nakba and the eternal desire to return home. Upon our arrival at the village spring, we were received with racist and homophobic slurs by about ten men and a woman, and when we refused to leave the place and continued with the tour as planned, the verbal violence became physical. One of the assailants declared that he trains his dog “to bite Arabs”. Another one claimed that we were disturbing him at “his own home” where he has been living for 15 years. The tour proceeded as planned among the remains of the village, but upon our return to the parking lot, we found that several vehicles of the tour participants had been vandalized.
Violence against people who are well within their rights to use public space, and who take part in nonviolent activity on behalf of a legally registered NGO should concern anyone who cares about individual liberties and freedom of expression. Attacks on civil society and human rights organizations in Israel are not new. They are the product not only of ideological conflicts and flawed understanding of democracy, but above all of living in deep denial and constant collective and individual defensiveness. This social disease of denial laced with fear is highly familiar to us, and we at Zochrot strive to heal it.
The attack on the tour participants precisely on the lands of the depopulated Palestinian village of Lifta is a sobering reminder of the necessity of our work. The ability of so many who have been raised in the Zionist education system to spend their leisure time in a water spring that used to be a source of life for thousands of people without stopping for a moment to think about the place they are in is tragic. The instinctive opposition to those who seek to invoke the memory of those who lived here, to talk about the price we all pay for the crimes committed here, and mainly about ways to redress this reality indicates the fragility of the Zionist vision, and the importance of bringing the Nakba and the return of Palestinian refugees to the forefront of the public agenda.
Those who seek to silence us, know this: we will never stop uncovering the truth, we will never stop teaching, touring and promoting political and cultural change within Israeli society until such time as the Palestinian refugees’ right of return is realized, leading to sustainable peace and a just and equal society.
We thank Mr. Yaqub Odeh, who was born in Lifta and became a refugee at eight years old, and led us through the village trails, even after a group of Israelis asked to expel him once again. We thank Yaqub and all the people of Lifta for the memory, persistence and vision. We thank the tour participants and the thousands who choose to take part in Zochrot’s activities each year.
Click here for more details on the struggle to save Lifta from the most recent “development plan”, and on ways of taking part in it.
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