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Benvenisti Mourns The Forgotten Rural Heritage Of Israel

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  • Benvenisti Mourns The Forgotten Rural Heritage Of Israel

    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
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