Marking the Palestinian Presence at the Heart of the Israeli State

By Isabelle Humphries


	Orthodox priests celebrate Mass at the restored church in Mujaydil (Photos Nasri Nassar).

THIS PAST Christmas, for the first time in nearly 60 years, Orthodox Christians of Mujaydil celebrated in their own church. Old walls have been repaired, new windows and bells put in and the weeds outside the little stone church have been pulled out. In another part of the world, a group of senior citizens renovating a crumbling church to use for weekly mass could be the most uncontroversial of community activities. But for the members of the committee formed to preserve the Orthodox church of Mujaydil, their status as Palestinian refugees inside the Jewish state loads their action with highly explosive potential. Activity which in middle class America could be as “depoliticized as it gets” becomes, in Israeli-ruled Galilee, a radical act of confrontation. For the village of Mujaydil no longer exists; the church is situated in the heart of the Jewish town of Migdal Ha’emek.

A few kilometers outside Nazareth, on the road to Haifa, 1940s Mujaydil was a farming village with around two thousand Muslim and Christian inhabitants. But like hundreds of villages across Palestine, this peace was brutally interrupted by Israeli occupation. In July 1948 villagers were forced to flee their homes and lands. Hundreds came to nearby Nazareth hoping that the international Christian profile of the town would prevent Israeli forces from exiling its inhabitants, as happened in other towns. Refugees sheltered with friends and family, on floors of convents and religious institutions, even in cinemas and public halls. As the true reality of the Israeli occupation became known, and with no work, homes or food in Nazareth, many villagers fled further afield to Lebanon or the West Bank.

Several hundred refugees of Mujaydil stayed behind, however, eventually receiving identity cards in the new state, and never quite losing hope of returning to their village. Today, several thousand “internal refugees” of Mujaydil live in Nazareth. They are among the at least 250,000 Palestinian citizens in Israel displaced from their village of origin. Figures are only approximate, because the Israeli government keeps no official record of village of origin of Palestinians who received identity papers in the new state. For Israel to recognize their status as refugees would be to expose the apartheid inherent in the concept of a state for Jews only.


A May 1987 photograph of Mujaydil’s deserted Orthodox church (From All That Remains, by Walid Khalidi).

“On my national insurance card it says that I arrived in this country in 1949, as if I were an immigrant,” said Nasri Nassar, born in Mujaydil in the 1930s. “They want to erase my existence.”

Like hundreds of other villages, Mujaydil was razed to the ground, and in 1952 the Jewish town of Migdal Ha’Emeq was established on the ruins. All original houses and the mosque were completely destroyed. Through pressure from the external Church, the Catholic priests continued saying mass in Mujaydil’s other church, but villagers could not reach it. In early years the Orthodox housed members of holy orders in their building, but this was impossible to maintain and the church and graveyards were left derelict. Between 1948 and 1966 the villagers of Mujaydil who remained just a few kilometers away lived under strict military rule, and any movement outside Nazareth required an official permit from the Israeli military government.

Rebuilding to Survive

“I want my children and grandchildren to know where we lived so that people do not forget…To survive as a community we have to be able to protect our history, to go to the place that was the spiritual heart of our village which is long destroyed.”

—Nasri Nassar, Mujaydil Committee Secretary

Decades later, when villagers once again were able to visit the Orthodox church, they found it in ruins. Vandals had written grafitti on the walls, broken windows and stolen the bells. In the early 1990s a group of villagers paid for new flooring, but it was destroyed again. In 1999, however, a new committee had more success, receiving official permission to renovate. With labor and materials donated from within the community, by August 2004 the first mass was held inside the church.

While the group currently is raising funds to be able to complete the work, it is not financial problems alone that have dogged renovations. As the first mass was held, a small group of Jewish youths stood outside cursing worshippers. A volunteer has camped out at night on the church grounds to prevent further vandalism. The group wants urgently to find enough money to assemble a permanent wall and gate to prevent further damage.

A Wider Movement

The activity at Mujaydil is symbolic of a wider movement trying to breathe life once more into destroyed Palestinian villages. In the past decade, internally displaced refugees of all generations have begun to articulate the memory of their Nakba (catastrophe). Those who remain in the land occupied in 1948 have the potential to reach their villages of origin, which refugees in the wider Diaspora do not. Renovation of sacred sites such as mosques, churches and burial grounds, and struggling for the right to access is considered a central task of today’s activism.

Mujaydil Village Committee is one of 21 villages currently registered under the umbrella of the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced (ADRID)—and there are others outside this grouping. Every year, on the day Israelis celebrate “independence,” ADRID holds a commemorative march to a destroyed village, symbolically reclaiming the land as Palestinian. The group also regularly organizes tours around destroyed villages, raising community awareness of the injustice of the past being perpetuated today. Mobilizing began in earnest following the commencement of the American sponsored “peace process,” the moment when refugees perceived that the Palestinian Authority would sign away their rights in a settlement with Israel. From Israeli-controlled land to the camps of Lebanon to the USA, refugees are trying to take an active part in influencing their own destiny.

Nasri Nassar of the Mujaydil committee hopes to use their experience to help other villages replicate their success. It is important to note that while the focus here is a Christian place of worship, there is similar activity organized in tandem at Muslim holy sites, and that all internal refugees fervently express their shared identity as Palestinians. They lived together before the Nakba, and after the Nakba they struggle together to reclaim their rights. While some villages have had slightly more success (such as Kafr Bir’im where weddings, baptisms and burials are now held), the reality is that all refugees share the same fate: they are unable to return home.

Activities such as the renovation of the church in Mujaydil challenge the central Zionist project of whitewashing the land with Zionist history. A few Orthodox Jews shouting abuse at Palestinians attending mass may look insignificant, but it is clear that the presence of Palestinians presents disturbing questions that the majority of the Israeli public do not wish to face. Physical signs of Palestinian collective memory inside the areas conquered by Israel in 1948 question the moral foundations of Zionism, rather than simply challenging Israel’s latest atrocity in Gaza. Awareness of the Nakba inside the Jewish state presents a counter-narrative or counter-memory where it is most unwanted, in the internationally undisputed areas of Israel. The actions of internal refugees at the site of memory push history to the foreground of contemporary debate.

Isabelle Humphries is a freelance writer conducting Ph.D. research on Palestinian internal refugees at St. Mary’s College, University of Surrey,UK, For more information on Mujaydil and similar projects contact <isa bellebh2004@yahoo.co.uk>.