Keep Their Names

On Thursday afternoon, February 17, 2022, I met on the ruins of my village Mi’ar with a group of students of Al-Shaghour Secondary School from the populated town of Majd al-Krum, accompanied by their teachers and their teachers, to talk to me about my short story “The Leaning Palm” that they are studying within the curriculum of modern Arabic literature, and despite my admiration for their questions and analysis. This indicates their deep understanding of the story and the efforts made by the Arabic language teacher to show her love for her work and literature. However, they brought me back to a subject that has always hurt me whenever I meet our children in universities, in secondary and middle schools, and in cultural clubs, which is ignorance of the sites of our villages and of the names of our villages and religions. And mountains, trees and plants in our country.

Why do many of us say the Kishon junction and not the Muqata’, the Yarkon River, not the Al-Auja and the Golani junction and not the Maskana junction and the Megiddo junction and not the Lajjun junction and the Checkpost junction and not the happiness junction for example?

Do our children in Western Galilee, for example, know when they travel to Ras al-Naqoura or swim in the Zayb Beach, whose name they have changed to “Akhzif”, that they are passing through the ruins of villages such as Sumayriyah, al-Ghabiyya, al-Birwa, Damoun, al-Ruwais, al-Nahr and al-Bassa?

Do our children in the Upper Galilee know, when they travel to Safed, Acre, Haifa, and Tiberias, that they pass the ruins of the villages of Safsaf, Miron, Ain al-Zaytoun, al-Khalisa, Nasir al-Din, al-Ja’una, Iqrit, Bir’am, Taytaba, al-Sammu’i, Kafr Anan, Fardiya and other dozens of villages?

Do our children in Haifa and the villages of Wadi Ara know the locations of the villages of Ain Ghazal, Jaba’, Kfarlam, Umm al-Zeinat, Khubaizah and their sisters who were like pearl necklaces on the chest of Mount Carmel and on the seashore?

Forgive me, because I will not continue my questioning until I reach Lydda, Ramleh, Jaffa, and beyond. A short article does not contain the names of hundreds of villages, tens of valleys, tens of streams, tens of mountains, and other places they crossed or wiped off the face of the earth, leaving only a witness to the depth of the crime. Such as an olive, a cactus, a palm, an amber, a bead of a well, a tombstone, or the dome of a concubine that is set apart or a forced Judaization.

I visited the ruins of dozens of displaced villages in the districts of Acre, Haifa, Nazareth, Bisan, Tiberias and Safed, and met dozens of men and women who told me about the last day in their village, about the village’s families, imams, teachers, and martyrs. My patriot disappeared and the book was absent with him. I lost a book but gained a rich experience.

When I travel from the north to the flower of cities or to the mermaid and cradle of culture, beautiful Jaffa, or to Beersheba, the capital of the Negev, with my friend the historian, Dr. Mustafa Kabha goes on to explain the names of the places we pass by, their history, what happened in them, and the names of the famous people who belong to them. I feel how much we need to pass on this valuable information to our people, old and young, men and women, young men and children, in order to preserve our history and our geography.

In every city and town, we need a national association that prepares historical and educational trips for the new generation, schoolchildren and teachers across the country so that they know what the Israeli education programs have ignored and what the Zionist establishment has “expressed” for decades. Al-Birwa, Mayar, Saffuriyah, Al-Ghabsiyeh, Al-Maqtaa’, and Al-Dediba Mountain.. We sing together, “Peace be upon you from me, O land of my ancestors.

And whoever said: On this earth there is nothing worthy of life.