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STATEMENT OF "THE ASSOCIATION OF FORTY"
IN THE U.N. - NOVEMBER 2000
The
Uprooted - the Present Absentees
In 1994, a ministerial committee was established to discuss the issue
of returning the inhabitants of the villages of Kufur Bir'em and Ikrith
to their villages in the Galilee, in the North of Israel. This committee
recommended allocating 600 dunams for each village and allowing the
inhabitants to build their houses over this small area of land. Regretfully,
this recommendation has stayed on paper, was not adopted and has not
been turned into an official decision yet, although it does not equal
the demands of the inhabitants of these two villages which rely on
the decision of the Supreme Court in the 1950s, according to which
these inhabitants are entitled to return to all the lands from which
they were uprooted and which amount to thousands of dunams.
In recent years, the inhabitants reopened the file and launched a
complaint against the state before the Israeli courts aiming at implementing
the previous decision of the Supreme Court and at bringing justice
to these inhabitants. Yet, these attempts by the inhabitants conflict
with the official stalling policy of the government and of the Israeli
judicial system, which aims at causing these inhabitants to despair,
freezing the case and making it obsolete.
Regarding the rest of the uprooted villages, which were demolished
in 1948, and on whose lands Jewish settlements and towns amounting
to over 400 were built, the government refuses to recognise the right
of the inhabitants to return or to reconstruct the churches and the
mosques which remained in scores of these villages.
Over the last two years, reconstruction of holy places was allowed
in few of these villages, such as Ikrith, Kufur Bir'im and Al-Ghabisiyah.
The government justifies not making a decision to return the inhabitants
of Kufur Bir'im despite a decision by the Supreme Court, as such a
decision will constitute a precedent for the other villages, and thus
prefers to continue with its stalling policy and denial of the right
of over 200,000 uprooted Israeli citizens to return to their villages,
in accordance with what all the international charters dictate.
It is worth stressing that the Committee for the Defence of the Rights
of the Uprooted in Israel has submitted practical suggestions for
solving the problem without hurting the Jewish localities, which are
located on the lands of the uprooted, but for rebuilding the uprooted
villages next to these localities and in a way which secures bringing
the minimal amount of justice to these inhabitants and which banishes
the historical injustice inflicted upon these inhabitants over 52
years, the age of the state of Israel.
The government not only rejects these solutions but also attempts
to demolish and to banish all the remains of these villages which
prove their existence, as in the attempt to banish the Al-Istiklal
cemetery near Haifa which belongs to one of the uprooted villages.
Also, several mosques were demolished and burnt in various places
in the state by extreme gangs, and if the Arab public bodies had not
been on the alert, these holy places would not have been saved.
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