Mapping Exile and Return: Palestinian Dispossession and a Political Theology for a Shared Future

Kafr Bir‘im, Elias Chacour, and the Arboreal Imagination

3 Kafr Bir‘im, Elias Chacour, and the Arboreal Imagination They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be . . . –—Isaiah 65:21–22 (NRSV) “Something in the yard stopped me. There, firmly rooted and still green with life, grew my special fig tree.” –—Elias Chacour, Greek Catholic Archbishop for the Galilee1 The prophet Isaiah’s vision of rootedness in the land and freedom from dispossession echoes the yearnings for belonging and return of millions of Palestinian refugees, both Christians and Muslims. An affirmation that one’s ultimate dwelling place is in God (Ps. 90:1) does not negate human attachment to particular places, nor does it contradict Isaiah’s depiction of a future of 91 security in the land. For Samira Daou, originally from the Christian village of Kafr Bir‘im in the upper Galilee, one of over five hundred Palestinian towns and villages depopulated and destroyed by the Israeli military during 1948 and its aftermath, and today a resident of the Dbayeh refugee camp outside Beirut, return represents an end to the alienation she experiences as a refugee in Lebanon: “I still feel a stranger in this country, feel that I don’t belong. Even if I had lived a hundred years here I would still like to go back to Palestine, go back to Kafr Bir‘im where no one can tell me that I’m a refugee and that I don’t belong.”2 Displaced Bir‘imites who remained within what became the State of Israel express a similar sense of estrangement. “I don’t want my children and grandchildren to feel like strangers forever,” states Emtanes Susan, today a resident of the village of Jish, only a few kilometers south of Kafr Bir‘im’s ruins. “I want them to belong to the land.”3 In the face of an Israeli cartographic regime that seeks to erase the traces of Palestinian presence from the landscape, the displaced villagers of the nearly seven hundred-year-old Kafr Bir‘im and their descendants have over six decades been at the forefront of Palestinian refugee efforts to return.4 Together with Abuna Elias Chacour, perhaps the village’s most famous native son, who served as longtime Melkite priest of the Galilean village of I‘billin and today presides as Archbishop of ‘Akka, Haifa, Nazareth, and All of Galilee, Bir‘imites have asked, “Am I always to be a refugee, pushed from place to place, never belonging anywhere?”5 They have answered not only by pursuing legal and political avenues in attempts to secure their return but also by cultivating connections with the ruins of Kafr Bir‘im, making regular family visits to Bir‘im’s demolished buildings, holding annual summer camps for the youth of Bir‘im in order to pass on the village’s folklore traditions, and celebrating weddings and burying the dead in the village’s church and cemetery, both of which villagers won the right to renovate and use after concerted political action. In the late 1960s, Elias Chacour, then a newly ordained priest of the Melkite (Greek Catholic) church, made his first return visit to the ruins of Kafr Bir‘im, from which he, along with his fellow villagers, had been expelled by Israeli military forces at the age of six and from which he had been barred for two decades.6 Bir‘im was for centuries a Christian village in the northern Galilee. Its 1,050 inhabitants were among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who became refugees.7 On November 13, 1948, the Israeli military ordered the villagers to leave Bir‘im, allegedly because of security concerns, promising that they would be allowed to return after a few days. After weeks and then months passed without them being allowed to return, Bir‘imites petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court, which upheld their right to return. The 92 | Mapping Exile and Return military responded on September 17, 1953, by placing explosive charges around the homes and bombing the village from the air while the villagers looked on from a nearby hill. Over the ensuing years, Bir‘im remained off-limits as a closed military area for the expelled villagers, even as the Israeli state turned over portions of the...