Ramiya: Under threat of erasure in the Galilee

“There used to be a water well here but they’ve destroyed it too”. 49-year-old construction worker Salah Swaid, or Abu Nazih as many refer to him, has been organizing much of the legal and popular struggle initiatives against the displacement of the unrecognized Palestinian-Bedouin village Ramiya by the ever expanding Jewish city of Karmiel.

“We have documents pertaining all of this territory as belonging to Ramiya in the Tabu [Ed: Israeli Land Registry which takes its name from the Ottoman Land Registry]”, he said. Indeed Ramiya is registered in both Ottoman and Israeli records as a village with a name and defined borders.

Karmiel, the city which now surrounds it, was founded in 1964 as part of David Ben-Gurion’s plan to ‘Judaize the Galilee’. Karmiel was first constructed as a settlement, to use the term from its own founding charter, on largely agricultural lands confiscated by the State of Israel from the Palestinian villages of Ba’ne, Deir Al Assad, Nahef, and Majd Al Krum for “Public Purposes”.

Abu Nazih told me: “they’ve confiscated the lands for public purposes even though there were already people living on these lands because they don’t recognize the Arabs as part of that ‘public’ – they only recognize the Jews”.

The confiscation of land for ‘Public Purposes’ has been used repeatedly inside what is sometimes internationally referred to as “Israel proper” to drive the native Palestinian population off of their lands in order to replace it with an immigrant-settler Jewish population.

The story of Ramiya is a story of continual land theft and home demolition. No other town’s or village’s battle with land confiscation by the settlement of Karmiel is as extreme as Ramiya’s. Karmiel, along with Natzeret Illit otherwise known as “Upper Nazareth” are the flagship projects of the State of Israel’s “Judaization of the Galilee” plan.

The struggle of Ramiya is much more comparable to that of other unrecognized Palestinian villages in the Naqab, the Jordan Valley and South Hebron Hills than to any other struggle against Israeli land confiscation of neighbouring Palestinian towns and villages in the Galilee.

Ramiya was home to a population of 1000, with its territory stretching 98 acres, but today, a mere 160 persons remain on land stretching only 10 acres. The rest was confiscated during the biggest land-grab in Israel’s history since 1948, which sparked the protests on 30 March 1976 now remembered as Land Day. Even the area on which 45 families remain to this day is considered Jewish National Fund property according to Israeli law, with the village not recognized and still without connection to the electricity or water grids.

Abu Nazih: “Today we get water from a dirty pipe, half of the people are sick because of this faulty pipe it’s not up to any legal standard but what can you do, the people have to drink”

“My daughter asks me ‘the homes over there (pointing to their Jewish neighbours blasting stereos and the noise of televisions out of their homes) are watching TV – why don’t we have the TV on? Their place is all lit up – why don’t we have light like them?’Wwhat can I tell her?” interjects Abu Nazih’s friend and Ramiya dweller Kheir Swaid.

Abu Nazih: “Electricity we get with the generators, but a man works two full days to be able to buy the diesel which will light up his house for a few hours.” A few months ago city inspectors arrived in Ramiya with a warning not to use the generators after 11pm, as some of their Jewish neighbours in the surrounding neighbourhood of Rabin had been complaining about the noise.

Ramiya’s struggle of survival came to the fore in mid-2013. Israel’s Special Patrol Unit otherwise, known as “Yasam”, broke into the village early in the morning, attacking residents and demolishing several steel shacks which most of Ramiya’s residents live in, threatening to crack more skulls if the villagers wouldn’t evacuate the entirety of Ramiya and promised return “visits”. They left the village in ruins, but not before making a sweep of arrests which included an elderly woman trying to protect her home.

The struggle for Ramiya restarted that very day, for the first time in 20 years. Such shenanigans from Karmiel’s municipality had not been seen here in over 20 years, when construction began in 1991 on the Jewish-only neighbourhood of Rabin over the collective head of every Ramiya resident, demolishing the greatest bulk of homes, tents and steel shacks the villagers call homes.

We know that right is on our side here and we wouldn’t forgo our rights even though the courts are crooked. For us there’s no justice in the courts. These courthouses are not courthouses they are racism they are houses of racism they give backing to racism in Israel. It’s not justice, it’s not democracy.

2013 was a tumultuous year for Karmiel as it was the year of the municipal elections where incumbent mayor Adi Eldar, who had remained unseated in the mayoral office for the past 24 years, faced off against an ideologically and factionally-splintered opposition for another seemingly easy road to victory. The majority of the opposition to the incumbent mayor, who became allied to Avigdor Lieberman’s rightist party Yisrael Beiteinu after the last municipal election, came largely from the right.

I asked Abu Nazih if whether throughout the years there have been attempts to address the Jewish public of Karmiel.

Of course, we’ve addressed the Jewish public from the very beginning. The public in Karmiel is a rightist public, a public not interested in these matters. The crisis in Ramiya doesn’t matter to them. We distributed flyers in Hebrew, going door to door. I’ve personally disseminated over 10,000 flyers for 10,000 homes in Karmiel. But what can I do with a population that is mostly very right-wing, with a right-wing mayor. He’s not content only with living on the lands of Ramiya, his house is 50 meters from here on my land. It’s a cancer he implanted in this place.

The first order of business was organizing a big demo to announce the return of the popular struggle in Ramiya for the first time since 1995. The plans came to head with the first national rally for Ramiya in more than a decade last December 19. The rally took place in the centre of Ramiya village, surrounded by the Israeli neighbourhood of Rabin, attended by representatives from all Palestinian political parties and NGOs, as well as grassroots Palestinian activists and mayors of Palestinian towns in 48. Following the day of the rally, a protest sit-in tent was opened for the public.

Abu Nazih: “The purpose of the tent is for activity and its duty is that of a guard post. There should always be people in the tent so that if they [the municipality] send the evacuation orders they know there will be people here – that that if they come to evacuate us then there’s going to be a war.”

They keep calling us to say that if we won’t sign the evacuation orders they would evacuate us anyway but the people they have nothing to lose anymore. I don’t deserve this and I won’t go to the courthouse and they can do whatever they want. If they want to come and demolish then come and demolish. Do they want to come and kill us? Come and kill us, end of story. A person who’s lost everything – what more does he have to lose? I don’t want to speak harsher words. The desperation has reached such heights it’s indescribable. The people won’t give up. I think that the JNF is in trouble.

Michael Treiger is a political activist and blogger from the Galilee region of Palestine

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.