[Reader-list] Arabs and Israelis, United by Flames.

[pooja shali]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/world/middleeast/14israel.html?hp

EIN HOD, Israel — The flames encircled Ed Sernoff’s house in thisIsraeli
artists’ village <http://www.ein-hod.info/> in the Carmel hills near the
northern port city of Haifa, licking a corner of the stone structure and
cracking a window but otherwise leaving it intact. A small child’s playhouse
survived in the middle of the mostly charred garden, but the chalet-style
home that Mr. Sernoff’s son had built next door was destroyed.

>From the Israeli Arab village of Ayn Hawd on a nearby hilltop, Zakaria Abu
al-Hija looked down at the rooftops of Ein Hod, the village his father and
other relatives fled, or were driven
from,<http://www.nakbaonline.org/Haifa/Ayn-Hawd/> during
the Arab-Israeli war of 1948,
whenIsrael<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/israel/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>
was
established, and to which the family was not allowed to return.

Most of the original Arab residents of what is now Ein Hod became refugees,
landing in refugee camps in the West Bank city of Jenin or in Jordan. Yet
Mr. Abu al-Hija says that those who stayed and became Israeli citizens have
good relations with their Jewish neighbors in the artists’ colony, and that
the deadly wildfire that broke out nearly two weeks ago and raged for four
days did not distinguish between Arab and Jew.

“It hurts all of us that Ein Hod burned,” Mr. Abu al-Hija said, “no matter
who is living there.”

While more than a dozen homes in Ein Hod were badly damaged, Ayn Hawd was
spared the inferno that killed 43
people<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/world/middleeast/07israel.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=israel%20+%20fire&st=cse>
—
prison service cadets, police officers and an Israeli teenager who
volunteered with the fire service — and ravaged one of Israel’s most
beautiful forests. The blaze, fanned by strong but erratic winds, skipped
certain trees, houses and villages, adding another layer of contradiction to
the conflicting narratives in this part of the land.

The inferno, the worst in Israel’s history, was finally brought under
control with the help of an international aerial firefighting force, a
rescue effort also laden with anomalies as Greek planes flew with Turkish
ones, and Israeli firefighters faced the flames alongside crews sent in by
the Palestinian
Authority<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/palestinian_authority/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
including one from Jenin.

Last Tuesday, two days after the fire had been extinguished, it poured rain,
but in many places smoke still curled up, as if from deep under the ground.

Many of the thousands of evacuees returned, if only to inspect the damage.
Jews told how Arab villages had offered them shelter as the fire approached,
while the Arabs in Ayn Hawd said they had received hundreds of phone calls
and offers of help from Jews.

Perched on the Carmel mountain ridge overlooking the Mediterranean, Ein Hod
and Ayn Hawd encapsulate some of the paradoxes of modern Israel.

During the fighting in 1948, the Zionist forces attacked and overran Ayn
Hawd and other villages in the area as part of an operation to prevent Arab
militias from sniping at traffic on the Tel Aviv-Haifa road. By the end of
the hostilities, about 400 Arab villages across the country had been razed.

But the Romanian painter Marcel
Janco<http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0915FA385C0C778DDDA80894DF494D81&scp=2&sq=Bucharest%20Rediscovers%20Houses%20by%20a%20Modernist%20&st=cse>,
a founder of the Dada movement who came
toPalestine<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/palestinians/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
fleeing
the Nazis, begged for the picturesque Ein Hod, then Ayn Hawd, to be saved.
The artists’ colony was established in
1953<http://www.nakbaonline.org/Haifa/Ayn-Hawd/Picture2820.html> and
now has a population of more than 500.

About 700,000 Arabs fled, or were expelled, from their homes during the war
and became refugees, while 150,000 stayed behind. Arab citizens of Israel
make up 20 percent of the population.

Among those who stayed were about 20 members of the Abu al-Hija family,
including Zakaria’s father, Muhammad, who remained on their lands. Prevented
from returning to their village homes, they set up a new Ayn Hawd nearby.

At first they lived in tin shacks. Aisha, Muhammad’s widow, said they also
used to sleep in caves. The first houses went up in the 1950s. Today, about
300 residents, all members of the same extended family, live in about 50
houses.

Yet the Israeli authorities officially recognized Ayn Hawd as a legal
village only in the 1990s, and it was hooked up to the national electric
grid just two and a half years ago.

Mr. Sernoff, a painter, said his children had grown up with children from
Ayn Hawd. “They used to go and sleep over with the shepherds,” he recalled.

Daniel Shefer, a professor of architecture at the Technion, the Israel
Institute of Technology <http://www1.technion.ac.il/en> in Haifa, and the
elected chairman of Ein Hod, a cooperative, said that the residents were
mostly very liberal and made a point of trying to keep up contacts with Ayn
Hawd.

Israeli Jews describe the houses of Ein Hod as “abandoned” Arab properties.
But for Arabs, 1948 was the “nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe,” and they
consider the houses stolen. Mr. Shefer acknowledges a certain discomfort
when every so often an article is written about the liberal artists living
in Arab houses. “But that is life,” he said.

Some historic parts of the village were ruined in the wildfire. The small
stone house that used to be the home of Dov Feigin — a sculptor and one of
the founders of the artists’ colony who died in 2000 — is now condemned. His
grandson and grandson’s family had been living in the house. Outside the
house, a large bronze lion, the work of a neighbor, survived the blaze.

In Ayn Hawd, Mubarak Abu al-Hija, the leader of the village, said he was
most pained by the loss of life. He said he identified with the people of
Ein Hod whose properties were burned, adding, “I will do anything I can to
help.”

Zakaria Abu al-Hija said that he sometimes works in Ein Hod, gardening or
painting houses, and that he also has friends there. The house that had been
his father’s survived the fire, he said, though he claimed that everyone who
has lived in it since has suffered, whether from illness, bankruptcy or
divorce.

Personally, he said, he was not asking to move back to Ein Hod, though he
noted that he could not speak for others in the West Bank or beyond. All he
wants, he said, is for Israel to pave proper roads in Ayn Hawd and to
provide the new village with a health clinic.

But he added, “Nobody knows what will happen from one day to the next, and
nobody forgets their home.”