From: Ali Abunimah
To: wesun@npr.org
Subject: A House in Ramleh

September 9, 2001

Dear NPR News,

Thank you for Linda Gradstein's report on Weekend Edition Sunday today about efforts by Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel to continue to have human relationships with each other despite the ongoing conflict caused by Israel's occupation and colonization of Palestinian land. The report was excellent, and generally fair, and captured the texture of life from a different angle than the overwhelming death and suffering we are sadly used to, but there were two significant points of error and omission.

The center of Gradstein's lengthy report was the story of a house in the former Palestinian city of Ramleh, built and owned by the Khairi family in the 1930s, but occupied after the creation of Israel by a Jewish woman named Dalia. After the 1967 war, the son of the house's owner came to Ramleh and knocked on the door. Dalia let him in, beginning a relationship that lasts to this day. (This story was the subject of an incredibly moving and award winning NPR documentary entitled "The Lemon Tree" several years ago. You can listen to it at http://freshair.npr.org/dayFA.cfm?todayDate=05%2F07%2F1999)

Dalia, almost uniquely among Israelis wanted to give the house back to its true owners, but could not, because as Gradstein put it "Israeli law bans non-Israelis from owning property in Israel." This is in fact false. Israeli law allows non-citizens from anywhere in the world to buy and own property in Israel provided they are Jews. If Linda surfs over to the Jerusalem Post website, for instance, she will see numerous ads from real estate development companies designed specifically to entice wealthy Americans to buy holiday apartments or retirement homes in Israel or occupied Jerusalem.

More accurately, Israeli law bans non-Jews from owning certain kinds of property (even their own as in the case of the Khairi house), even if they are citizens of Israel. This racist policy is carried out through the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet Le'Yisrael), a quasi-state agency that "owns" more than 90% of the real estate in Israel "in perpetual trust for the Jewish People" all over the world. By the statutes of the World Zionist Organization, under which the JNF operates, this land, much of it expropriated from Palestinians, can be transferred only to Jews who may benefit from it whatever their citizenship. It is for this reason that Dalia was unable to return the house to the Khairi family, and it serves instead, with the agreement of that family, as a pre-school for Palestinian children in Ramleh.

Gradstein's formulation misleadingly implies that any citizen of Israel would enjoy the same rights to own property, while any non-citizen would be denied this right. Your listeners need to know that this is manifestly not the case and it is ethnicity and not citizenship which determines this, like so many other rights in Israel's "democracy."

Secondly, in describing the departure of the Khairi family member who built the house, Gradstein said that "he became a refugee during the war that followed Israel's creation." This statement is but the barest euphemism for what actually happened.

If ever there were a case where Gradstein could and should have provided more contextual information, it was here (her report was more than 8 minutes long). It was at Ramleh, and the neighboring town of Lydda in July 1948 that one of the most notorious incidents of ethnic cleansing occurred in Israel's so-called "War of Independence." This was detailed in the memoirs of the officer who ordered the expulsion of the two towns' 50,000 residents (as well as refugees who had already taken shelter in them), future Israeli prime minister Lt. Colonel Yitzhak Rabin, but removed by Israeli military censors. The account was published instead in The New York Times on October 23, 1979. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe summarizes the events like this: "While for the Arab states the surrender of the two towns meant some loss of prestige, for the Palestinians it spelt tragedy. Almost the entire population from both the towns was expelled by the Israeli forces. Those who tried to stay on left after Israeli soldiers massacred about 250 people." Pappe concludes that "Lydda and Ramleh constituted the first serious Israeli attempt to occupy areas allotted to the Arab state by evicting the resident Palestinian population." ("The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951." New York, Tauris: 1994, p.154)

Palestinians are used to having their history euphemized, distorted or erased. That is a fundamental part of the Palestinian experience. Part of the struggle for liberation is reclaiming it and ensuring that it is reported accurately.

Sincerely,

Ali Abunimah
http://www.abunimah.org