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In the Village of Nowhere, a Fate Soon Sealed
Erased From the Map
Children from the village of Nuaman must pass through an Israeli checkpoint as they make their way out of the Jerusalem city limits to a school across the valley in the West Bank.
(Photos By Ilan Mizrahi For The Washington Post)
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Darawi was an infant when Israeli soldiers arrived in the weeks after the war with pens and notepads to carry out a census. The troubles of the village can be traced to that day.
At the time the war broke out, the village was located in Jordan. Some of the village men were working construction in Amman, the capital, and were unable to return for years after Israel occupied the land. According to aerial photographs taken in August 1967 by Israel's mapping agency, 13 houses ran along the ridge. While showing that the houses existed, the photos have not resolved the question of who lived in them at the time.
The soldiers registered the people they found there as residents of Um A-Talla, a West Bank village where the head of their clan lived. Israel then renamed the village Mazmuriya for a Roman archaeological site nearby, erasing Nuaman from the map.
Whether a clerical error or deliberate, the West Bank residency classification deprived the families of the right to live, vote in municipal elections and work in Jerusalem that thousands of other Palestinians in the city's annexed neighborhoods received.
Sabin Hadad, a spokeswoman for Israel's Interior Ministry, said that "either they were not there when the census took place or they did not live there continuously, and therefore did not enjoy the right to obtain an Israeli ID."
"The fact that they now live in Israel does not make them automatic Israeli residents, just as living in the United States does not grant you automatic rights of citizenship or residency," Hadad said.
A Settlement Rises
Yusef Darawi's mobile phone rang.
The voice on the other end came in angry shouts -- his boss. Yusef's almond eyes looked into his lap.
"We're under pressure," he said, snapping his phone shut with calloused hands. "We're behind schedule because they won't let us in." He had been denied passage through a checkpoint to work on a construction site.
Yusef was born in the house behind his own 41 years ago, one of 15 children of a father with two wives. Now he was helping build a Jewish settlement planned in the years after Oslo that, according to its development plan, would likely displace his own village one day.
Throughout Israel and the territories, peace seemed a possibility after the Oslo accords. The village of Nuaman had grown to 25 homes by then. Young men like Yusef were starting their own families and building multistory houses next to the squat one-room cottages they were born in.
Then one day, within a year of the Oslo accords, a pair of Israeli building inspectors arrived at the unfinished home of Mahmoud Atiyeh Shawarwa, one of Yusef's many distant cousins. The inspectors ordered the construction, which Shawarwa was doing himself, to stop for lack of building permits granted by the city of Jerusalem.
