Not the caves at Kiryat Shmona, not the dance bars of Tel Aviv—Israel’s best kept secret just may be Dahmash. Sandwiched between Lidd and Ramle, nestled alongside the train tracks and a scrap-metal junkyard, and just five minutes from Ben-Gurion International Airport, Dahmash is one of Israel’s hundreds of unrecognized villages.
The village consists of 70 homes built on private Palestinian-owned land, inhabited by about 600 Palestinians. These include refugees from Ashkelon and Be’er Sheba and native Dahmash residents going back several generations.
But the land is zoned as an agricultural area, so its residents are unrecognized, A neighboring plot (a bit further away from the junkyard) recently had its agricultural status changed, enabling the approval of a new real estate development of 900 units intended for Jewish Israelis.
Meanwhile, Dahmash’s legal efforts to be recognized—paying taxes zealously, even drawing up an urban plan themselves—have all been ignored by the authorities. So the village faces demolition by the state.
Kind of remind you of Sheikh Jarrah? Whether evictions or demolitions, it reminded us too. So on Sunday, over a hundred Sheikh Jarrah activists joined a similar number from Dahmash for a successful joint demonstration along the main road, followed by a performance by the hip-hop group Dam.
Sheikh Jarrah activists in solidarity with Dahamash residents
Aside from fearing the destruction of their village, Dahmash residents have no roads, and their Israeli ID cards have no addresses, which leads to unnecessary arrests of villagers by police. They have no mailboxes, no garbage disposal or sewage, and little electricity. As in East Jerusalem, where there is a shortage of over 1,000 classrooms, Dahmash has no local school and the neighboring towns have fought hard not to have Dahmash children enroll.
As far as the authorities are concerned, says Arafat, the head of the Dahmash Popular Committee, “There is no Dahmash, there are no Arabs. The system treats us as if we don’t exist.”
Since April, demolition orders have been handed down for 13 of the homes. On an early morning in 2007, police occupied the entire village, and emptied and demolished four homes.
“It came time for the kids to go to school,” said Arafat. “And I watched them sift through all their belongings on the ground. They were looking for their backpacks.”
More demolitions were scheduled for this month, but Dahmash has managed to push the court hearing back to July 14. Until then, we will continue returning to Dahmash, and villagers will join us this Friday in Sheikh Jarrah.
“There are 1.2 million Arabs [in Israel],” said Arafat. “Are they going to disappear? And 6 million Jews. Are they going to disappear?
“We have to live together. Not as occupiers and occupied: as equals.”
Just as we will not be silent in Sheikh Jarrah, we will not let Dahmash remain hidden behind the legal and physical garbage the state has thrown upon it. From Sheikh Jarrah to Dahmash, we will continue banging the drums of alarm. You will not be able to say you didn’t know.
Sucess!
Interesting how you call land inside Israel “Palestinian-owned” and how you call the Israeli city knows as Lod by its Arabic name “Lidd”, even though the city has a majority Jewish population. Shows to all of us your true intention is not “peace” but the deligitimization of Israel.
Another interesting fact is the extreme divergence of intentions between different groups of you Sheikh Jarrah activists. Some, like Bernard Avishai says he lives in what was an Arab house before 1948 in west Jerusalem. He supports throwing the Jews out of Sheikh Jarrah so that he can say that just as Jews should not reclaim pre-1948 Jewish-owned land, Arabs should not reclaim what was Arab property in what is now post-48 Israeli territory. That way he keeps the Arab house. We might call that “enlightened self-interest”. Howver, this piece goes far beyond that by not recognizing Israeli control of Lod, as I pointed out above. Thus, your organization will fall apart due to its internal contradictions.
You do know that Lod used to be an Arab town, right? That is, until ’48, when the few tens of thousands of Arab inhabitants were expelled after it was occupied by the IDF.
Yaffa, too, used to be an Arab town, as did Haifa, Akka, Beer-Sheba…
Now, to say that there is an”extreme divergence of intentions between different groups of you Sheikh Jarrah activists”, my friend, is not a very accurate statement. The divergence is not of intentions, but of opinions, positions, tactics perhaps… The intentions are not very diverse – everyone who comes to these demonstrations aims to get the evicted families back into their homes, stop all other settlements in East Jerusalem, and end the occupation.
Fantastic? Perhaps. Contradictory? Hardly.
Ido-You “progressives” should at least be consistent. You justify calling the Jewish-majority city of Lod by its old Arabic name of “Lidd” since it once had a majority Arab population. But in the same piece above the writer mentions the “Arab refugees” for the now-Jewish city of Ashqelon. Why does the writer not refer to it by its former Arab name of “Majdal”? Or is it okay for Jews to live there, unlike Sheikh Jarrah.? Where is it “moral “for Jews to live in the country?
And which “occupation” is that you “progressives” want to end-the one from 1967 or the one from 1948? Do you know any Arabs who view the occupation of 67 being “bad” but the one of 1948 being “good” (then why call Lod “Lidd”?)?