Lifta, located on the north-west entrance to Jerusalem, is a unique village which is today the arena of a conflict between the State of Israel and its historical inhabitants. This cultural site is threatened by a political project of villas and businesses.

“I was following my mother through Lifta, my village, holding the bottom of her long dress with one hand, eating with the other the cakes she had just prepared for me.” Re-visiting the town where he was born, Yacoub Odeh recalls his first few years nostalgically. He still smells the wonderful fragrance emanating from the taboun, an oven made of clay and dug in the earth. He evokes the taste of the bread accompanied by labneh, a yogurt cheese, or za’atar, a mixture of spices. His childhood was an heavenly one, just a kilometre away from East Jerusalem, where he lives today.

The only historic, intact Palestinian village

Uninhabited by Palestinians for more than seven decades, Lifta is a village petrified in silence and architectural beauty, but it is especially the last vestige of the time of the Nakba. During the 1940s, almost 3,000 Palestinians lived in the village, continuously inhabited for over 2,000 years, according to the Civic Coalition for Palestinians Rights in Jerusalem, constituting one of the largest Palestinian villages in the Jerusalem region prior to 1948.

In 1948, the hamlet in the hills was completely depopulated and the inhabitants were never allowed to return. Almost all the houses and the two elementary schools on the western side have been demolished asserts the Civic Coalition. Lifta was divided in two by the Green Line in 1949 following the Armistice Agreement.

During the 1967 War, Israel extended its jurisdiction over these territories. But unlike hundreds of other Arab villages that were emptied, bulldozed and then rebuilt after the war, Lifta remained remarkably visible. A site without a parallel in the Eastern Mediterranean. 
 

The old man drops his arms, powerless. He moves with agility in his former village, stopping near familiar places: his ruined childhood home, the mosque, some terraces, remaining evidence of agriculture and olive trees, the natural symbol of Palestine. To prove his longstanding presence in Lifta, he accurately depicts the details that one can guess in the vestiges, gazing at you with a look of utmost intensity, his bushy eyebrows paralleling the fixed concentration of his look.

“The old will die and the young will forget” recites Yacoub Odeh, quoting Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister. “But I didn’t forget and my children neither”, he adds, smiling broadly, cheerful. Since 2010, he often visits Lifta with his family to recover his childhood stolen at the age of 8. Above all, to spread the hope of, one day, returning.

From a unique cultural spot to an elite-class villa quarter?

In sharp contrast, the noise from construction activities surrounding the valley, drowns out his voice. The sound of his memories. In 2011, the Jerusalem Municipality and the Israel Land Authority (ILA) ardently promoted the 6036 construction plan. It is intended to destroy the cultural landscape of Lifta in order to build a luxury residential and commercial neighborhood development consisting of appromitely 200 housing units and a hotel.

The Israeli authorities claim ownership of the land, consider the remaining homes in Lifta as absentee property, in conjunction with the 1950 ‘Absentees’ Property Act,” and therefore, they can sell the intended buildings at a low price to the private sector.

The Save Lifta Coalition has been operating since 2010 to stop plan 6036, denouncing this project as impossible to complete without “leaving a deep mark and injuring the mountain”, whereas “the builders and residents of the village have done exceptionally well for hundreds of years.” It would require roads, parking structures and huge retaining walls on the mountainside.

Lifta, symbol of a conflicting history

On this warm Tuesday morning, in mid-summer, a few ultra-Orthodox men get undressed, interrupting Yacoub Odeh’s telling of his memories, leap into its natural spring. For them, this spring is sacred, identified with the Biblical waters of Nephtoah.

Unlikely allies in his fight to preserve his village, the religious see there the biblical village of Mei Neftoach. After 1948, Israeli authorities spurred the settlement of Jews in Lifta from areas such as Kurdistan or Yemen. In 2017, a dozen families, the last inhabitants of Lifta, were evacuated by the State of Israel - but receiving financial compensation - to widen the roads to the entrance into Jerusalem. It is preferable to be a “Mizrahi from Lifta” than “a Palestinian from Silwan”, a Palestinian neighborhood abutting the Old City of Jerusalem whose buildings have been transferred to the ultra-nationalist Ateret Cohanim organization, to receive a judicial response, emphasizes Nir Hasson, a journalist for Haaretz.

This improbable coalition of Jews and Arabs, with all manner of contradictory objectives, is fighting against this redevelopment plan, inner contradictions included. Yacoub Odeh demands his right to return, whereas others Palestinians intend simply to perpetuate with Lifta the memory of the hardships endured by their people. For the Save Lifta Coalition, the village should be “a model for the search for paths to a shared life of peace, reconciliation and justice” between communities, “in recognition of the mutual pain, as a local and universal heritage site for future generations”.

In 2012, opponents of the plan managed to win a temporary reprieve. Former residents filed a legal petition to preserve the village as a historic site. It succeeded in freezing the plan and obligated the ILA to conduct an antiquities and conservation survey in the village. “Lifta is the first case ever where the refugees succeeded to challenge the Israeli authorities in the court” asserts Zakaria Odeh, the general director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights and Yacoub’s little brother.

Is international recognition the key?

A remarkable victory was achieved in 2015, when Lifta was added to the list of UNESCO’s tentative world heritage sites for bearing “unique testimony of the traditional village life.” For Yacoub Odeh, “the best way to help me is to write to UNESCO to protect my village from its fatal outcome”, to make it pass on to the main list.

According to the archaeologists, the story of Lifta offers a unique insight into Jerusalem life as far back as the First Temple period. Below the ground lie unexcavated archaeological remains of earlier periods of occupation of the site, the earliest one dates from the 13th Century BC. Due to its uniqueness, the World Monuments Fund listed it on its list of threatened sites.

In spite of the survey’s findings, completed in 2016, proponents of the redevelopment plan continue to seek the approval of local authorities to proceed. Whereas the President of the Civic Coalition raises the issue of financial responsibility, “is it still worthy for the private sector to exploit this site considering the now mandatory conservation price?”, Yacoub Odeh highlights another explanation. For him, “Lifta’s empty homes are the first thing that tourists coming from the west to Jerusalem see. Adding, it embodies the memory of destroyed villages”, as an intention to erase the vestiges of Palestinian life within Israel.

Rejected one year later by the Jerusalem city council members, the future of Lifta is left open. “According to the survey, that the authorities accepted to release only after public pressure, it has been proved that many layers have not been discovered yet. New excavations must be done” stresses the lawyer of the Palestinian party. “In the next few months, reveals, a new plan to market the land will be certainly released.”