"The house in Ein hud"
Inside out – the past week was rather enlightening, in terms of looking more deeply at different perspectives: the half day we spent in Ein Hudh, a displaced Arab community in sight of the homes they been forced to flee; the time spent in the Artist’s Colony set up in those forbidden homes; the time in Ar’ara, with disjointed stories of brutality under the British mandate; the afternoon in Tiber, an Arab city known more for its drug problems than its millennia of history; the evening spent with off-duty Israeli soldiers and friends, and the nationalist views heard expressed…
If you’ve ever felt so close yet so far from somewhere you wanted to be, spare a thought for the Arabs of Ein Hudh, formerly of Ein Hud, in central Israel. Back in 1948, as Arab and Jewish armies clashed, and up to 750000 Arabs fled their homes for safer refuge (as a result of a perceived fear of violence and poor advice, or real brutality, physical intimidation and threats from the Jewish forces, depending on which history books one reads), some of residents of Ein Hud instead decamped half a mile into the hill behind. Individuals trying to return were periodically evicted by the army, and the Arab former residents saw first Tunisian Jews, then an Artists’ Colony settled there, living in homes to which they still had former keys. The village was only officially recognized in 2005 – the first time a tarmac road and connections to mains water and electricity were put in, after decades of the villagers protesting in the courts efforts to force them to move from the tiny parcel of land they occupied, still overlooking the edges of the (most still standing) homes of their parents and grandparents.
