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Every time I start
writing about this subject, I feel it is meaningless compared to the life threatening issues around
us such as the refugees, the rampage of the Israelis settlers, home
demolitions, the burning of the Dawabsheh family as well as the fragmentation of the Arab world to an
extent that they are unable to protect the daily invasion of Al-Aqsa mosque,
let alone liberate Palestine. Yet the issue of depriving Palestinian Jerusalemites
from their right to residency is also very crucial. According to OCHA, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 14,000 Palestinians
lost their right to residency between 1967-2010.
For the last eleven
years, and ever since my husband Yousef passed away, I continued to receive an
invitation in his name from the Israeli Jerusalem Municipality inviting him to
Jerusalem day. Not that he ever responded or attended when he was alive,
but the persistence of this invitation eventually got to me and I decided that
my reflection was going to be about this issue.
I am calling it an
issue, because ever since my husband passed away, we asked the municipality to
name the street that leads up from the main road to our house in Beit Hanina in
his name, because he had developed the whole area in the early sixties before
the 1967 war. Neither our street nor any in the area had names at the
time. The response of the municipality to our request was that a
few years should pass by before it names a street after a deceased person.
So we kept pursuing the issue but to no avail. Two years ago
when the invitation from the municipality arrived, I wrote back saying that my
husband passed away, and requested his name to be removed from their
list. At the same time I seized the opportunity to remind them of our
request to name the street after him.
I was not surprised
not to get any response, but I certainly was surprised when we woke up one
morning to the sound of drilling
in our wall to find out that the name and number of our street is now Ramallah
Road, Zqaq (alley 1) and all the houses were numbered accordingly. The
whole neighborhood cooperated in signing a petition to the municipality to request
naming the street after Yousef, but we never received a response.
Yet despite all
this communication, the invitation
from the municipality came once again this year. So I could
not help but think of the many devious ways by which the Israeli Authority
deprives Palestinian Jerusalemites from their right to residency, while a
person who no more exists is still on the municipality list.
