Present Absentee vs. Absentee present

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.