The two-storey Hallak house in the smart district of Talbieh in west Jerusalem tells the story of a people who not simply lost their homes but their country with the creation of Israel in 1948.
"There were fruit trees, a nice apple tree. There was a swing where we used to play. There was an open veranda where we used to sit with all flowers around," Wilhelmine Baramki, a 73-year-old Palestinian Christian woman, told The Guardian in an interview published on Tuesday, May 6.
Her family built the house in the early 1930s and named it after her grandfather Hanna Hallak.
It was divided into apartments with the grandparents living downstairs to the right and uncles and two aunts living in the other apartments.
"On Palm Sunday they used to pick all the nice flowers they had to make our palms," remembers Baramki who was 13 in 1948.
She used to live with her parents a few minutes away in another Christian Palestinian district of the city, Baqa, but she has memories of summers spent with her grandmother Farideh and the family in Hallak house.
"We used to love going there. Those memories were something for us."
Then life turned into a nightmare after Jewish gangs drove through Talbieh with a loudspeaker instructing the Palestinians to leave their homes immediately.
The family grabbed a bag and left quickly, seeking refuge in the family's other home in Baqa.
"Every night there were bombings, every day it was almost the same," Baramki recalls bitterly.
"They left to stay with another aunt who lived in the Old City in east Jerusalem. Just for a few days we thought."
The family eventually they took refuge from the fighting into neighboring Lebanon where they stayed for a year and a half.
By the time they got a chance to return the west part of Jerusalem, including both Talbieh and Baqa, was already under the control of the nascent Israeli state.
Ours, Not Yours
The Baramkis were forbidden to enter to their home, district or city.
Israel labeled them "absentee" and gave their houses, like the houses of nearly all the other 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced out in 1948, to newly arrived Jewish immigrants.
The house is now owned by Reuven Tsur, a Hungarian who immigrated with his parents to the newly established state of Israel when he was just 16.
"I only saw the palm trees from the outside and I said: 'This must be a mistake. It couldn't be that beautiful,'" Tsur told The Guardian.
Tsur and his wife bought a three-room apartment that was part of the larger flat in which Baramki's grandparents had been living a decade earlier.
They admit that they didn't think of its former occupants.
The Baramkis, meanwhile, stayed in east Jerusalem until 1967 when the six-day war.
Victorious Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Syrian Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, which it later annexed.
"Now we are present-absent. We are present here to pay taxes and everything, but absent to get back our property. This is the rule that they have," said Wilhelmine.
But that gave them a chance to go back to Talbieh district, now called Hovevei Zion (the Lovers of Zion), and look at their former homes.
"Sure enough after a few weeks comes a very prominent gentleman wearing an English suit and he said: 'OK, my parents lived here and I would like to see the apartment,'" remembers Ilana, Tsur's wife.
The gentleman was Wilhelmine's late uncle, Victor Khoury.
There were more visits from the family in the months and years that followed.
The Tsurs say they would give up their apartment in Hallak house if it truly meant peace would come and if they were given a comparable apartment in return, an offer rarely heard in today's Israel.
On May 15, Palestinians, whether inside the occupied territories or in Diaspora, commemorate the Nakba Day, when Israel was created on the rubble of Palestine.
"It's our land," insists Wilhelmine. "We have a right to come back to our home."
CAIRO - IOL-
