Al-Birwa

Al-Birwa stood on a rocky hill sloping toward the Acre plain, about ten kilometers east of the city. Its people — 1,460 in the 1945 count, most of them Muslim with a Christian minority — farmed grain and olives, worshipped in a mosque and a church, and sent their sons to a school the Ottomans had built in 1882 and their daughters to one opened in 1942. In March 1941 a son was born there who would carry the village’s name into world literature: Mahmoud Darwish.

The village changed hands twice in the summer of 1948. Israeli forces first took it in June; the Arab Liberation Army briefly retook it; and in mid-July, during Operation Dekel, the Carmeli Brigade occupied it for good. Most of its people fled or were driven toward Lebanon and the neighboring Galilean villages. Darwish’s family crossed into Lebanon and slipped back a year later to find al-Birwa in ruins — a homecoming to absence that he would write about for the rest of his life.

Today three houses, two shrines, and the locked school building are all that stand of the village; the moshav of Ahihud and the kibbutz of Yas’ur sit on its lands. After a legal struggle, former residents won the right to fence and tend the Muslim and Christian cemeteries. Darwish, buried in Ramallah in 2008, kept al-Birwa in his verse as the measure of all lost places.

Sources

• Al-Birwa — Palestine Remembered
• Al-Birwa — Zochrot
• Al-Birwa — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Palestine Open Maps