Lifta was a Palestinian village located on what is today a small valley near the entrance of Jerusalem. Save Lifta is an organization at the center of a struggle between people who want to preserve the historic village, and a plan for the creation of a new luxury neighborhood amongst the existing village homes.

Our tour in March was led by representatives of Save Lifta, including former residents of the village. Tour participants heard personal stories about growing up in the village, expulsion, and details of the current struggle to preserve this cultural heritage site.

Depopulated homes on a hillside in Lifta. Credit: Yehudit Alyaoff

 

Lifta is located at the western entrance to Jerusalem

 

An essay by Clinic researcher Joanna Kramer on her experience at the Lifta tour: 

 

Saving Lifta: A Place and Memory

Friday's tour of Lifta took participants through the remaining stone structures that still dot the hilly landscape, yet although we entered the physical space of homes and a mosque, the morning was more a journey through memory. Guide Yakub Udah was born in Lifta, fleeing with his family to the area around Abu Ghosh in 1948. For him, this was not simply an anthropological exploration of the village’s history; here was his mother’s home, here the gardens his family tended, there the house of a close family friend. For Yakub, the village was still very much alive, despite the growing weeds and municipal plans to develop the area.

Guide Yakub Udah. Credit Joanna Kramer

A theme of the morning developed around the idea of mas’ah, an Arabic word described to us as the concept of collective ownership. As we passed a spring filled with laughing Israeli teens enjoying a Friday morning dip into its waters, Yakub shared that the village residents--known as Liftawis--would once gather around this same body of water to discuss matters of communal importance. This “town square” approach trickled into property structures; a tour participant, a student conducting his final project on Lifta for his architecture degree at Bezalel Academy, added that ownership of village land fell into both personal and collective structures. Today, associations of former Lifta residents all over the world, from Jerusalem to the United States, preserve the strong communal ties of the displaced residents.

A spring in Lifta. Credit Joanna Kramer

As we crossed in and out of more homes--monuments preserving a history that many, from government officials to real estate developers, would rather ignore--I reflected on the difficulty of exactly that task: preservation of a memory. It is a paradoxical feat, one that attempts to capture the multiplicity of a vibrant village into a static scene of time-worn stones. And of course, it is a painful one, a task with which Liftawis and their supporters would have preferred to never have been confronted. Yet, with Save Lifta’s campaign underway, and a stated goal of the movement to create “an open-air museum of the built and natural Arab heritage” where the village once stood, the question is at hand.

There were many points over the course of the tour during which participants were presented with an overly simplistic narrative of the village’s history. It was a paradise-to-hopelessness sequence, with 1948 serving as the moment of rupture. While this arc clearly holds emotional resonance with the experience of a Liftwai, as well as generates a metaphorical spring of sorts around which ex-villagers can still continue to gather and assert their collective identity, its generality robs the village of the fullness of its history. To claim that pre-1948, the village was all good, and only good, undoubtedly leaves out the neighbor disputes and political governance drama and interpersonal scandals that are the stuff of communal life, and are as equally integral to understanding the village’s history and development.

Orginial homes peak out of a green hillside. Credit Joanna Kramer

Save Lifta is presented with the powerful and delicate task of imagining how to preserve memories without calcifying them. It is a process of learning that will require extensive conversation between former residents and architects, as they create plans for a site that honors Lifta’s history by presenting the full range of memories witnessed by the stones first laid thousands of years ago, and the lessons that emanate from the fact that they still stand today in 2018.