14-The Ongoing Nakba: searching for the destroyed villages near Ramla and the Ben Gurion airport

Finding the sites of the villages is a major challenge of this project, then verifying that I’m indeed at a destroyed village site. Yesterday I found maybe 3, Miska, al-Tira, and maybe one other— but with few if any confirming signs. I drove thru several places, now kibbutzim, moshavim, or other Jewish communities (the signs often call them “settlements,” but they’re not settlements in the sense of Jewish communities illegally in the West Bank), looking for cacti, old Arab buildings, and other signs of history. I imagined if stopped by someone suspicious of why I’m driving over the same small roads repeatedly, sometimes with the phone camera held up to the windshield or side window, I might say, I’m interested in the architecture, not adding, Arab architecture.

I did spot several old buildings and photographed them with my Canon camera—and iPhone to record GPS coordinates. Two that may have been Arab, one large complex high on a hill that was assuredly Arab, an Arab structure along side the road, and what may have even have been a mosque in downtown Ramla, partially destroyed. The pickings of yesterday were decidedly scant.

One big difference between last year’s village sites and this year’s is habitation. Here along the coast, most of the sites I’ve visited so far are populated, whereas last year’s sites were often parks and other open areas where I could more easily find remnants of past life. (From my journal of July6, 2019)