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On October 30, we visited the offices of the Mixed Cities Project in Ramle,  only one block from the location of the now famous home in Sandy Tolan’s “The Lemon Tree.” The lemon tree is now just a dead stump in the play area of the children’s center into which the house was converted.

The Lemon Tree Home: Front The Lemon Tree Backyard Sandbox on top of Lemon Tree Stump

The Mixed Cities Project was launched in 2003 by SHATIL, the New Israel Fund’s Empowerment and Training Center for Social Change Organizations in Israel, with support from the European Union. The Project seeks to empower Palestinian residents in Ramle, Lod, Acco, Jaffa and Haifa to fight for equal access to housing rights, spatial, cultural and overall civic equality and to participate and gain representation in public planning at national, regional and local levels.

We met with Buthayna Dabit, the Director of the Project, and we toured the neglected Palestinian neighborhoods of Lod. Palestinians constitute close to 20% of Israel’s population and live mainly in all Palestinian Arab towns and villages. 90,000 Palestinians live in the mixed cities listed above, but live in isolated, separate and neglected neighborhoods that exist under oppressive spatial constraints and in poverty and without the most basic elements of normal infrastructure such as sewage, refuse disposal, surfaced access roads and street lighting. Israeli planning authorities refuse routine building and planning permits that force Palestinian families to make necessary repairs to homes and businesses that often result in demolition orders that are carried out by Israeli police in the same military fashion as the army in the oPt. Many of the Palestinian neighborhoods are “unrecognized” and are ignored when major highways, rail routes and industrial zones are planned.

Municipalities also facilitate the erosion of Palestinian and Arab cultural identity by refusing to post streets and municipal buildings with Arabic language and by ignoring the need to preserve Palestinian cultural sites in what are known as the “old cities” in the mixed city neighborhoods. These “old city” locations were both the original population centers of the formerly exclusive Palestinian villages and the locations where Palestinians from the villages were forcibly “transferred” in 1948 into small neighborhoods that were then surrounded by fences and referred to as “ghettos”. Now, in some neighborhoods, the Israeli planning authorities have built walls, that look very much like the “Apartheid Wall” inside the West Bank, to separate the Palestinian population from the Jewish residents.

For more information about the Project and the details of the ongoing discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel in the mixed cities, please visit www.nif.org.il or contact Ms. Dabit at [email protected].

Inside 1948 Home: Outside 1948 Home Parking Lot Built and 1948 Homes Destroyed

On Wednesday, October 24, several  members of the delegation met with Sulelman Monsour, one of the founders of the Modern Palestinian Arts Movement.  As with all of our meetings in Palestine, every aspect of Palestinian life has been profoundly impacted by the Occupation.  Sulelman is not the Director of the Ramallah Arts Academy in Ramallah, the first post secondary school in Palestine dedicated to exploring creative visual arts.  Sulelman's personal history to generate a free and expressive traditon of visual art is a history of struggle.  He dates the beginning of the Palestinian Arts movement to 1967 when any posting or efforts to display Palestinian art was prohibited.  In 1972, he tried to organize the first Visual Arts Exhibit by creating  a Palestinian Artists Union. He was required to gain a permit to establish the Union, but it was denied by Israeli Military authorities.  Finally, in 1975, he was able to hold the first Palestinian Arts exhibition.  He told us that the Israeli Army showed up at the exhibition taking pictures of the art and writing down the artists names.  THis was followed by vists by the army to the artists homes and continued harassment.  By 1979, the army closed down any continuing art exhibitions and orders that no Palestinian painters could use the colors green, red, white and black together.  Sulelman said that when he received these orders, he simply asked "With these restrictions, how do I paint a watermelon?"

After the first intifada, he told us that Palestinian artists adopted a voluntary code to stop using any Israeli products for their work.  They began using only materials they could find in Palestine which led him to working with mud as his media, while other artists found creative expression in olive wood leather and using colors made from dyes found in native plants.  He joked that while he created many works in mud, the market for sales in this media never materialized.

 Along with other artists, Sulelman lobbied for years to establish an arts program at Bir Zeit University.  He explained that the Israeli Military authorities refused to allow two types of programs at Bir Zeit, one was agriculture, and the other was art.

With funding from Norway and the tireless lobbying and fundraising of Maria Khouri, the Ramallah Arts Academy opened its doors in 2006 with its first class of 10 students.