Ain Hawd/Ain Hawd Al-Jadida

My friend's letter read:

"I am surprised, reading your e-mail and mine to you at the time, that I did not mention that our friends from Kibbutz N... took us to Ain Hawd. M... drove us through that winding, stony, pitted dirt road you saw to reach it.

We went to their "famous" restaurant and were delighted and stuffed by the home cooked dishes that came one after another (no menu), washed down with pitchers of date juice. I left my card (a tradition there) slipped under the glass-topped table, proudly to say "I was here", something I don't normally do.

When we got back to the States, I looked Ein Hud up and read the story.

The whole enterprise including the village itself is an exercise in defiance..., or stubbornness..., or passive resistance. My husband, B... said, after the meal (and not yet knowing the story), "make something extraordinary like this restaurant and the people will come". (This was voted the 2nd best restaurant in Israel!)

It was very crowded - very - with what looked like Israelis. And unless they flew in by helicopter, they all took that winding one-lane dirt road. I kept asking on the way,"why is this not paved?" Of course, now I know.

The strange thing was that our friends had wanted to take us to some special place that was recommended by others, so they had never been there themselves. They pointed to the artists' colony which they wanted to take us to maybe after the meal. Turned out we were too full to go on to do that after all that eating (we could not even fit in dessert, which you had to go downstairs to get).

And the strangest part of all was that we did not get the story from them. They were seemingly oblivious to it. But I was curious once we got home to look it up, and out rolled the whole story. I will send you some pictures I took.

Shortly after, we had a long discussion with the friends who had been with us at their dinner table. I was "the odd man out" in it - almost, not quite. They argued the right wing position even though these are old leftists. I was surprised. M... fought in in five wars starting with the first. He was in the Palmach, a bona fide hero too. But they live in the north, have had a lot of interfacing with Arabs throughout, and used to be peaceful coexistence fans. Now I was hearing very defensive language.... and also positions that I associate with the far right: "we won, they lost".... "they should move to Jordan", etc. But they knew better, or remembered their old selves and did soften somewhat by the end of our discussion.

For me, though, it was hard work arguing and disappointing to say the least, that these old leftists had been so turned off and become so embittered over the years. With regard to Gaza, their more open and embracing daughter did say this after listening: "Sometimes I think that the next generation is going to ask us, "how did we let this happen?"". That stuck with me and I guess I felt a little better. Somewhere in there Israelis know.... if they can ever get past their outsized fears."

My friend sent several photos of Ayn Hud houses, many of them apparently under construction.

You will notice that in contrast to their former houses that are now part of the artists colony of Ein Hod, these are all in concrete.

The village of Ein Hud is planned and developed by one person. Mohammed Abu al Hayja worked for more than 20 years at the Israeli National Development and Planning Committee as an engineer. At the same time, he built and developed the village of Ein Hud, where his family settled during the Naqba, and which was until recently entirely illegal.

Mohammed Abu Abu al Hayja'’s work for Ein Hud essentially took place in three different steps. The first phase entailed getting recognition from the government and engaging the planning procedures of the state. The second phase consisted of giving a public face to the village in the form of a restaurant, which also brings work. The third phase, community planning with the help of an NGO, consists of developing the village further for tourism, while using it also as a platform for education about the plight of the Palestinians in Israel. During all this time, from 1948 till now, Abu al Hayja family have had to invent ways of surviving in an inhospitable environment, leading to a series of inventions for an architectural resistance.

Architectural survival techniques

The State of Israel rarely initiate building permits to the Palestinians population (not just in the Occupied Territories). The enforcement of the building law by the authorities appears through immediate demolition of construction-sites or the issuing of a demolition order to sites, which are already in a progressive building state.

In case where a building has already walls or in case it’s inhabited, the owner of the building will receive a demolition order and the building will not be demolished immediately.

This governmental attitude made the Palestinian into pragmatic but yet creative builders.

There are few rules that are applied to most of the building in the village.

1. Pop-up buildings– In order to prevent the disturbances of the building authority’s inspectors the act of building took place just during weekends and Jewish holidays. That made the village in those periods very busy trying to build the foundation secretly and then using the holidays to complete the walls.

2. Offset method- a growing family that needed a bigger space could not just apply for a building permit and extend its house but needed to make the changes again secretly.

In a reality where every two weeks an aerial photo is being taken in order to prevent illegal building, the planners had to find a way to tackle the problem.

The way it was done in Ein Hud was by offsetting the outline of the building by few meters, these way from the sky it looks the same.

3. No Balconies– When walls need to be constructed first and as fast as possible balconies are out of option.

4. Scenography- One of the ways to “earn” a demolition order and not to you’re your house demolished immediately is to prepare the scene ‘Living under construction’. Most of the houses, which are in construction works, has already the elementary furniture; Before installing the windows frame you need to have already a kitchen, a toilet and a living room.

Please continue reading this article here.

A Yediot Aharonot review (in Hebrew) of the restaurant Al Bayt fi Ayn Hoodh-HaBayit beEin Hud indicates that it opened in spring 2004 before it was hooked up to electricity. It doesn't comment on this but mentions there's no air conditioning but that it's unnecessary, even in July, because the air in the village is so fresh and cool.

Another review in Hebrew on a site for gourmets says the cooking is on gas, the (unlit) road is almost impassable at times and cautions its readers to take care but to make the effort anyway to let the delicious smell guide you down the only road through town to Al Bayt because the food is great.

And finally, Albeet's own website - work your way through it, it's mostly in Hebrew but you can see the menu (although at the table they don't give you a menu) in both Hebrew and Arabic.

A film was made about Ayn Hud before the village was fully recognized called 500 Dunam on the Moon - The story of Three Villages in One, Ain Hawd, Ein Hod and Ain Hawd Al-Jadida. (Maybe its release speeded up its partial connection to the electricity grid, which at last occurred in 2005.)

The synopsis:

A famous short story, "Facing the Forests," written by Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua in 1964, tells of a Palestinian man with a severed tongue and his young daughter whose job it is to help keep the forest from catching fire. As it turns out, the forest was planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in order to cover the ruins of the old man's village, which was destroyed by the Israelis in 1948. At the end of the story, after being incited to do so by an Israeli fire scout, the Palestinian sets the forest ablaze himself.

In 1948 Israeli forces expelled between 650-950 Palestinians from Ayn Hawd, a 700 year old Moslem village in the Southern Carmel hills. [2] Most of Ayn Hawd's inhabitants ended up in refugee camps on the West and East Banks of the Jordan, while some 150 villagers managed to remain inside the borders of Israel after the war and became what are known in Israel as "Present Absentees." [3]

In 1953, while some 418 Palestinian villages depopulated by Israeli forces during the war were being razed to the ground, the village of Ayn Hawd was designated for preservation as an artist's colony. Under the vision of Marcel Janco, a Romanian Jewish refugee who was one of the founders of the Dada movement, Ayn Hawd was repopulated with Israel's finest painters, sculptors, and potters. In 1954 the name of the village was officially changed to "Ein Hod" which in Hebrew means "The Spring of Glory" (the Arabic "Ayn Hawd" means "Spring of the Trough"). Today, Ein Hod is the site of a world renowned sculpture biennale, as well as home to numerous galleries, exhibits, festivals, and concerts. It has served as a mecca of Israeli cultural production. The village mosque was transformed into a restaurant/bar modeled after the Cafe Voltaire in Zurich, where Dada was first conceived.

Meanwhile, in the hills above Ein Hod, Some of Ayn Hawd's Present Absentees, headed by Muhammad Mahmoud 'Abd al-Ghani Abu al-Hayja (also known as "Abu Hilmi"), settled in a hamlet on what used to be their pastures, and today is a Jewish National Fund forest (planted in 1964) and administered by the Carmel National Park Authority (established in 1973). Ayn Hawd al-Jadida: "the New Ayn Hawd," is an unrecognized village according to Israeli law, and all of its 35 houses are considered illegal, and are slated for demolition. As an unrecognized village, they receive no governmental services such as water, electricity, sewage, a health clinic, an access road, or a public school. Despite the fact that Ayn Hawd al-Jadida first received official recognition from the Israeli Ministry of Interior in 1994, nothing has changed in the make-shift village over the past eight years. The residents measure the passing of time according to the various landmark events which have shaped their consciousness, if not their lived reality: "the first demolition order," "the second demolition order," "the first recognition," "the second recognition," etc..

For years, these refugees worked as gardeners, construction workers, and "handymen" in their former village. [4] The Dada movement, a guiding force for Ein Hod's artists, called for the negation of bourgeois linguistic and pictorial conventions, and for a return to a generalized, indigenous, primitive art, with an emphasis on paradox in the form of nihilistic satire. To these artists, Ayn Hawd is a found object. Its glory: the ruins-aesthetic (in stark contrast with the perceived artificiality of modern Israeli architecture), and its inhabitants have gone to great length to preserve this "distressed" look, thanks, in part, to the services and know-how of the village's original owners.

In October 1998 a forest fire raged through the Carmel hills, damaging several Jewish settlements, including Nir Etzion and Ein Hod. The fire also licked at the houses of Ayn Hawd al-Jadida, which would have burned to the ground were it not for the residents' efforts to stave off the fire with their hands. The provisional water supply to the village from Nir Etzion was cut off, and all Israeli fire fighting efforts concentrated on evacuating the Jewish residents and extinguishing their settlements. Ayn Hawd al-Jadida, the unrecognized village nestled in the heart of the forest planted by the JNF, was all but forgotten. Israeli TV was flooded with broadcasts of Ein Hod artists lamenting the loss of their homes overnight, while Israeli news media incited public hysteria by insinuating that the fire was the result of arson on the part of "hostile elements." Subsequently, and despite the police's own assertions that there was really no evidence to substantiate such claims, a resident of Ayn Hawd al-Jadida was arrested for setting the forest ablaze.

Inspired by "Facing the Forests," 500 DUNAM on the M00N inverts Yehoshua's story (no more severed tongue) to document the art of dispossession and the creativity of the dispossessed.

There's lots of information on the site and a tiny (literally) clip here. The movie's around 45 mins. long.

With this elegiac review of the movie on Facebook which was originally published in the Journal of Palestine Studies, we close another illustration of how visitors and citizens of Israel can so easily miss the moving recent history of places they visit if they are not alert. For Israel has not yet come to terms with this history.

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Ein Hod/Ayn Hud

An internet friend wrote me a long, newsy e-mail last spring, much of it about a recent trip to Israel, during which she had not had time to get in touch with me. Due circumstances beyond my control I wasn't able to reply at the time, months went by and suddenly, summer was almost over. Acute feelings of guilt together with the imminence of Jewish New Year finally forced me to sit down and write. I commented on her observations and anecdotes and then added some of my own. One of them was about the Ein Hod artist colony I'd visited during the summer.

The Ein Hod artist colony used to be a must on the tourist map in the years prior to 1967, which is when the name registered with me. The whole concept of artist colonies (pity they massacred Beethoven and then disposed of him "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", but this is art) was something I was unfamiliar with until I came to live in Israel. None of the famous artists I'd ever read about had lived in anything more colony-like than the Bateau Lavoir. Ein Hod, plus a Druze village called Daliyat el Karmil, used to appear in every tourist brochure's Haifa/Carmel section and because I was in the area with visitors a few weeks ago I suggested we take a look at both. I knew from those old brochure pictures that Ein Hod must be very pretty.

As you can see, it was.

Loosely planted gardens cascaded down the mountain: pomegranate, fig, olive and grape in wild profusion amongst the overgrown bougainvillea and other flowery bushes that remain unnamed here due to my ignorance. Stone steps led out from the gardens surrounding the houses - some ramshackle, some frankly sumptuous, replete with swimming pool and heart-stopping view - onto a tarred road that wound through the village. Very quaint and artist colonish, you could hear the birds singing undisturbed by the occasional passage of a four-wheel drive and the buzz of a metal saw from nearby sculpture studios. From an esplanade donated by a Duesseldorf friendship committee, we sat on a convenient bench near a memorial to someone who had lost his life there and admired a truly splendid view of the valley plunging down before us and spreading out towards the distant hills. The sea wasn't that far away, but the hot air clung to the heights and betrayed not a hint of breeze. I don't remember much art but nothing could have competed with that scenery anyway. The whole bespoke history but there was nothing that told it except perhaps the unpicked fruit, some of which already lay decomposing on the ground, those gardens and, of course, the windows and architectural style of many of those houses.

Leaving after coffee in one of the terraced gardens, we exited a gate we had somehow omitted to take on entering and continued on the road east, hoping to find an even smaller road that would take us to our next port of call, Daliyat El Karmil.

Just a little further along the wooded road, a sign on the right caught my eye that read Ain Hawd. I found it strange because:

1. the English in the sign that had guided us there had read Ein Hod and the Arabic on that one (can never resist trying my hand deciphering Arabic when I catch sight of it - a nice next step would be understanding what I'm reading) had been a transliteration of the Hebrew name;
2. the Arabic on this one - عين حوض - transliterates into English roughly as 'Ain Hoodh (I can't recall what the Hebrew for it was) while the English, as I said, read Ain Hawd. Odd.

We decided to investigate. We passed a large yard with cows and a cowshed in it and a sign reading Nir Etzion, after which the road curved behind Ein Hod to reveal a stunning view of the hills beyond. Suddenly, the broad tarred road narrowed and ended, becoming a neat white gravel one that was nevertheless little more than a footpath. The car being a rented one, not knowing whether the gravel would degrade further into potholed caked mud and spying no hint of a village before the next bend, we abandoned the project and reluctantly about-turned in the direction of the official road east a little further to our north.

I googled Ein Hod and Ayn Hawd at the end of the trip (the story of my life, this going into situations without preparing them and then learning about them later further to the evidence of my own eyes) to see what I could find. Since this is not meant to be a history lesson so much as an état de lieu, Wikipedia will suffice to convey the idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ein_Hod

Essentially, the original village was one of a group of villages named after Emir Hussam Eddin Abulhija, an Iraqi-born military commander who fought the Crusaders under Saladin. In the process of Israel's achievement of statehood, most of its 700-900 inhabitants "resettled in the West Bank", many in Jenin refugee camp. A group of 35 inhabitants stayed put, or almost stayed put, by taking refuge in the wadi behind the village and not budging. They battled it through the courts and were "recognized" after 44 years of stubborn tenacity during those who tried to dislodge them could find no loophole in Israeli law that would sanction it. However, it's only four years ago since this "recognition" finally got them hooked up to the national electricity grid.

Here's a clip unfortunately only in Hebrew, that shows the village before it was recognized and the adjacent Jewish moshav of Nir Etzion (ex-Etzion bloc)

Mohammed Abu el Hija, the unofficial mayor, of the then as yet unrecognized Ayn Hawd and a Nir Etzion representative are interviewed in the aftermath of the October 2000 riots.

The man from Nir Etzion explains that Ayn Hawd's water comes from their water tower. His moshav arranged it to help the villagers. The mayor of Ayn Hawd explains that it's a gift that could be withdrawn at any time, in which case they would have no running water. It is the state that should supply it. An Ayn Hawd youngster says that in former days only 20% of Jews were racist, now he reckons it's 80%. In Nir Etzion they say that there was no trouble from the villagers at all during the October riots; they don't mind the sound of the calls to prayer from the nearby minaret and "hope it won't evolve into anything unpleasant". The Ayn Hawd youngster says that they always invite people they know in Nir Etzion to their weddings, but they have never been invited to a wedding in Nir Etzion.

Within hours of sending my lengthy, apologetic Rosh Hashana greeting and the tale you've read thus far, came a fascinating reply. See next entry.