***** New York Times 17 June 2002
A Tale of Two Middle East Villages
By CELESTINE BOHLEN
As a young girl growing up in Israel, Rachel Leah Jones [e-mail: <rachel at addr.com>] found herself drawn to the hillside artist colony Ein Hod [Cf. <http://aai.business.israel.net/ein_hod/>, <http://www.interart.co.il/einhod/>, <http://www.hadassah.org/NEWS/archive/1998/FEB98/ARTS.HTM>] because the landscape reminded her of her early childhood in Northern California. It was only later that Ms. Jones understood why this village in the foothills of Mount Carmel, with its old stone houses and sloping alleys, had such a powerful, almost magical effect on her.
"When I was older, I understood why this place felt as though it had some age, some roots, and that was because it had been a Palestinian village for 700 years," said Ms. Jones, a 31-year-old filmmaker who now lives in Brooklyn. "That was when I realized that the reality there was much more complex."
The documentary film that is Ms. Jones's directorial debut, "500 Dunam on the Moon," is showing Tuesday and Wednesday nights as part of the 13th Annual Human Rights Watch International Film Festival at the Walter Reade Theater, which runs through June 27. The festival began in Britain and is dedicated to protecting the human rights of people around the world.
Ms. Jones's film sifts through the complex reality, made up of the village's two identities. Even the name Ein Hod, which in Hebrew means "spring of glory," is an eery echo of the village's Arabic name, Ayn Hawd [Cf. <http://www.palestineremembered.com/Haifa/Ayn-Hawd/>], which means "spring of the trough."
Ms. Jones soon came to learn that the Palestinian village of Ayn Hawd had not completely disappeared in the war of 1948, when most of its inhabitants fled the approaching Israeli army. Many of its families did leave Israel then, and some of their descendants are interviewed in the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin. But one family, the descendants of a certain Abu Hilmi, stayed on, founding a new Ayn Hawd on a hillside above Ein Hod, which it haunts today like a ghost from the past....
..."The Israel that we Israelis grow up with is only part of the story, and it is a distorted story," Ms. Jones said. "Growing up in Israel, you see ruins everywhere, and you are made to believe these are the relics of ancient history. Now I realize that many of those ruins are only 30 or 40 years old."
Ein Hod was founded in 1953 by Marcel Janco, a Romanian Jewish artist who spotted the charm of the abandoned village and was thus able to save it from destruction. Ein Hod soon became a mecca for artists and eventually for day-trippers who drive an hour north from Tel Aviv for an outing in the Mount Carmel foothills.
And yet many of the Israelis who live in or pass through Ein Hod are oblivious to its Palestinian past: the film shows black-and-white photographs of high-spirited, artsy gatherings at the village cafe bar, which as the Palestinians bitterly recall had once been the mosque. A young Israeli couple proudly shows off their "authentic" house in Ein Hod, which is made of stones, beams and window frames from abandoned Arab houses.
"These houses were treated as found objects, which Israelis could use to create their own art," Ms. Jones said. "But you take one look at the materials and they scream Palestinian."
The Palestinians on the other hand have not forgotten the past, in part because their present existence, whether in Jenin or in the new Ayn Hawd, is so tenuous. The latter, with a population of 250 less than a mile from the original village, has never been recognized by Israel because it is in a so-called green zone, designated as parkland on a map of the country adopted in 1965.
For this reason the village has no electricity or connecting road, and until a terrible fire broke out in October 1998 it was literally hidden from view by the looming cypresses planted as part of Israel's mass forestation project.
"We hate the Jewish cypresses," says Muhammad Abu al-Al-Hayja, grandson of Abu Hilmi, who with his daughter comes up with the image of a parcel of land on the moon, measured by the dunam, a unit of land that dates back to Ottoman times.
Ms. Jones said it was the fire of October 1998 - shown in newsreel clips - that finally compelled her to tell the tale of Ein Hod and the two Ayn Hawds, after the blaze burned away the forest and exposed the new Ayn Hawd and the past that it represents....
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/17/movies/17FEST.html> *****
<http://www.aivf.org/resources/tips/pbssessions/pbspitch5.html> -- Yoshie
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