Basel did not call on us to be resistance fighters. Nor did he call on us to be revolutionaries. Basel told us to be true, that is all. If you are true, you will be revolutionaries and resistance fighters.
We drove to what looked like a residential home, but when we entered I realized it had been transformed into a youth center. Standing behind a desk in the middle of the entrance room was a thin man with thick glasses, somewhere in his mid-twenties. His name was Basel al-Araj. Unlike most interactions between people meeting for the first time, this one involved almost no pleasantries. Somehow, both Basel and I realized that we could skip them, and that we preferred it that way. An engaging story-teller, he was one of those people who are masters of communication, but for whom language felt like a curse β so much knowledge to share, so many stories, but you can only say one word at a time.
Despite this, within what felt like no time at all, and illustrating each point with a document, Basel had shown me that al-Walajah is a microcosm of the Palestinian struggle. On the eve of the Nakba, al-Walajah had a population of around 2, Palestinians living on over 20, fertile acres, dotted with fresh springs throughout the hills on both sides of the valley.
The village itself was on the hilltop to the west of the valley β the Valley of the Giants in the Old Testament β where the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway was built in the s. The sun had begun to set in the middle of our conversation. Basel took me outside and pointed west. In Israel occupied the new site of al-Walajah, which had been a refugee camp in all but name since the Nakba. In , the Israeli Knesset formally annexed Jerusalem, expanding its municipal borders to include parts of the new village but without extending Jerusalem residency rights to any of the inhabitants.
Since then, Israeli police have harassed Walajees in those parts of the village, in some cases arresting them while in their own homes for being in Jerusalem without a permit.
