500 DUNAM ON THE MOON [1]

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.

Footnotes

1. A land measurement unit. dunam = 1,000 meter square.   4 dunam = aprox. 1 acre

2. For further reading see: The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village by Susan Slyomovics, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

3. Present Absentees are those Palestinians whose property ( e.g. villages) was confiscated under the Absentee Property Law (1950), but who were found to be present (within the borders of the new state) in the population census, and were thus registered as citizens of the state according to the Israeli Nationality Law (1952).

4. The residents of Ayn Hawd al-Jadida have also worked as day laborers in their former fields expropriated by the neighboring Kibbutz Nir Etzion which was established on Ayn Hawd 's agricultural lands.