This is the saddest village in Israel and probably the most beautiful, too. There’s nothing else like it: a ghost village, many of whose homes are still standing, with a hole in the roof, courtesy of Israel, to prevent them for being reused. The 60 or so homes that remain, of two and sometimes three stories, are planted on the slope of the hill and blend masterfully into the natural landscape. Each floor of the buildings, fashioned from stone and graced with arches, tells the story of a different period and a different style of construction. Lifta is a rare architectural gem, a monument to what was once here in this country, mute testimony to a way of life that was abruptly cut off. A mosque, olive presses and a flour mill, remains of picturesque balconies, a tiled path leading to the spring, which was one the village’s throbbing heart and whose waters are now in use by yeshiva students and “hilltop youth” in the “between the times” vacation that follows Tisha B’Av.
The spaces between the houses are untended, overgrown with sabras of course. A Palestinian family from Zur Baher, a village on Jerusalem’s southeastern outskirts, has come here this week, to the ruins of this village on the city’s northern edge, to pick the fruit of these cactuses for Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice; they use the traditional stick with an empty tin can attached at one end for the task. A day earlier, Jews mourned the Temple, which was also an abattoir, destroyed 2,000 years ago. Those same Jews are forbidding their Palestinian neighbors from mourning the destruction of their home 73 years ago, and chastise them for wallowing in their catastrophe.
In his 1992 book “All that Remains,” the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi tells of 410 homes that existed in Lifta in 1931 and of 2,550 residents in 1945. Yacoub Odeh, who was
— source Jews For Justice For Palestinians | Gideon Levy | 23 Jul 2021