The depopulated Palestinian village of Mi’ar lies some 17 kilometers east of Acre in the north of Israel. It doesn’t appear on modern maps, and there are no road signs to direct you to all that remains of the village today: two cemeteries, the larger one surrounded by the prickly pears that once marked the village’s border. Everything else — from the local school to the homes of the hundreds of people who lived here prior to July 1948 — has been totally erased from the landscape and from the consciousness of the Israeli public.
The village wasn’t destroyed during the war itself; that occurred over the course of the two subsequent decades, as its Palestinian residents, who had fled in fear of the advancing Zionist forces, attempted several times to return to their homes. Many of those residents were internally displaced, remaining inside the borders of the new state and receiving Israeli citizenship, yet were marked as “present absentees” with no rights to their own property.
Mi’ar is just one of an estimated 600 Palestinian localities that were totally depopulated of their residents during the Nakba (“catastrophe”) of 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their land in what became the State of Israel — and have been forbidden from returning ever since. This year, Mi’ar
— source 972mag.com | Ben Reiff | Jun 23, 2022