The Christmas market in Bir’im was already underway when I arrived on a Saturday earlier this month. Music drifted through the ruins, children ran between stone walls, and families greeted one another as if this were an ordinary village square preparing for a holiday — not the remains of a place whose people were expelled more than seven decades ago.
At the entrance to the depopulated village, atop of which Israel operates the “Baram National Park,” people waved at me, some stepping forward for a hug. For a moment, they seemed certain I was someone they knew, a member of the community returning after a long absence.
After I introduced myself as a journalist, a flicker of disappointment crossed a few faces. But the warmth remained. I was still welcomed as if I belonged. That sense of recognition reflects how Bir’im continues to exist as a living community, if not a residential village.
Bir’im is a small Palestinian Christian village in the Upper Galilee, just south of the Lebanese border. Its residents were expelled by Israeli forces on Nov. 13, 1948, and despite many being granted Israeli citizenship, they have never been allowed to return. But unlike most of the 500 Palestinian villages depopulated during the 1948 Nakba, whose communities have fragmented or disappeared over the decades, Bir’im and the nearby village of Iqrit stand apart. They were the only two whose residents pursued their right of return through the Israeli courts, a legal struggle that helped preserve a functioning collective.
Today, Bir’im’s former residents and their descendants are scattered across Israel — mainly concentrated in Jish, the closest village to Bir’im, and Haifa — with others exiled to Lebanon. For decades, they have returned to the village regularly, organizing summer camps, memorial gatherings, and religious celebrations to keep Bir’im present in their collective memory, even without the right to live there.
This year’s Christmas market was the first large communal gathering in the village since the war on Gaza began, after two years in which residents chose not to celebrate. People came not only to mark the holiday but to see one another again — to sit, talk, laugh, and exchange stories.
Booths sold handmade items bearing symbols of Palestine and Gaza, while a face-painting station drew children toward the center of the square. Chairs were also provided so elderly residents could stay comfortably for hours. The organizers were deliberate: they wanted the space to feel accessible and familiar, a place where all generations could linger with ease.
Open to the public, the market drew visitors from across the country. Many came from nearby Palestinian towns, while others traveled longer distances to attend. The event also attracted Jewish-Israeli visitors, curious to take part in the festivities. Not everyone who came, however, did so in good faith.
A far-right Israeli Telegram channel published an inciting post about the market, sharing a video of a man sarcastically questioning whether one of the activities was “appropriate for children.” He was referring to a coloring page that depicted an Israeli soldier telling a Palestinian father to leave his home, as a young girl cries beside them.
According to the organizers of the market, the illustration was intentional. It was designed as an educational tool, meant to convey in the simplest terms the story of Bir’im and Iqrit, whose children grew up hearing about displacement even before they learned to read.
The legal battle to return
Bir’im was one of the last villages to be depopulated in 1948, but unlike most others, when Israeli forces entered the village, they issued residents Israeli identity cards. “They told them, ‘You are now citizens of the newborn country Israel,’” explained Riyad Ghantous, a second-generation descendant of Bir’im’s displaced residents.
Two weeks later, Ghantous said, four soldiers arrived and ordered the residents to leave temporarily, citing security concerns along the Lebanese border. The villagers were told they would be allowed to come back within two weeks. But that order never came, and those who tried to return in the subsequent weeks were arrested. According to Ghantous, “In at least one documented attempt to return, residents were caught and expelled to the Jenin area, outside the country’s borders.”
What had been presented as a temporary evacuation became permanent displacement, setting Bir’im on a legal path that would distinguish its case for decades. After two years of repeated appeals from village leaders to the government went unanswered, residents turned to the courts. In 1952, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the villagers could return once they received permission from the military.
That decision, Ghantous said, was meant to “make us lose hope and accept that there was no chance of return.” One year later, Israeli forces completely leveled the village, part of a broader campaign to destroy Palestinian villages whose residents were internally displaced in 1948. “If you look closely, you can still see that most of the walls are standing — it was the roofs that were destroyed in the airstrikes,” he said. “The next day, they came back and blew up the larger houses with dynamite.”
By the early 2000s, Israel no longer argued that concrete security concerns precluded the return of Bir’im’s residents. Instead, in affidavits submitted to the court at the time, the state referred instead to what he described as “broader implications.”
According to Michael Awn, a lawyer from Bir’im who has represented the village in court for years, this language reflected a political concern that allowing displaced Palestinians to return to Bir’im and Iqrit could encourage similar demands from other communities. In that framing, the obstacle was no longer security, but the precedent return might set.
Alongside the struggle for recognition in Israeli courts, since 1993, Palestinian members of the Knesset have repeatedly sought to advance legislation that would permit the residents of Bir’im and Iqrit to live in their village, most recently in 2022. Each time, the proposals were brought to the Knesset floor, only to be voted down.
‘The village is still alive in its people’
But attempts to secure a return to Bir’im have not only been limited to court petitions and legislative efforts. In 1983, displaced residents formed the Youth of Return, a grassroots initiative led by second-generation descendants of the village, who chose to escalate the struggle through demonstrations and direct action — shifting the focus from legal appeals to solidifying a presence on the land.
“The case of Bir’im never stopped, not for a single day,” explained Ghantous, who joined the Youth of Return. “Since 1948, we have kept returning and struggling in different ways. Every generation found its own way.”
One major milestone in this journey came in September 2013, where Palestinians from the Youth of Return set up a permanent presence near the village church, refusing to leave despite eviction orders issued by the Israel Land Authority. “The youth came and sat there, inside what the state calls a national park, and refused to go,” Awn explained. After a petition was filed in the Magistrate’s Court in Safed, the court ordered a temporary freeze on the eviction, allowing the residents to remain on site until the following summer, on the condition of a financial guarantee.
During that period, around 200 people lived in the village, holding nightly gatherings, festivals, and cultural events. “For the first time,” Awn said, “people from Bir’im were able to return, live in their houses, and experience the village again — even if only for a year.” The reprieve ended when the state appealed the decision, and a higher court ordered the evacuation, bringing the experiment in return to a close.
More recently, Bir’im’s youth have taken it upon themselves to bring back life in the village and renew collective engagement with its cause. Two months ago, volunteers organized a cleanup campaign, clearing paths between ruined houses and reopening access across the site. That was followed by a multi-day volunteer work camp. The Christmas market is part of this broader effort to restore daily presence on the land.
“Every time people meet here, it reminds us that even if the houses are gone, the village is still alive in its people,” said Sharbel Dakwar, a second-generation descendant of Bir’im who now lives in Haifa.
That continuity was embodied most vividly by Ibrahim Eissa, 92, known to everyone as the village’s “Jiddu,” or grandfather. “I am the happiest person on earth today, seeing my children and my grandchildren here in Bir’im,” he said.
Standing in front of his grandmother’s house, Eissa recalled how he used to play in the courtyard during the summer. Despite his poor eyesight and old age, he remembers every stone in the village and recounts its stories as if he lived there for the past 77 years, a smile never leaving his face. “I used to come here by taking a shortcut through the hills, straight from the heart of the wilderness, to reach Bir’im. I can’t leave this place. Our families are buried here.”
Burial in Bir’im was not always possible: After Israel lifted military rule over its Palestinian citizens in 1966, residents began pushing to reclaim fragments of life in the village, including the rights to pray in the church and bury their dead. According to Awn, the latter was realized only around 1970, after loud and sustained protests forced the state to relent.
“I have a son and a grandchild buried inside the village, and many others [have relatives buried] as well,” Eissa told +972. “That is why Christmas here carries such deep meaning: we lay our dearest loved ones in this place, and we also celebrate our dearest loved ones here. We feel at home.”
For Eissa, the Christmas market was more than a holiday celebration. It proved that his decades-long efforts to keep the village alive had succeeded, despite repeated attempts by the state to prevent it.
“What you see today is the result of my own hands: during the period of military rule, the church was neglected, with no electricity. [The state] wouldn’t allow me to bring equipment here to install the electricity poles,” Eissa explained. “So I would come at night — I carried the poles on my shoulders and dug the ground myself. All of this was for Bir’im.”
‘They cannot destroy our feeling of belonging to this place’
For decades, the people of Bir’im have maintained close social ties, keeping the village alive in practice as much as in memory. Many families have continued to intermarry, reinforcing relationships severed by displacement. At the Christmas market, I met Palestinians whose parents were both from Bir’im, even though one side of the family settled in Haifa and the other in Jish.
Dakwar emphasized how repeated return sustains the community, a collective expression of Palestinian identity at a time when doing so individually carries great risks. “When people keep coming back here for prayer, for holidays, for gatherings like this, it creates a feeling of safety,” he said. “The more we come together, the less fear people feel. The community protects itself.”
At the market, older residents gravitated toward the remains of houses they once lived in, recalling daily routines and familiar corners. Younger Palestinians moved through the ruins differently, searching for homes they knew only through family stories. For many, return was not imagined solely as rebuilding physical structures, but also as preserving relationships, rituals, and a sense of collective belonging. Even those who had never lived in Bir’im spoke of it as a place they were raised to recognize as home.
What these testimonies affirmed was that in Bir’im, community has become a form of self-protection. According to Palestinian psychologist Asrar Kayyal, settler-colonial displacement often targets social life as much as physical space, working to fragment communities and isolate individuals. In Bir’im, that process never fully succeeded: unlike many other displaced villages, Kayyal explained, Bir’im’s residents were able to confront their dispossession collectively and to receive official acknowledgment of the injustice.
That recognition, limited as it was, helped protect the community from internal collapse. And when people refuse to face loss alone, displacement does not fully succeed in breaking what it aims to destroy. As one young attendee at the market put it, “They may have destroyed the stones, but the occupation cannot destroy our feeling of belonging to this place.”
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As the afternoon wore on, the market shifted into something less structured. Without a stage or even an announcement, music rose from the crowd, led by Palestinian singer Alaa Azzam. The singing quickly turned into dancing: Palestinians of all ages joined a Dabke circle, while others gathered around, filming, smiling, and offering shouts of encouragement. Children ran into the center, dancing freely as the rhythm of feet striking the ground echoed through the ruins.
For a moment, the village was alive with sound and motion — Palestinians returning, singing, and dancing on their land, even if only temporarily.
