By: Rana Khamous

The usual trips to the occupied lands of Palestine (1948) have never satisfied my ‎adventurous self; eating at the Old Man and the Sea Restaurant in Jaffa and visiting the ‎Hanging Gardens of Haifa have become ordinary parts of these trips.‎

Zajel invited me to an unusual trip to Galilee; the view of the Palestinian coast was ‎astonishing. However, the Israelis attempted to erase the Palestinian identity there by ‎building rural settlements.‎

The large numbers of the destroyed and depopulated villages on the way from Nablus to ‎Galilee made us feel that the way took longer than it really did. One of which is Ein ‎Hod; it was turned into artists’ village on 1954 and its mosques were turned into ‎restaurants. We also learned many stories about Palestinians who were forced out of ‎their villages, such as Al- Kabri village.  ‎

From Galilee, we could see Wadi Al-Qarn which is the meeting point of two valleys. ‎Also, we could see from up there the Lebanon-Palestine borders; Lebanon was only 10 ‎meters far.‎

Afterwards, we visited Akko and passed by Kufur Same’a, Ma’lia, Fassuta, Harfish and ‎Sahmata which are old Palestinian villages. ‎

Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to visit a place in south-west Haifa, in which ‎they used to extract salt out of sea water and move it into Fredes village before it was ‎destroyed in 1948.‎