other. There were always five families staying in the village, while the ‎rest were going to work and vice versa. We worked, ate, and socialized together. But eventually, the Israeli forces raided the church and assaulted the priest, threw the Bible away and ‎arrested some of the returnees. In 1983, the youth of Kufr Birim founded the “Al Awdah” [“return” in Arabic] Association. Its goal is to ‎change the path of our struggle and build an educational program about our land and ‎homeland, in order to give a legacy to our children. Between 1984 and 1985, we also started the “return camp,” to gather all generations of people from the village, to build and maintain relationships between them.‎ ‎ In 2013, we agreed to repeat the return experiment of 1972 and, on ‎‎17 August 2013, we started the “I declare my return” initiative. We returned to Kufr Birim, and around 300 people stayed there taking turns. It was the first ‎time since 1972 that I had slept there – the first day of the new year, I opened my eyes and I was in Kufr Birim! During that time, we held many cultural activities; I did a tour between the ‎houses for all the artists. We also asked the elderly to take the youth for a tour, to introduce them to the village and to write on each home the name of its original owner. P ‎ eople from all parts of the world were visiting the camp.‎ That camp, in 2013, was one of the best camps [we organized]. That year we called it the “reunification camp”. We had discussion sessions with many ‎personalities from our village, who now live abroad. Some people had never been to the village before. We also launched balloons with the name of each city that our children would love to visit.‎ Unfortunately, we cannot set up a camp every year because of the political and security conditions, I ‎wish we could do it always, it’s really effective. The idea took a positive dimension, but we ‎don’t know what should be the next step. The Israeli occupation didn’t like what we were ‎doing, because the land is registered under the Israel Land Authority and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. [So they filed a case against us, and] in February 2015, during the ‎first trial session they requested our evacuation.‎They also asked us to remove the mint we planted. The court allowed us to stay, but later on, the Israel Lands Administration appealed to the Central Court, demanding the evacuation of the village within three months. ‎Eventually, they confiscated all the daily life tools [we were using] to force us to leave, such as electricity sources, water and bedding. This was the first and the last time we were evacuated from the village after we started the “I declare my return” initiative. The Birim case is part of the Palestinian case, it’s the same case, and even the occupation authorities ‎themselves recognize this connection. I am a refugee in my land, and so is my family.‎” Nahida Zahra, 56 years old, current resident of al-Jish village. Interview: via Skype, 31 May 2018 37