In the Galilee hills, Christmas celebrations revive a depopulated Palestinian village

December 24, 2025
Samah Watad

After a two-year absence, displaced residents and their descendants returned to Bir'im — part of efforts since 1948 to keep the community alive.

People gather near the entrance to the the church at the Christmas market in Bir'im, Dec. 13, 2025. (Anna Maria Hawa)

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.”
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.

The Gaza genocide radicalized the world — and there’s no going back

Tareq Baconi

People can't unsee a live-streamed annihilation defended under the banner of liberal democracy. They know the Israeli apartheid regime can no longer exist.

An activist waves a Palestinian flag at the front a feminist march in Paris, March 7, 2025. (Anne Paq/Activestills)

October 7, 2023, marked a paradigmatic rupture in how Palestine is discussed and imagined. Until that moment, international discourse had been trapped in the vocabulary of statehood and peace processes. The Palestinian question was framed as a conflict to be managed rather than a structure of domination to be dismantled, but October 7 forced the world to confront the realities Palestinians have long named: settler colonialism, the ongoing Nakba, Zionism, and Israeli apartheid.

This rupture is not merely rhetorical; it marks a substantive shift in global political understanding. Discourses of decolonization and accountability now permeate arenas once confined to the diplomatic language of a two-state solution. Israel’s assaults on Gaza have shattered the pretense that its violence is episodic or defensive, exposing genocide as a structural feature of its settler-colonial project.

For Palestinians, this moment reaffirms a longstanding truth: liberation cannot be secured through negotiation within an unjust system but requires confronting the structures that enact their dispossession and erasure.

For the world, the genocide has catalyzed a broad radicalization. When crowds march through global capitals demanding a free Palestine, they simultaneously articulate demands for the abolition of racialized capitalism, extractive regimes, climate injustice, and all forms of contemporary fascism. Palestine is understood through an intersectional lens, one that binds these struggles together. This radical understanding of structures of power reframes Palestine not as an isolated crisis but as a lens through which the broader architecture of global domination becomes visible.

The rupture of October 7

In the months leading up to October 7, the conditions on the ground had already rendered the pre-existing paradigm untenable. Palestinians were managed through aid and economic incentives rather than granted rights or justice; the entire international architecture — the peace process, donor frameworks, and diplomatic language — functioned to contain and marginalize Palestinian aspirations while legitimizing Israel.

Before October 7, the world treated Israel as a legitimate state within the family of nations, while Palestinians were cast either as a humanitarian problem to be managed through aid or as a security threat to be contained within the frameworks of the “War on Terror.” Beginning in 1993, the Oslo process — with its endless negotiations and conferences — sustained the illusion of progress while entrenching apartheid. In this context, diplomacy functioned as a form of containment: the so-called “peace process” managed colonial violence by translating it into technocratic language.

This “managerial” paradigm was premised on erasing history. The Nakba became a closed chapter, and ongoing colonization was reinterpreted as a “security issue.” Yet, by October 6, 2023, this framework had already failed on its own terms. It produced neither peace nor stability, only deepening domination and despair.

Before Hamas’ operation, that year had already become the deadliest for Palestinians in decades, especially for children, even as the world continued to treat Palestinian demands as a side issue to be pacified rather than an ongoing political struggle for liberation. October 7 showed that decades of “management” had not created order but incubated resistance.

In addition, October 7 exposed a core contradiction in Zionism: the belief that settlements and territorial expansion could ensure lasting safety for Jewish people in Palestine without ever having to deal with the indigenous population being supplanted or oppressed. Zionism presented colonization as redemption and displacement as safety. For decades, this illusion held because Western powers protected it and because Palestinians were rendered invisible in the narrative of Jewish return. October 7 revealed that no lasting safety can be built on the erasure of others. Indeed, the very logic that promised security produced perpetual insecurity.

Today, the question of Jewish safety is clearly inseparable from the question of Palestinian freedom. As long as Zionism, with its commitment to domination and colonialism, persists, it condemns people to a life of unending violence and thereby ensures that resistance to its very foundations will continue. By exposing this contradiction, October 7 redefined the parameters of justice: no solution that preserves a settler-colonial order can ever be just. Indeed, the possibility of coexistence depends not on managing Palestinians but on dismantling the system that made their dispossession possible.

The rush to restore the old order

Amid an ongoing genocide, governments and international institutions scrambled to reassert the familiar vocabulary of the pre-October 7 world. Ceasefires, reconstruction pledges, state recognition, and declarations of support for a “two-state solution” resurfaced as gestures of reassurance to a shaken order. Yet, these measures are futile attempts to restore normalcy rather than confront the reality that the old normal was the problem. They function as tools of denial and of perpetuating injustice by attempting to reassert Israel’s legitimacy while pacifying global outrage.

Every effort is being expended today to re-legitimize the Israeli state after the mask has been torn off its reality of apartheid and genocide. While millions marched in the streets of world capitals demanding a Free Palestine, world leaders are asking us to unsee a genocide, and to return to past delusions.

A ceasefire is indeed necessary — it saves lives and allows for humanitarian relief — but it cannot be mistaken for justice. As many Palestinian experts have consistently emphasized, reconstruction without sovereignty only deepens dependency. Recognition of a shrunken Palestinian “state” that lacks control over its land and its borders entrenches partition rather than freedom. These are nothing more than vacuous measures that are aimed at placating Palestinians; the proof for this is that none of these measures consider the urgency of holding the perpetrators of genocide accountable for their war crimes, as a prerequisite to ending the violence unleashed against Palestinians.

Each of these steps seeks to put the genie back in the bottle, to return the world to October 6, when apartheid was tolerated and the Nakba ignored. Yet the illusion cannot be restored. The world has seen the structure of violence too clearly to forget it.

Hamas and the politics of distraction

Central to this attempt to restore the old order is the fixation on Hamas. The demand to “destroy Hamas” operates as a pretext for genocide. It allows Israel and its allies to frame total war against Palestinians as counter-terrorism, collapsing resistance into criminality. Under the Israeli colonial logic, all resistance — armed, legal, cultural, or diplomatic — is illegitimate because it refuses subjugation.

The fixation on Hamas is a red herring; when the Israeli regime talks about eradicating Hamas, what it means is exterminating all Palestinians. Hamas has undeniably suffered significant losses — its leadership, personnel, and much of its infrastructure have been severely degraded. But Hamas is not reducible to its members; it is an idea, an ideology rooted in resistance.

The focus on Hamas mistakes the symptom for the structure. Even if Hamas were dismantled tomorrow, the genocide and the siege of Gaza, the apartheid system, and the denial of return would persist. At the same time, resistance would reconstitute itself in new forms because the condition that gives rise to it — colonial domination — remains. The demand to eradicate Hamas is thus not a strategy for peace but a declaration of intent to suppress any expression of Palestinian political will. In this sense, Hamas becomes a convenient diversion, allowing Israel to wage mass violence under the guise of self-defense while escaping accountability for the system that produced resistance.

For Palestinians, this moment carries both peril and promise. History teaches us that colonized peoples are never guaranteed victory: colonial regimes have rendered some Indigenous populations extinct, while others survive only through the enduring burdens of intergenerational trauma. Indeed, the liberation of Palestine is not inevitable — but it is certainly possible; and it is up to Palestinians to secure it.

This moment places us at a critical historical crossroads. Zionism has lost much of its propaganda apparatus, and this erosion of narrative dominance exposes the vulnerability of the Israeli regime. Will Palestinians be able to build on this global groundswell of solidarity — this moment of clarity — to further erode the false and violent promises of Zionism and advance the struggle for a Free Palestine?

The Western colonial mindset exposed

As colonized people, Palestinians will continue to resist the forces that dispossess and oppress them — whether in Gaza or across all geographies. The liberation of Palestine is no longer seen as a local or regional cause; rather, it has become the moral and political hinge of an emerging global consciousness.

The diaspora plays a crucial role in this transformation. Scattered across continents, Palestinians are shaping discourse in universities, parliaments, and streets. Their struggle connects with movements worldwide for climate justice, racial equality, and broader decolonization. The attempt to criminalize their speech — through sanctions, censorship, and smear campaigns — demonstrates their growing influence. By asserting the vocabulary of liberation, Palestinians in exile and those within the broader solidarity movement are dismantling the discursive foundations of empire itself.

After all, October 7 revealed the colonial continuities underlying the global order. Western governments’ response to Israel’s assault on Gaza — military aid, diplomatic cover, and the repression of solidarity— exposed the persistence of a colonial mindset beneath the veneer of liberalism. The institutions built after World War II to guarantee universal rights have become mechanisms for preserving hegemony. When international law is selectively applied, it ceases to be law and becomes the language of domination.

The genocide in Gaza has thus become a mirror in which the world sees itself. It reflects the racialized structure of global power that links Palestinian dispossession to broader systems of extraction and control — from resource theft to border militarization to the policing of migrants. Palestine is not an isolated crisis but the frontline of a global struggle between empire and global justice. To demand freedom for Palestine is to demand an end to the colonial order that sustains exploitation everywhere.

Decolonization is not only about borders; it is about dismantling imperial capitalism, militarism, and the global hierarchies that sustain them. Palestinians must continue to articulate liberation as part of a shared global agenda. To speak of freedom from the river to the sea is to articulate a universal horizon of justice; the global reckoning that followed October 7 revealed that such a possibility can be imagined, but the struggle now is to make it durable.

October 7 did not invent new politics; it revealed the truth of an old one. It exposed the moral bankruptcy of a world order that calls itself liberal while underwriting genocide. It shattered the myth that peace could be achieved without confronting the structure of dispossession and erasure itself. The attempt to resurrect the “peace process” is an effort to bury this clarity under the language of diplomacy.

Ultimately, this genocide has radicalized the world, and people cannot unsee a live-streamed annihilation defended under the banner of liberal democracy. The world has realized that Israel can no longer exist as an apartheid regime. This is precisely what a free Palestine means: to dismantle apartheid, to reclaim Palestine, and to usher in a future of freedom and justice between the river and the sea.

For Palestinians, there is no going back. The paradigm has shifted, and justice now demands dismantling the structures that enabled dispossession. Strategically, the task ahead is to consolidate this rupture into a coherent decolonization project. Justice cannot be confined to statehood under occupation; it must address the full spectrum of Palestinian rights — return, equality, and sovereignty. This means rebuilding Palestinian political institutions on the basis of liberation rather than donor dependency, ensuring they reflect the collective aspirations of Palestinians everywhere.