From the pull-off below, where a hero and heroine of the Period of the Judges are imagined entombed within sarcophagi dating from many centuries later, the ruins of the village at the crest of the tel were invisible. Indeed, with the exception of being perched atop the Mandate-era pillbox with a good pair of binoculars, one could find very few hints of the village in the landscape, no architecture rising above the mulberries and thistles that are reclaiming the stones, no historical markers. There was nothing obvious on the basis of which a passerby might connect the spring that waters the kibbutz' cattle with the spring that sustained the village above.
First-hand memories of the village must have remained, as it was only depopulated in May 1948. Yet those who might be most willing to reminisce were unreachable. Careful questions at the moshav and kibbutz were met by and large with silence. Some stories were told: epic myths of Deborah and Barak... chronicles of Jonathan and Demetrius… archaeological narratives of a thriving administrative center during the Persian and Hellenistic Periods... personal narratives of emigration in 1963... but little with regard to the ruins of the village beyond a terse “they left.”
The village has a name. Indeed, the name by which the village was most recently known is a close derivation of the name by which the site has been known for millennia: from the Biblical geographies of Canaan and early Israel, to Greek and Roman historians, to tenth-century Arab geographers, to nineteenth-century British cartographers, to the entries in the official History of the Haganah documenting Operation Yiftach.
Narratives of nationalism acquire power through the codification of an imagined shared past of memories, history and myth. They often also demand a willful and necessary amnesia.
The name of this village, which nature reclaims and memories elide, is remembered as Qadas. Bitter irony, perhaps, in the name's meaning of “sanctuary.”
[originally published here in July 2014 as “Standing Amidst Myth, History & the Ruins of a Palestinian Village”]