Synod Meeting in Beirut Appeals to World for Baram-ikrit Villagers

The Greek Catholic Synod meeting in Beirut ended a week-long meeting today with an appeal to “the world’s conscience” to defend the right of Arab villagers in Israel to return to the sites of their border villages from which they were evacuated for security reasons 25 years ago. The meeting, presided over by Patriarch Maximos Hakim, was attended by Archbishop Joseph Raya of Galilee. Raya has taken up the cause of the former inhabitants of Baram and Ikrit, the villages in question, for which he was praised at the Synod meeting. Last month the Israeli Cabinet upheld the military’s contention that the security situation which required the evacuation of Baram and Ikrit still prevailed and barred the return of the former residents. Both villages were razed nearly 20 years ago and their inhabitants resettled.

A split developed over the weekend among the villagers and their supporters in Israel. One group calling itself the Baram Evacuees Committee announced its dissociation from the support given its cause by Archbishop Raya and by a number of extreme leftwing political factions in Israel. Ayub E-Matnas, chairman of the new committee, said he rejected Raya’s “crusade” in Jerusalem. The Archbishop led a protest march there last Wednesday. Matnas also rejected plans to raise funds to repay the State Lands Administration for the compensation monies already paid out to the Baram and Ikrit villagers.

But Peretz Ofer, a spokesman for the Committee for the Baram-Ikrit Villagers claimed that E-Matnas, deputy chairman of the town council at Gush Halav where many of the evacuees now live, acted without his committee’s consent and was trying to exploit Archbishop Raya’s absence. He called E-Matnas’ statement “provocative” and observed that the latter represented the Labor Alignment, the major party of the coalition government, on the Gush Halav council.