On July 11th, skies above the West Bank village of Burin will fill with kites. In various shapes and colours they will soar over a neighbourhood that is under constant attack by illegal Israeli settlers, and under threat of being erased from existence. Burin, and its annual kite festival, are endangered fragments of a Palestine that is fast being dismembered by an occupying power. This July you can participate in the Burin Kite Festival. By next year the festival could be consigned to history, if Burin is emptied of her Indigenous population.
Burin
Burin is perched on the northern tip of the West Bank, near the town of Nablus, and is home to 3,000 Palestinians. When historical Palestine was carved up by the colonial powers and the new settler territory of Israel established, Burin and the surrounding area was designated to remain under Palestinian control. Few listened. The village and the West Bank initially fell under Jordanian control, and since 1967 have been occupied by Israel, making it the longest military occupation in modern history.
Unfortunately, Israel wasn’t content with mere occupation. In 1982, approximately 500 acres of Burin was illegally classified as Israeli state land, and handed over to settlers, who set up an outpost named Har Brakha. Over the next decade, the settlement expanded and in 1991 opened its religious school, or yeshiva, headed up by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, a controversial figure who unsurprisingly supported soldiers refusing orders to evacuate illegal Jewish settlements from the West Bank. Today, Har Brakha boasts a population of some 3,500, many of whom actively intimidate and terrorise Burin’s Indigenous Palestinian population, on occasion with the support and under the protection of the Israeli army as shown here.
In parallel to the invention of Har Brakha, a second settler outpost was created called Yitzhar. In 1983, land belonging to six Palestinian villages to the south-west of Burin was stolen in order to establish a hilltop enclave that would enact Zionism’s far-right land theft ideology. Yitzhar’s yeshiva marks it out as a hotbed for far-right Zionist thinking, which endorses violence against non-Jews. Its head is Yitzchak Ginsburgh, a Missouri-born ultra-Orthodox rabbi who believes ‘Lebanon is part of the land of Israel and was given to the Jewish people by God,’ and frequently writes of the need for righteous violence. (Two of Ginsburgh’s devout followers, Yosef Elitzur and Yitzhak Shapira, also argue ‘the sin of murder only applies to Jewish-on-Jewish violence’).
The yeshiva was initially located at Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus but relocated to its current Yitzhar site in 2000. This historic connection with Joseph’s Tomb, amplified by fiery rabbi Ginsburgh, turns already zealous students into deadly extremists.
Sandwiched between these two religious paramilitaries is Burin. Over the years the assaults on the village have been relentless, as settlers seek to intimidate and bully her residents in the hope of displacing them.
The Kites of Burin
The first Burin Kite Festival was in 2008. It hasn’t run every year – it was cancelled during COVID and had to be suspended on more than one occasion due to threats of settler violence. This year marks its 12th occurrence. The festival was conceived by community organiser Ghassan Najjar, who dreamt up the concept while being held in solitary confinement by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). Najjar said sketching out the details of his vision is what kept him going while in isolation.
Burin is a community that is blessed and cursed by its location. Surrounded to the north and south by radicalised, violent settler outposts, and afforded no legal protection by the state of Israel or its security services, the village exists in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety. Settlers roam the streets by night, and increasingly by day they set fire to crops and uproot trees, stone passing cars and poison drinking wells. Young men frequently block roads and intimidate children and women. On several occasions settlers have walked into houses and occupied rooms for several hours. The settlers openly carry weapons while Palestinians are prohibited from bearing arms – settlers are protected by the police and sometimes even the IOF. No one is protecting the Palestinians.
But once a year, for a few hours, Burin shakes off her hostile neighbours. Colours and shapes take to the skies, and there is laughter and joy amongst parents and children, neighbours and friends. There is a moment, however brief, when community comes together, when Burin rises off her knees and soars above the settlers and brutality, above the pain and suffering. She reaches up, defiant, her kites dancing between hilltop and sky. Najjar summarises the festival’s spirit, “The message is simple. This is our land; this is our sky.”
My worry is one day there will be no Burin. It will be replaced by yet another menacing illegal settler outpost, with its fanatically charged religious school producing young Zionists drunk on racism, hate and violence. My worry is very real – over the weekend the Palestinian hamlet of Mughyier ad-Deir, south of Burin, vanished in very similar circumstances.
And Burin’s kites – they’ll just be a memory baked into a story you read somewhere.
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze —
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself —
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above,
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
– (Refaat Alareer 1979–2023)
The organisers of the Burin Kite Festival are inviting communities to host local solidarity kite flying events between July 4th and 13th as part of a global campaign demanding an end to the occupation of Palestine. Details can be found here.
©2025 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @theafghanwriter
