The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (28 page)

At the beginning of June, Ben-Gurion was content to focus on the long march into the upper Galilee, driving his troops up to the border with Lebanon. The Lebanese army was 5000 strong, of which 2000 were stationed on the border. They were supported by 2000 ALA volunteers, most of them stationed around the city of Nazareth and the rest scattered in small groups among the dozens of villages in the area. Under the charismatic command of Fawzi al-Qawqji, the volunteers continued as best they could to defend the villages and show some resilience in the face of the looming Israeli offensive. But they were hampered not only numerically and by their inferior military skill, but also by the poor quality of their weapons and lack of ammunition.

One of the ALA battalions was the Hittin battalion. The commander at one point sent the following message to al-Qawqji: ‘The battalion’s equipment is not usable because of the amount of dirt in it. This includes rifles, machine guns and vehicles.’ The commander also complained that there was only one logistic supply line from Syria, which was often blocked, and even when the supply lines happened to be open, there were other problems to overcome. At one point he received the following telegram: ‘In reply to your telegram asking for cars to remove supply from Tarshiha to Rama, we have no fuel for the cars so we cannot reach you’ (sent on 29 June and intercepted by the Israeli military intelligence).

Thus, in the absence of any regular Arab troops the Galilee lay wide open for an Israeli assault. But as early as June, and increasingly over the following months, the villages themselves were beginning to offer the advancing troops more resistance, which is one reason there are still
Palestinian villages in the Galilee today, unlike Marj Ibn Amir, the coast, the inner plains and the northern Negev.

The desperate courage of the Palestinian villages, however, also accounts for the brutality of the front. As they progressed, the Israeli troops were more determined than ever to resort to summary executions and any other means that might speed up the expulsions. One of the first villages to fall prey to this strategy was the village of Mi’ar, today the location of several Jewish settlements built in the 1970s: Segev, Yaad and Manof. The irony is that part of the land taken by force in 1948 remained uninhabited for decades, and was even cultivated by Palestinians living nearby until it was re-confiscated in the 1970s, as part of what Israel calls ‘the Judaization of the Galilee’, a brutal attempt by the government to de-Arabise the Galilee, which was still, in some areas, equally divided demographically between Jews and Arabs. It would appear that Israel intends to re-activate this scheme with the billions of dollars it hopes to extract from the US government following the pull-out from Gaza in August 2005.

The writer Taha Muhammad Ali was a boy of seventeen when, on 20 June 1948, the Israeli soldiers entered the village of Mi’ar. He was born in nearby Saffuriyya, but much of his poetry and prose today, as an Israeli citizen, is inspired by the traumatic events he saw unfolding in Mi’ar. That June, he stood watching, at sunset, the approaching Israeli troops shooting indiscriminately at the villagers still busy in the fields collecting their dura. When they got tired of the killing spree, the soldiers then began destroying the houses. People later returned to Mi’ar and continued living there until mid-July when Israeli troops re-occupied it and expelled them for good. Forty people were killed in the Israeli attack on 20 June, part of the few thousand Palestinians who perished in the massacres that accompanied the ethnic cleansing operation.
⁶

The pace of occupying and cleansing villages in the lower and eastern Galilee was faster than in any phase of the operations that had gone before. By 29 June, large villages with a significant presence of ALA troops, such as Kuwaykat, Amqa, Tel-Qisan, Lubya, Tarbikha, Majd al-Krum, Mghar, Itarun, Malkiyya, Saffuriyya, Kfar Yassif, Abu Sinan, Judeida and Tabash appeared on the lists of future targets the troops were given. Within less than ten days they had all been taken – some villages were expelled but others were not, for reasons that varied from one village to the another.

Majd al-Krum and Mghar are still there today. In Majd al-Krum, the occupying forces had started a mass eviction of the village when a row suddenly erupted between the intelligence officers, resulting in half of the village being allowed to return from the trail of forced exile.
⁷
‘Most Glorious Olive Groves’ is the literal translation of this village name, and it still lies amidst vast vineyards and olive groves, adjacent to the northern slopes of Galilee’s highest mountains, not far from Acre. In ancient times the place was known as Majd Allah, ‘The Glory of God’, but the name was changed when the vineyards that began developing around the village became famous. At the centre of the village was a well whose water explains the abundance of plantations and orchards around it. Some of the houses looked indeed as if they had been there from time immemorial: stone-built and reinforced by clay, surrounded by the olive trees on the south and vast tracts of cultivated land on the east and west.

Today Majd al-Krum is strangulated by Israel’s discriminatory policy, which does not allow Palestinian villages to expand naturally, but at the same time continues building new Jewish settlements around it. This is why ever since 1948 the village has had a strong political cadre of nationalist and communist resistance, which the government then punished further by demolishing houses, the rubble of which the villagers have left in place in commemoration of their past resilience and heroism, and which is still visible today from the Acre–Safad highway.

Mghar is also still there, spread out within a scenic canyon in the descending valley that connects the lower Galilee with the Lake of Tiberias. Here the Jewish occupying force was faced with a village where Christians, Muslims and Druze had coexisted for centuries. The military commander interpreted Plan Dalet as calling for the expulsion of only the Muslims. To make sure this was done swiftly, he executed several Muslims on the village’s piazza in front of all the villagers, which effectively ‘persuaded’ the rest to flee.
⁸

Many other villages in the Galilee were like Mghar in that they had mixed populations. Hence, from now on, the military commanders were given strict orders to leave the selection process that was to determine who could stay and who could not to the intelligence officers.
⁹
The Druze were now fully collaborating with the Jews, and in villages that were partly Druze, Christians were generally spared expulsion.

Saffuriyya was less fortunate. All its inhabitants were evicted, with soldiers shooting over their heads to hasten their departure. Al-Hajj Abu Salim
was twenty-seven, and the father of one beloved daughter, when the village was taken. His wife was expecting another baby and he recalls the warm family home with his father, a kind and generous man, one of the richest peasants in the village. For Abul Salim, the Nakba began with the news of other villages surrendering. ‘When your neighbour’s house is on fire, you begin to worry’ is a well-known Arab saying that captures the emotions and confusion of the villagers caught in the midst of the catastrophe.

Saffuriyya was one of the first villages Israeli forces bombarded from the air. In July many more would be terrorised in this way, but back in June this was a rarity. Terrified, the women took their children and hastily sought shelter in the ancient caves nearby. The young men prepared their primitive rifles for the inevitable attack, but the volunteers from the Arab countries took fright and escaped from the girls’ school where they had been stationed. Abu Salim stayed on with the men to fight although, as he remembered many years later, ‘The officer of the ALA advised me and others to run away,’ which, he admits, seemed to make sense. But he stayed put and so became a crucial eyewitness to the events that followed.

After the air bombardment came the ground attack, not only on the village but also on the caves. ‘The women and children were quickly exposed by the Jews and my mother was killed by the troops,’ he told a newspaper fifty-three years later. ‘She was trying to enter the Church of Annunciation, and the Jews dropped a bomb that hit her in the stomach.’ His father took Abu Salim’s wife and fled to Reina, a village that had already surrendered. There they took refuge with a Christian family for a few months, who shared their food and clothing with them. They worked in the family’s orchards and were well treated. As they had been forced to leave their own clothes behind in the village, villagers tried to return in the dead of the night to smuggle them out. Israeli troops caught several of them and shot them on the spot. In 2001, Abu Salim, now eighty years old, concluded his story by stating that he was still willing, as he had been in the past, to buy his old house back with good money. What he cannot rebuild is his family. He has lost all contact with his brother, whom he thinks has children somewhere in the diaspora, but he has been unable to track any of them down.

Like many villagers in the vicinity of Nazareth, the people of Saffuriyya fled to the city. Today sixty per cent of Nazareth’s residents are internal refugees. The decision of the local Israeli commander who occupied
Nazareth the following month not to drive out its inhabitants meant that many of the expelled villagers around Nazareth were spared the fate of a second eviction. Along with many of the survivors of the other villages, the people of Saffuriyya put up new homes in a neighbourhood that faced their old village, today called Safafra. This meant another traumatic life experience: they actually watched as the Jewish settlers began emptying their houses, occupied them and slowly turned their beloved village into an Israeli moshav – a collective agricultural settlement – that they called Zippori, which Israeli archeologists quickly claimed was the name of the original Talmudic city.

In other neighbourhoods in the city of Nazareth today you can come across survivors of Malul and Mujaydil, who settled in the southern part of the city as near as they could to the Israeli development town of Migdal Ha-Emeq, built on the ruins of their villages after their occupation in July. Malul is gone without a trace; in Mujaydil two churches and a mosque were the only remnants until recently of the Palestinian presence. The mosque was destroyed in 2003 to make room for a shopping mall, and only the churches survive.

The village of Mujaydil had 2000 inhabitants, most of whom fled to Nazareth before the soldiers reached their houses. For some reason the army left these intact. In 1950, after the intervention of the Pope in Rome, the Christians were offered the opportunity to move back but refused to do so without their Muslim neighbours.
¹⁰
Israel then destroyed half the houses and one of the village’s mosques. Mujaydil’s al-Huda Mosque had been built in 1930 and was twelve metres high and eight metres wide. A
kuttab
– an elementary Quranic school – was nearby. The site was famous for the elaborate system it used to collect the rainfall from the mosque’s roof into a well. A tall impressive minaret was added to the edifice in the 1940s.

The Christian sites were equally picturesque. Part of the Russian Orthodox Church is still there today, though its walls are long gone. It was built in honour of the brother of the Russian Czar, Serjei Alexandrov, who had visited the place in 1882 and who donated the money for its construction in the hope that local Christians of other denominations could be converted to Orthodox Christianity. But after he had left, the local representative of the Orthodox Church in Palestine, Patriarch Nikodim, proved less insistent on the missionary task he had been entrusted with and more genuinely concerned about education for all: he opened the church to
all the denominations in the village and ensured it functioned most of the time as the local school.

The village also had a Roman Catholic church, built in 1903, which housed on its first floor a trilingual school for boys and girls (teaching was in Arabic, Italian and French). It also had a local clinic for the benefit of all the villagers. This church is still there and an old family who decided to come back from Nazareth to take care of the site, the Abu Hani family, now looks after the lovely orchard and the school.

As in other places in Palestine, it is worthwhile to dwell a little on the local history of the village as it demonstrates how not only houses or fields were destroyed in the Nakba but a whole community disappeared, with all its intricate social networks and cultural achievements. Thus in Mujaydil the Israeli army obliterated a piece of history that included some fine architectural specimens and a series of significant social developments. Just twenty years before the Nakba, the proud villagers decided to transform, actually modernise, the old traditional system that placed the mukhtar at the head of the village community. Already in 1925 they had elected a local council, whose first project was to provide lighting along the village’s roads.

Mujaydil was a unique place in many other aspects. Apart from its religious buildings and modern infrastructure it had a relatively large number of schools. In addition to the two schools associated with the churches, there was also a state school, the Banin School, known for the magnificent trees that provided shade for the pupils during their breaks, for the well situated in the middle of the school yard and for the fruit trees that surrounded it. The village’s main source of collective wealth, which supported all these impressive constructions, was a mill, built in the eighteenth century, that served the villages in the vicinity, including the people of the ‘veteran’ Jewish settlement of Nahalal (Moshe Dayan, who came from Nahalal, mentions his father’s reliance on this mill).

Mujaydil was taken in the military operation to take over Nazareth and the villages around it, which was codenamed ‘
Dekel
’, Hebrew for palm tree. It is actually pine trees and not palms that today cover many of the destroyed Palestinian villages, hiding their remains under vast ‘green lungs’ planted by
the Jewish National Fund for the purpose of ‘recreation and tourism’. Such a forest of pine trees was planted over the destroyed village of Lubya. Only the diligent and meticulous work of later generations, spearheaded by historian Mahmoud Issa, now living in Denmark, has enabled visitors today to trace the vestiges of the village and join in the commemorations of the sixty people who lost their lives there. The village lay near a main junction (today called the ‘Golani Junction’), the last main crossroads on the Nazareth–Tiberias road before it starts its steep descent towards the Sea of Galilee.