Lubya a palestinian demolished Village in Galilee Memory-History-Culture-Identity Mahmoud Issa Preface

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Response of the British

As elsewhere in Palestine, the British authorities attempted to quell the uprising with a series of repressive emergency measures. These included mass arrests, detention, curfews, and house demolitions. Lubya and its inhabitants were not spared.

“I was 13 years old when the British army imprisoned me,” said Yousef Issa. “We used to cut the telephone wires. When the old men interfered to free me because of my age, the English officer responded: ‘The young are more dangerous than the old.’ I stayed in prison for three months, two months in Julia, at the eastern part of al-Bus village, and one month at Khaduria, near Mount Tabor. It has the same name as the school. This was in the year 1939. When the Second World War began, they freed us from prison.”
“There were 24 people, including myself, imprisoned by the British army. British forces came and surrounded the village under the pretext that revolutionaries were in the village. An airplane spread papers ordering a curfew on the village. The following were the names I can remember: From the 'Ajayni: Yasin Awad, Abdullah Ammouri, Mahmoud Ammouri, Yousef, Saleh Mofaddi, Salah Hussein, and Salim Mihammad. From the 'Atwat: Muhammad Ibrahim Mansour, Ayid al-'Ata, Mahmoud Yousef Musa. From the Shanashri: Mahmoud Ibrahim Ahmad, Husni Abed Ruhman, Mustafa Abed Ruhman. From the Awaidi: Muhammad Ali Warda. From the Shahabi: Muhammad Kasim.” He could not remember the remaining nine Lubyans.
Ahmad Okla remembered one particular incident when “the British army entered Lubya and arrested 40 men including the leaders Hassan Abu Dhais and Fawaz Ali Shihabi. Lubyans reacted by forming a fighting force named al-Kaf al-Aswad (The Black Hand). Reprisal killings subsequently took place, such as the killing of the mayor of Tiberias Zaki Hudaif who was killed by Yousef Hassona and Nayif Abu Dhais. The head of Department of Lands was also killed by Khalil al-Tabari as was an Arab policeman who collaborated with the enemy. The latter’s killers were Sa’id Mufaddi and Aboud Fandi.”
“The British army responded with violence against the village,” said Abu Tal'at. “They imposed a curfew from 9 p.m. till 9 a.m. and used to cut cactus, lay them on the ground, and make suspects walk on their prickly leaves. Amina Ali Ismael had similar memories. “They used to gather all the men at Wadi al-'Ayn and kept them there the whole day under the hot summer sun. Then they collected cactus leaves from the fields and ordered men to walk on them. The English came to our village and burned the harvest of the season. We used to fill our houses with all kinds of food: wheat, corn, olive oil, beans and other things. The English forces came and threw all the sacks on the ground, mixing the different kinds of beans together, thus destroying all our stores for the winter season."
Amina followed this with a deep sigh, as if the incident had just happened in front of her eyes. “The English forces used to besiege the village, imposing curfews from six at night until seven in the morning. They shot Said Abid al-Rahman dead while he was on his way to feed his horse in the morning. They were there with their forces in the houses of my uncles: Damoun, Miziad and Issa Mahmoud. They appeared at our house at night with a translator, his name was Abu Ishak, as I remember, asking my father about a terrorist that had come to the house. My father denied the allegations and prevented them from entering the house."
According to Ahmad Okla's acccount, in 1938 the British finally “decided to occupy Lubya and establish a small military post in the village. Sa'id Abdel-Rahman was one of those killed by these British forces.” Some Lubyans said that Sa'id Abdel-Rahman was shot dead one morning as he was preparing for morning prayers. Villagers did not welcome the British presence in Lubya. “Lubyans continued their resistance against the British forces hurling stones and other projectiles at them. Harassed, the British forces in the end were obliged to vacate the post and retreat to a place named al-Khirbi, south west of Lubya.”
Several men from Lubya paid with their lives for their participation in the revolt. “Ahmad Muhammad B’Akkar, [repeated?] from the Shihabi hamula, a member of the Iz al-Din al-Qassam group, died in Dayr al-Ghosoun, in the West Bank area, during the 1936 revolution,” said Abu Majid. “The English troops had at one point come to arrest him after receiving a tip from someone in their armed forces. They had even beaten a teacher, Muhammad al-Safrini, from Tulkarem district, when he refused to tell them Ahmad’s whereabouts. The police had also searched the houses of Ahmad and Marzouk ’Odeh because Ahmad used to visit them often.”
“After the shooting of Dawwas Othman by Jewish troops, the British got involved and killed two others, ‘Arif Muhammad Abdel-Rahman and Ibrahim al-Mansour. To avenge their deaths, four men, Yasin al-Ammouri, Ibrahim Mousa al-Bakrawi, and Mousa and Thyab al-Saleh got together and hatched a plan to kill one of the Jews. ‘I am against this sort of action,’ said Abu Majid. ‘They executed their plan by deceiving two of the innocent Jewish merchants who came to buy sugar from them. The four men are dead now.’”
While British forces had largely succeeding in suppressing the uprising by the end of 1939, they continued to seek out those Palestinians actively opposed to British occupation of the country. “I remember when the British found the revolutionary Saleh Muhammad Taha dead in the afternoon of Monday, 14 July 1944 (24 Sha’ban 1363 Hijri),” said Ahmad Olka. “The British brought him from the hospital of Tiberias and he was buried at midnight under the show of force of the British forces [as his family in ‘Ayn al-Hilwe reported to me in an interview at the camp and his group hiding near Lubya]. The group defended themselves, killing and injuring three of the British, including one of their officers.” Elderly Lubyans remember Taha as a symbol of resistance.

Chapter Eight
The Nakba
Memory is a battlefield.

Alistair Thompson

The year 1948 brought about a huge rupture in Palestinian society. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to leave their homeland and flee to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the remaining parts of Palestine not occupied by Israeli forces at the end of the war (i.e., West Bank and Gaza Strip). Like the residents of other villages, Palestinians from Lubya left everything behind.
Almost all of the men and women I interviewed started their reminiscences with the events of 1948. Elderly Lubyans remembered in detail the valleys, villages and mountains on the road to exile. Some described it as the road to hell. Others spoke of humiliation, hunger, of missing loved ones, fear, long nights under open skies, attacks by thieves and imprisonment.
Jewish officers who participated in the attacks on Lubya also remembered the events of 1948. Some blamed residents of the village themselves for their own fate. [add]
After staying a few weeks or months in temporary shelters in border areas, the refugees from Lubya were forced to move on. Village life was exchanged for life in a refugee camp, and the endless monotony of queuing for basic necessities – things which the villagers had once provided for themselves through their own hard work.
It also signaled the beginning of an endless wait to return, a wait which few refugees could have predicted would last more than five decades. The 1948 war brought about what key leaders and thinkers of the Zionist movement had been talking about for decades – transfer. [add] A decision was made that the Palestinian refugees would not be allowed to return to their homes. [Ethnic cleansing]
Events leading up to the attack on Lubya
The whole of Palestine was put on alert after the United Nations recommended the partition of the country into two states, one Arab and the other Jewish.^¹⁵⁹ The village of Lubya arbitrarily fell within the borders of the proposed Jewish state. Adjacent Palestinian villages with long-time relations to Lubya were located on the other side of the dividing line within the territory designated for the Arab state. The UN plan ignored the wishes of the majority of the native inhabitants of the country who were opposed to partition. No measures were taken to determine the wishes or obtain the consent of the residents of villages like Lubya.
Yousef Issa was 28 at the time. “The military situation deteriorated throughout the country following the resolution to divide Palestine into two states, one for the Arabs and the other for the Jews,” he said. “The majority of the Palestinians rejected the resolution and started to prepare for the consequences that they knew they would face. From then until the total destruction of the village on the 21 July 1948, almost eight months later, Lubyans fought with all possible means available to them, especially after they found out that Lubya, according to the partition plan, would be annexed to the Jewish State.”
Nahom Abbo, the retired Jewish Israeli officer from Tiberias who participated in the occupation of Lubya in 1948 echoed Yousef’s views of the events leading up to the war in Palestine. “[A]fter the Partition Plan was passed by the United Nations, riots exploded in the whole region. Before the establishment of Israel I was an officer, and at that time also the leader of a military group in Tiberias. The leadership asked me to move to [Jewish] al-Shajara in order to train Jewish youth, but I had the idea in the back of my mind that I should do something about the Lubyans. Because I speak fluent Arabic and dress like an Arab, I had no problem moving from al-Shajara to Tiberias through Lubya, though later on I became vulnerable.”
As had happened during the 1936-39 revolt in the country, the Jewish Yishuv sent envoys to various Palestinian villages in strategic locations to try to convince the residents not to take part in the resistence, attacks and counter-attacks that were spreading across Palestine. Lubyans remember several Jewish envoys that came to the village. This included Yosef Nachmani from Tiberias and Chaim Lavikov from Jewish al-Shajara. Both had been active in trying to arrange land sales between residents of Lubya and the Zionist colonization associations.
“The Jews at one point sent a man to the village, by the name of Nachmani,” said Amina Ali Ismael^¹⁶⁰, who was around 19 at the time. “[He came] with a letter asking the Lubyans to live together with the Jews under Jewish rule. The young men of the village rejected the offer and accused [the mukhtar] Hassan Abu Dhais of being a traitor.” Ibrahim Shihabi recalled that “the Jews also sent an English officer to ask for the village’s neutrality. My father told him that he should consult with [Hassan] Abu Dhais. The young men who were at the meeting were very angry at the idea, and asked my father: ‘Has your treasury box been filled by the English?’” This version of events was confirmed by others from Lubya.
“I remember that we had only one telephone in the village, at the home of Mustafa Mufaddi,” said Abu Tal'at. “One day the telephone rang and one of the Jews, on the other end of the line, asked to speak to mukhtar Abu Dhais. The Jew told the latter: 'We have no objection to your people joining the army, because ours are joining the army also, but let us not attack one another in this area.' Some men, however, got on the mukhtar’s case for receiving this phone call and accused him of being a khariji (outsider).”
Members of the Abu Dhais family I spoke with continue to believe that their uncle, Mustafa Abu Dhais, could have saved Lubya from its fate because of his good relations with local Jews. “Chaim Lavikov, a Jew from al-Shajara who was responsible for minorities in the Jewish army, sent a message to the Lubyans proposing that they stay in Lubya,” Ahmad Abu Dhais^¹⁶¹ told me. “[A] few young boys, zu’ran (ruffians), spoiled everything.”
Like Nachmani, Lavikov was also known in the village for trying to arrange land sales between Arabs and Jews. According to Abu Tal'at “the zu’ran almost killed the man after he left the house. The people of the village, however, begged them not to harm him. ‘Let us live together and avoid problems’, they said, but the zu’ran accused Abu Dhais of being a traitor. The leadership of the revolution did not dare open their mouths out of fear of being accused of treason.”

Ahmad’s mother, Um Isam, had no qualms about naming those whom she thought were responsible for the clashes with the Jews. “The ones who made all that fuss were Muhammad Abdel-Rahman, Abu Nasir and Nabooh, from the ‘Atwat family,” she said. Yousef al-Yousef and other Lubyans, however, viewed these people as brave revolutionaries. These two views of the events of 1948 and the Jewish offers for a truce with the village still prevails among Lubyans until now.

Not all Palestinian villages that entered into such agreements with their Jewish neighbours, however, were spared from attack by Jewish forces, as was the case with Dayr Yasin in April 1948 where Zionist forces massacred more than one hundred men, women, children and elderly despite a truce having been reached between the village and the Jewish community in Jerusalem.^¹⁶²

When I mentioned the massacre to Izra Lavi he blamed Eztel. “It was not Ben Gurion who ordered the massacre,” he said. “It was Etzel. [They] caused a lot of problems. They killed and expelled Arabs in Haifa. They also worked against the English.” His wife Ester added that “it was not Menachem Begin [the leader of Etzel] personally. Etzel was against the Haganah. They were like Likud and Labor today. Eztel committed the massacre without orders from Begin. They were worse fighters than the Haganah.”
In another example in the north of the country the Israeli army gave assurances to residents of the two Palestinian villages, Iqrit and Bir’im, that once the area was secure they would be permitted to return to their homes. The villages were later destroyed and despite a decision in their favor by Israel’s High Court, residents of these villages are still waiting to return.^¹⁶³Abu Isam rememembered another incident in the village of 'Illut, where he remained until it was occupied by Jewish forces in 1948. According to his son Hashin, “The Jewish soldiers would kill a few of the young men in every village they entered. From ‘Illut they chose 42 young men and shot them. The inhabitants didn’t fight, nevertheless they were punished.”^¹⁶⁴
I asked Nahom Abbo about another massacre in the village of ‘Aylabun that took place after villagers had accepted the terms of capitulation. “I know that episode very well,” said Nahom. “The villagers had captured four soldiers, killed them by cutting their heads off, and played football with them. When our troops entered ‘Aylabun they rounded up 30 to 40 men from the village and asked a masked man, also from the village, to identify those who had taken part in the soldier’s murder. A soldier put his hand on each man in turn, and asked the masked man to confirm or deny his guilt. They then picked twelve of them and killed them.”
In other cases, villages that had close relations with Lubya were singled out for harsh treatment by Jewish forces. In Tur’an, ‘Ajaj Sa’d ‘Odi^¹⁶⁵ remembered the days that followed the fall of Nazareth and Lubya and the decision of whether or not to capitulate to Jewish forces. “When Lubya and Saffuriyya fell, my uncle called for a meeting. Representatives from the Christian community accepted the proposal made by my uncle to send a message of surrender to the Jewish forces. The priest took the proposal to the priest of Kufr Kanna who then delivered it to the Israeli officer Amos. Amos told my uncle that he was waiting for Tur’an village to make one mistake in order to destroy it completely because of its close relationship to Lubya and to the Arab Salvation Army.”
“One day Amos arrived in the village and asked for all the men to be rounded up. Then he chose seventy to seventy-three men from different families and imprisoned them in Telfinsky Camp on the coast [near the shrine of Sayyidna Ali]. We knew nothing about the fate of these men until they were freed eight or nine months later. They were kept fifty in one room. When Amos asked the villagers to tell him who had signed the surrender papers, he realised that ten of them where not present, so he gave the order for their houses to be destroyed.”
The people of Tur’an were lucky that none of the men were shot as had happened in other villages such as Dayr Yasin, '‘Aylabun, Tantoura, Balad al-Sheikh, Husayniyya, and Dawayma.^¹⁶⁶ ‘Ajaj ‘Odi told me that later on “the leaders of the revolution sent a message to his uncle to ask him why he had surrendered. His uncle, however, subsequently met with Wasfi al-Tal [who later became Prime Minister of Jordan], who apologised to him and told him that he had made a wise decision, but blamed the people of Hittin for fleeing with the Lubyans.”
While some Lubyans still believe that mukhtar Abu Dhais could have saved the village, others felt that Jewish attempts to keep Lubya out of the conflict were merely based on Zionist military interests. “The Jews knew that if they could win Lubya to their side,” said Yousef Issa, “all the other villages around it - Tur’an, Hittin, ‘Aylabun, Nimrin, and [Arab] al-Shajara would capitulate.” Lubya occupied a strategic position at the crossroads between Jewish settlements in the area and the city of Tiberias. If Lubyans were able to shut down the roads, Jewish settlements in the area would find themselves isolated from each other.

Izra Lavi was the man ordered by the Haganah, Israel's pre-state militia, to occupy Lubya in 1948. Meeting him had a special meaning for Lubyans. When I told Subhiyya Muhsen Gouda^¹⁶⁷ who found refuge in the neighbouring village of Dayr Hanna after the war that I would interview Lavi she was astonished. “Aren’t you afraid?” she asked. This was the first time that they heard a first hand account from the man who had tried in vain to occupy Lubya, due to the resolute resistance of its inhabitants. Abu Wajdi, a Palestinian friend from al-Maghar village in the Galilee who knew Tiberias well introduced me to Izra.

The interview took place one evening at Izra’s home in Tiberias. Izra spoke Arabic and Hebrew and his wife Ester spoke Arabic, Hebrew and English. My friend Abu Wajdi intervened from time to time during the interview to translate from Hebrew into Arabic when the couple had difficulty expressing itself in Arabic. Izra’s wife, Ester, interrupted many times to clarify a few points, to enlarge upon what her husband was saying, and to give her own impressions about the war.
Izra began his account by telling me about the good relations between Jews and Arabs in Tiberias before the war. He then turned his attention to the events of 1948. “[When the Arabs] closed the roads to Safad and to the Jordan Valley we could not enter Tiberias from any direction. The north, south and western approaches were all closed. We could only enter Tiberias from the sea at Kineret. The Mufti began to lose control of his followers, and the Jews began to feel upset and afraid. I received orders to enter Tiberias to show the Jews that the situation was not as bad as they feared. I realized that the situation was deteriorating. At night we were afraid while during the day the situation seemed normal. A week later I was order to leave Tiberias to train the military how to lead a squad.”
“After that I became a regular officer and returned to Tiberias. We had to come in by sea because all the roads were closed. Thirty Jewish soldiers were in Rabbi Ranu’s house. The hotel in Tiberias was the Arab Army’s headquarters. They also used the houses of Suleiman and Mahfod Nasir al-Din. Lubyans also closed the road near their village. Anyone who wanted to travel to Afula or Haifa was unable to do so. I had to enter Tiberias by trickery. All the Jews were to open fire on the Arabs in order to provide us with cover. That was how I got in.”
Nahom Abbo, another Jewish Israeli officer who participated in the attack on Lubya, also recalled the growing number of confrontations in the area between the two communities. “[O]ne night, due to interference from persons from outside the region, I was stopped by the group of men at a checkpoint. One of them recognised me by name, but all the others were strangers. Then Jamil, the leader of the Najjadi [is it Najjada before] party, arrived and escorted me out of the checkpoint to the outskirts of the town. I was thus able to pass the message on to my leaders that we should be careful because the number of foreigners in Tiberias exceeded that of the locals.”
The first attack on Lubya in the spring of 1948 was preceded by attacks and riots in Tiberias. “I heard from Arab friends that there would be an attack on the city,” Izra said. “Therefore, the Arabs were to leave Tiberias so as to avoid harm. They were ordered not to take anything with them. When we entered the Arab houses, there was still fire burning under the pots of food.” Nahom added that “a group from Lubya, between thirty and forty men, joined in the warfare. In March 1948 the situation erupted. The Arabs killed three elderly Jews, and four Arabs were killed and sixteen injured. We buried our dead in Hittin and the Arabs buried theirs in al-Majdal.”
“When the battle in Tiberias was over, I asked the Arabs to remain in Tiberias,” Izra told me, “but they refused. There were orders from abroad that all should leave. They refused to stay. They asked only to have their weapons with them. We didn’t want them to leave. They believed that the Syrian, Jordanian and Egyptian army would intervene and throw the Jews in the sea, and return not only their own houses but Jews’ houses as well.” The claim that Arab leaders ordered Palestinians to leave their villages would later become one of the factors successive Israeli governments would use to explain the mass displacement of the Palestinian Arab population in 1948. Subsequent research, however, proved this claim to be false.
Attacks on Lubya
Many of the elderly Lubyans that I interviewed insisted on speaking about the details of the attack on Lubya and its defense. Accounts of the attack varied depending on the position of Lubyans in and around the village. Their stories conveyed not only the huge sense of loss with their defeat at the hands of Jewish forces, but also their pride in the defense of Lubya.
Unlike the Jewish Yishuv and its well-trained officers and soldiers, many of whom had participated in the second world war with British and allied forces, there was no centralized leadership to coordinate local efforts in Lubya. [quote from original]
In February 1948, only several months after the adoption of the UN partition plan the Zionist leadership sent a force to Lubya to try to open the road. Nahom Abbo was the head of this unit. “Everyone realised that as long as Lubya resisted, the road from al-Shajara to Tiberias would remain closed. They had a canon in place that fired on any movement in and out of [Jewish] al-Shajara.”
“I was the leader of eighty people (mihlaka mokairit) and I sent a group of my men to open a route into Lubya. The Lubyans shot at them, killing one and injuring two. This happened in February 1948. I thought then that the Lubyans were crazy, because they were surrounded on all sides.” The details of this attack and counter-attack were confirmed by many Lubyans that I interviewed.
The first attack by Zionist forces on the village itself took place in March 1948. Nahom explained to me that the idea was that a plane should bomb Lubya and then the army would enter the village. This first battle was not a success.” According to Yousef Issa six Lubyans died after having killed seven attackers and destroyed their vehicles during this first clash on 24 March 1948.
The second battle to occupy Lubya over 10-11 June 1948 began on the night the truce was declared. It also proved to be a failure. “The Lubyans closed the roads and fired at al-Shajara Kibbutz from their houses,” said Izra. “At the start, we tried to open the road to Maskana (now called Tsomet Golani). Our men came from Tiberias. My brother Isaac was with them. They had sand bags with them to fill the craters in the road.”
“The Lubyans did not flee as did those from other villages. They were strong and magnificent and the Jews were afraid of them. My brother was shot dead and burned in the car. He was ambushed by Lubyans. After this incident the decision was made to occupy Lubya. Lubyans were strong fighters. The village was situated on three hills. The leader of the attack was Chaim Lavikov from al-Shajara. This battle was a failure for us.”
Nasir Muhammad ‘Atwani^¹⁶⁸ was one of the Lubyans who participated in the defense of the village. He is now residing in Aleppo [in a camp?], Syria. In exile he started to educate himself, taking one degree after another, until he obtained his PhD in English literature. He later taught at Aleppo University. Nasir is now retired, but continues to write articles about Lubya for newspapers in Syria and in the Gulf. His story starts with the battle on 10 June 1948. His memories of the past are as fresh as if the events he recounted had just taken place before his eyes.
“We defeated them in this battle which lasted ten hours. I went to Nazareth, where Fawzi Qawuqji [the leader of the Arab Salvation Army], Abu Ibrahim and Abu ‘Atif were stationed, with other people from Lubya to ask for ammunition. Lubya was at that time following Haj Amin al-Husayni. In a sign of dissatisfaction, the Mufti didn’t accept an invitation to visit the village while he was once on his way to Tiberias, and passing nearby Lubya.”

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