Lubya a palestinian demolished Village in Galilee Memory-History-Culture-Identity Mahmoud Issa Preface
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Village lifeMemories of harvest, education, and wedding celebrations were a common thread running through many of the interviews. Nayif Muhammad Hassan, however, was one of the Lubyans who spoke in detail about other aspects of life in Lubya. He served with the British police force in Palestine together with Abu Majid during the troublesome years of the forties. He knew the village and its life well, although he spent 25 years as a soldier in the Jordanian army. For Nayif, village life was not as rosy as others had remembered it. “We were brought up in the fields where a farmer used to work for a whole year and was still not be able to buy clothes for his son. For example, one bag holding 12 saa' [5 kg] of corn cost 60 kirsh. It would have been better for the farmer to buy one bag at one lira. Lubya’s corn was famous in the whole region, but nowadays corn is used as bird feed. You could smell the bread from far when our mothers were baking. Bread has no smell nowadays. Generally speaking, a farmer in those days lived better than the people in the city, but poverty in the village was part of the government’s policy.” Some young men from the village joined the British army in Palestine in order to supplement their income from the land. Yousef Issa, for example, served in the army “five to six months every year from 1941 to 1946. I used to collect taxes on the kettle tax (tharayib) from the farmers from the whole area of Tiberias. In 1947 they sent after me, but I didn't go. They used to give us 30 Palestinian pounds as a salary. The rest of the year when I was at home, I used to work in the fields planting corn. At the time, one kilo of corn cost 20 kirsh.” Nayif Hassan continued describing other aspects of life in the village. “The barber was also the dentist and used a kalbi (crimp) to pull out teeth. There was neither a doctor nor a clinic in the village. My cousin Abdel-Rahman died after being bitten by a snake. I was also bitten by a one while I was playing with my friends. I put my finger in a hole in the ground to retrieve a ball when I realised that something had bit me. My uncle came and turned the stone over and saw the snake. It was 11 a.m. and the farmers were coming back from the fields. So they bound my arm, stopped a car on its way to Tiberias, and took me to a hospital in Nazareth. The director of the hospital was Mr. Bathket, who, when the bandage was removed, expressed his satisfaction at the treatment I had received at the village, because it had prevented the bleeding.” “He cleaned my hand and put it in warm water three times, but I had to spend one night at the hospital. I was astonished at how they left me alone in there. I was less than seven years old. I also remember that a nurse there gave me a lecture about Christianity, but I understood nothing. My mother and brother came the next day with two donkeys and took me out of hospital. On the way home we stopped in Nazareth to eat. I remember my brother found a fly in the food and protested to the owner of the restaurant, and we left without eating. When we arrived back at the village, I saw a lit torch on the fence (sinisli) of our house. All my close relatives, my uncle Saleh, 'Awad Shawish and many others had come to see me, wish me well and give me sweets.” “There was only one radio in the village in the house of Mustafa Abu Dhais [the son of the mukhtar]. Its batteries worked through a fan fixed to a stick connected to a dynamo. There was also one tailor in Lubya, a Circassian named Durdah. He could make Arab and foreign suits and used to iron them by putting hot coals in the iron. His work was very professional. He used to live in Suleiman Sayid’s house on the eastern side of the village, and paid a rent of 20 kirsh a month.” “There were two barbers in the village, Mahmoud Shar’an and 'Awad Qatamish, whom we used to pay once a yea. Sometimes we even gave them corn. Whenever our hair became too long, we went to them and they never refused to cut it. At harvest time, he used to collect corn from the different families, according to how large this or that family was. Mahmoud Shar’an had another job as a fruit and vegetable vendor and he used to buy his merchandise from Tiberias. Sometimes people from the ‘Atwat met him on his way back from Tiberias and destroyed all what he had with him, accusing him of having bought from the Jews.” Nayif also remembered a story about “an unemployed man in Lubya whose name was 'Awad al-Zaini. One day he passed by the house of Abu Dhais and the latter gave him two empty sacks to buy him coal and put it in them. 'Awad took the money and went on his way. While he was walking towards the Shihabi area, he met 'Awad Tallouzi (known as Abu Sa’id) who had camels with him, and sold him the two sacks. Two days later, Abu Dhais asked around about the coal sacks and was astonished to hear from Tallouzi that 'Awad al-Zaini had sold them to him.” From the time he was a young boy, Nayif “frequently went to the mosque to pray. The Imam of the mosque then was Sheikh Ali Shihabi.” According to Abu Majid’s diary, Lubya’s mosque was built by Mas’oud Madi in 1822. The mosque was built between the homes of two brothers, Shanshir and Madi, of the Shanashri family. It was constructed on special basalt pillars in the same architectural style as the white mosque in Nazareth and the upper mosque in Tiberias, but it did not have a tower (mi’thani). The mosque was large enough for 300-400 worshippers. Abu Sameeh told me that the Madi family came originally from the Wahidi tribe, who were Bedouins from the Naqab (Negev) area. “Mas’oud was a large feudal lord from Ijzim, a village in the Haifa district and a supporter of the Ottoman regime, whose family had its own courts and laws. When Ibrahim Pasha arrived in Palestine in 1834, however, he had Mas’oud executed. Sheikh Ibrahim al-Joudi had married Mas’oud’s daughter, Zayna (Um Khalil), and in honour of this marriage, her father had built the mosque in Lubya.” With the army Nayif Hassan also had a chance to work in different places and even accompany famous personalities visiting the region. “While in the army, I worked on the film Lawrence of Arabia in 1960-61. My job was to operate a crane for three months. Anthony Quinn played the role of Sheikh Odeh Abu Tayeh and Peter O’Toole the role of Lawrence. The film was made partly in the Tabuk area, east of Ma’an, and partly in Wadi Rum, in Jordan. A friend of mine from the Ta’amra Arabs found a narrow-mouthed jar with decorations on it and sold it for 25 Jordan dinars to someone from Bethlehem, who then sold it for 75,000 dinars.” Lubyans also shared various other memories related to life in the village. Abu Majid, for example, told me a story about a man from the Kilani tribe who wrote a poem about Lubyans eating cactus. The poem had negative connotations, which displeased many among the ‘Ajayni family, however, Abu Majid insisted on reciting the popular folkloric poem.
This poem is still recited by Lubyans until now. Dabbas, Mahmoud Husayn, Khalil ‘Ammori, and Tallouzi, were all names of people living in the same hara (neighbourhood) with Abu Majid. In the poem he was poking fun at people eating cactus fruit, which was famous in the village. Even until now, the cactus trees in Lubya still bear fruit, and Lubyans from Dayr Hanna come every year to collect and eat it. Before 1948, many of the villagers used the large cactus plants as fences for their livestock. While hundreds of villages were razed to the ground after 1948, many of the cacti remain and provide a visible reminder of life before the Nakba. In many places just a little amount of digging and searching in the undergrowth reveals the stones, wells, grave stones and other remnants of village life. Memories of harvestAll the inhabitants of the village, women, men, children and the elderly, contributed to the livelihood of the community. The fertile and extensive village lands provided not only what the village needed for its own sustenance but every year yielded produce for export to neighbouring towns and villages. In 1944-45 [last year for official stats, see Kamen] a total of 31,026 dunums were allocated to growing cereals; 1,655 dunums were irrigated or used as orchards82; and 1,520 dunums were planted with trees.83 Letters addressed to the agricultural office in Tiberias requested permission to plant different kinds of trees, including olive and apple. According to Jewish intelligence sources, Lubya’s olive trees produced about 600 jarra (containers made of earth used for domestic purposes) of oil. Village lands also produced 10 kuntar (one kuntar is about 330 kg) each of figs and grapes. Four different kinds of fruit trees produced about 15 kuntar in total. The dossier on Lubya also notes that villagers owned 1,800 sheep, 400 cows, 100 horses, 80 donkeys, 40 camels, and 3,000 chickens in the village.84 For Lubyans, the land was their livelihood. “Lubya had the best agricultural land in the whole area and its inhabitants were wealthy,” said Um Hassan. “There were those who lived well and earned a good income, those in the middle, and those who were poor which meant that they had no land to plant and no permanent job,” said Yousef Issa. “Those people used to work on the land of others. Their salary was four kail [One kail = 20 Palestinian kirsh. One Palestinian jinah = approx. one English Pound], while their wives received 1½ kail. This meant that a couple could earn 5½ kail, or about 75 kilograms of flour. This was enough to cover the family’s needs for the whole year.” There were only two families in the village who did not have land of their own. By the time they had settled in Lubya the land had already been distributed among its people. Intelligence collected by the Haganah observed that in 1943-44 approximately 50 village families had no land at all and earned a living by working as hired hands, breeding cattle, and/or as merchants. The difference in numbers can be explained, in part, by the different definitions of family. According to the dossier on Lubya each family owned between 100 and 150 dunums of land in the village.85 According to Yousef Issa “many transient workers came with their camels from Julise, Kufr Yassif, and al-Bi’ni to transport the sheaves. For every twelve kails [one kail = 12 saa’, one ‘ulba = 6 saa’, one mid = two saa’, one saa’ = 5kg] they transported, they would be given one. In the late thirties two hamulas, about twelve families from the ‘Asafra and Samallout in Lubya, bought a tractor and used it for their own benefit as well as rented it out at the usual rate, which was one kail for every 12.” Memories of harvest illustrate the kind of community solidarity that prevailed in the village. “The whole family used to work in the fields at harvest time and there was no pollution in the air,” recalled Nayif Hassan. “Sometimes landowners employed seasonal workers who were called murabi’ meaning those who worked for a quarter of the land’s produce. In summer, the farmers used to build a shelter out of vine branches (‘arishi) under which we used to sleep and gather at night to talk for most of the night in a wonderful atmosphere.” Those who did not own land or other means of production also had the possibility of earning a decent living. People helped one another. The shepherd, barber, merchant, teacher, and imam of the mosque, as well as every other villager, were connected to one another either socially or by virtue of their shared interests. The entire village, men, women and children all participated in the harvest. Normally, the men were responsible for cutting the grain. The women collected and transported the sheaves to the threshing floor. Sa’idiyya Younis86, who is married to Yousef Issa, still remembers the harvest days in Lubya. In 1995 she visited the village for the first time since 1948. It was one of the happiest and most sad moments of her life. Unlike other women from the village, Sa'idiyya was not afraid to be interviewed, speaking about the past without any hesitation. As with all the women from the village, her memories of daily life in the village were warmer and more detailed than those of men from the village. “We used to collect the grain in a place called hilli, a gathering place for sheaves. We made many hillis depending on the size of maris al-'ard or field. Then a man from the family came with a camel and transported the sheaves to the threshing floor. In April we began picking by hand: beans, lentils, and lentil vetch. When it was dry we sent it to be threshed. Then in May, as usual, we started reaping the wheat and barley.” Village women made braziers, which were the stoves of that time, from clay and water that would then be dried in the sun. They used a kind of soil called hizria to make jars, vessels and vats. “I remember that when I was a child we did not have a primus (kerosene cooker),” said Sa'idiyya. “We used to cook and warm ourselves on the brazier for which we collected wood from the nearby villages of ‘‘Aylabun and al-Maghar. The primus was used in Lubya only later, just before our expulsion in 1948.” During the interview Yousef interrupted Sa'idiyya to add a well-remembered phrase, which used to announce the beginning of the harvest season: “fi khamistash ayyar ihmil minjalak wa ghar. (On the fifteenth of May carry your scythe and start working).” Normally one mule, cow or horse with a threshing sledge was used to thresh the grain. The type of animal used depended on the financial situation of the family. According to Yousef, “Children were mainly used to drive the animals. After we separated the grain from the straw with wooden pitchforks we would put each in different sacks. Our family used to produce about 15 to 20 kail (one kail is about 60 kgs) and store what it needed in clay bins for the year. The rest we would sell. The extra straw we sold as animal fodder.” Yousef continued his story about the harvest and recollections of the usual workday, which started early in the morning. “First I would pray, then we would prepare the donkeys and horses and start our journey to the fields. It took us one hour or a little more to arrive at mawarisna (our plots of land). Normally we would be five to six from our family. The few people who had no children hired a muzari’ (sharecropper) who would be paid 5 kirsh for his trouble (one lira = 100 kirsh). We started by harvesting the beans, lentils and lentil vetch (kirsanni), which dried earlier than other crops. If we didn’t harvest the kirsanni in time it would fall to the ground.” “After we completed the harvest, we gathered the sheaves, which took four days to accomplish, and then camels transported it to the threshing floor in Lubya. The families who did not have enough men to do the work used to hire boys to do the threshing. The boys would work from eleven until four and we would give each of them one kail, about 60 kilograms, for threshing the whole baydar (threshing floor). It took about twenty days to finish the beans and lentils. Then we started collecting the wheat. All during the month of May we would harvest the wheat. The work lasted well into August.” “We used to say: 'in fatak ‘ab wa ma tharrait ka’innak bilhawa ingharrait (If you do not thresh in August, it is like falling in love with air).' At the end of August we started to collect the corn, and after the corn the miktha (watermelon), then the okra, tomatoes and zucchini. We also learned the art of planting miktha without water.” “At the end of September the olive season began and we usually did not have enough, so we bought what we needed from ‘Aylabun and Rami. There were two oil mills in Lubya, one owned by Hassan Abu Dhais [the mukhtar] and the other by Qwateen. They used to halter a horse to the main stone, and it would circle around the stone. Normally the owners of the mill took one pitcher of oil for every twelve pitchers produced. al-Sharkasi, his real name was Sa’id al-Shami [his brother was an officer in the British border army], owned a grain mill. He originally hailed from Kufr Kama. For every kail, he took two or three kirsh, or a rub’iyyi (a pot used by villagers to weigh the grain), which is one quarter of the saa’, one saa’= 5kg.” The millstone can still be seen though the mill was demolished in 1948. In winter, the people prepared for spring by sowing and planting. Sa'idiyya Younis remembered a proverb about the necessity of being ready to work in December. “illi ma bishid bilijrad, ‘ind al-salayib bihrad (He who does not work hard in December will be sorry when harvest time comes).” Education Lubya had its own modest educational institutions. The establishment of a school and attempts to establish a cultural club and an agricultural school illustrate an early awareness of the necessity of coping with the modern needs of the community, especially the youth. One of the village makhateer, for example, suggested that the village open a school for girls. “Instead of sending a stone to the neighbouring young man,” said Yiyha Shihabi, “girls should write a letter instead.” The first school in Lubya opened in 1896.87 Villagers financed the construction of it themselves. This school continued to function throughout the period of the British Mandate. The two-year curriculum was considered equivalent to the normal five-year preparatory school. Subjects offered included religion, geography, history, arithmetic, Arabic, English (from grade four), drawing and sports. There were twenty students in each class. Jewish intelligence sources state that there were around 135 students in the government school in 1942-1943.88 There was also a one-room school headed by Sheikh Ali Shihabi. Approximately 60 pupils attended the school. The school provided religious education for the predominantly Muslim village, and helped students prepare for entry into the regular school. This school was not part of the official Ottoman and Mandate education system, nevertheless, all the male students of the village attended the school. After grade five, children were sent to Tiberias to continue their education. Very few children from Lubya, however, were able to continue their education. Further education depended on the economic situation of each family. Nayif Hassan recalled that one resident of the village, “'Awad Abu Dhais, alma ‘thoun (a man who gives the official authorization for marriages) used to tell his son that he was willing to sell his mother and sisters so that he can go on with his studies.” Some villagers sold pieces of their land in order to pay for their children’s further education. In the 1940s, for example, Hauran Abdel-Rahman sold a plot of land and part of his cattle to pay for his son’s education at the American University in Beirut. After two years, however, the money ran out and the son, Abdel-Rahman, returned home. Two other students managed to study abroad: Muhammad Khalil Abdel-Qader, and Fawzi Abu Dhais. Some Lubyans, like Tahir Mahmoud Husayn (Abu Tal’at), dropped out of school at an earlier age. Abu Tal’at, with his ironic way of laughing at the past, was generous in providing me with many details that helped to uncover Lubya’s history. “I attended the village school until the second grade then left school altogether. At that time people were not very interested in education.” “I returned home from school one day crying and my mother, who loved me a lot, asked me why I was crying. I told her that the teacher hit me. So she picked up a stick and went directly to the school and threatened the teachers with it. This was exactly what I was hoping she would do. My teachers then were Ahmad Afifi, Sami Khouri and Sheikh Mustafa ‘Anabtawi. I used to spend my time in the fields with the sheep and cattle, drinking milk, riding horses, and paying visits to the neighbours.” School also provided a link to neighbouring villages and towns, including Nazareth. This was mainly due to the efforts of teachers from Nazareth who taught in the village. “We used to compete with Nazareth schools in different sports: football, jumping, etc.,” recalled Nayif Hassan. He started school in 1932 at the age of seven and continued until the fourth grade. “The director of the school bought us shirts, but we soon realised that the Israeli Star of David was drawn on them. People began to laugh at us in Nazareth. I don’t know why the other teachers, Muhammad Abdel-Qader and Safrini, didn’t object.” Nayif also reflected on funny episodes that took place in the village school. These memories give an impression of student life more than half a century ago. “When Sheikh Mustafa died, Abdullah replaced him. When he entered our class and asked us what we had on that day’s program we told him dictation. He said: ‘Ha!’ Whenever he opened his mouth, we laughed, so he came towards me and hit me saying, 'I am 45 years old and no one laughed at me before.' He had no teeth.” “The teachers Muhammad and Safarini used to wear a tarboush, but later they changed to a hatta and ikal (Arab headdress and head band). Younis al-Mani89 and Yousef Issa still remember the order given by the leader of the revolution, Sheikh Iz al-Din al-Qassam, that all people must wear the Arab koufia (headdress) and were forbidden to wear the tarboush, the Turkish traditional head dress. The order had been obeyed throughout Palestine. “A crazy teacher, Najib al-Khadra from Safad, used to let us run from the class to Wadi al-Shomer, the field where the battle of Salah al-Din al-Ayyoubi against the crusades took place. No one took the advice of the teachers in the village. There was, however, a garden in the schoolyard, located near babur (mill) al-Sharkasi and surrounded by a fence, in which we used to plant potatoes, beans and other vegetables. No one transgressed.” Other elderly Lubyans, like Ibrahim Shihabi90 from Syria, also shared fond memories of their student days in the village. I first heard about Ibrahim when I was in Palestine starting my research. Saleh Jawad from Beir Zeit University told me about a manuscript about Lubya that he had received from a man named Ibrahim Shihabi in Damascus. When I later met Ibrahim in Syria, he generously offered me all of his documentation on Lubya, including his booklet about the village that was published in 1954. “As children sometimes we used to have fights with other children, especially the ‘Atwat children. We used to collect stones and hurl them at the other kids with slings, and usually we defeated them.” “One day, after such an incident, their mukhtar came over and spoke to my father who promptly came to the school and asked Nasri to take all the pupils inside except for the ‘Atwat and the Shihabi children. He then made us kneel on the stone pavement and started hitting us fiercely. Then he allowed all the other children to go into the school building except for me. He continued hitting me a while longer and then delivered me into the hands of the teachers in order to continue the job. They kept on hitting me from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., but from that day onward we all became friends. I still would like sometimes to behave like the child I was in Lubya.” At the beginning of the 1940s a Mr. Bowman was inspector of the village school. School principals were Sami Khouri and Nasri Nakhla, both from Nazareth. According to Lubyans, school teachers included Abdullah al-Kartabil (Tiberias), Muhammad Abdel-Qader (Tiberias), Abdel-Rahman Hajjo (Lubya), Muhammad Johar (Lubya), Najib al-Kadra (Safad), Muhammad al-Sifrini (Sifrin, West Bank), and Mustafa al-‘Anabtawi (‘Anabta) who was the religion teacher. There is somewhat of a discrepancy between the teachers as remembered by Lubyans themselves and the information collected by Jewish intelligence sources that I found in the Haganah archives. The latter identifies the teachers in Lubya as Nasri Nakhla (Nazareth) who was also the director, Muhammad Ali Fahoum (Nazareth), Hassan al-Haj (Safad), and, Muhammad Abdel-Qader (Raini).91 This discrepancy can be explained by the fact that Lubyans tend to remember those teachers who taught at the school at an earlier date. Abu Isam, who kept the diary about life in the village, was a teacher in Lubya and director of schools in ‘Illut and Nazareth. His son Hashim gave more details about his father’s career, both in Lubya and after the Nakba, teaching in the villages around Nazareth. “My father taught for one year in Lubya. He obtained his degree in 1933 from a well-known school in Kadouri and then went to teach in al-Mansi, ‘Arraba, Samakh and ‘Illut. The director of the school in ‘Illut resigned from his post after he was attacked and robbed and my father took over his responsibilities. The school was ranked first in the Galilee.” The Kadouri Agricultural School was established in the city of Tulkarem now located in the northern West Bank. The school was meant to be open to both Jews and Arabs but Jews refused to be taught except in Hebrew. Therefore, another school with the same name was opened for Jews only. The position was consistent with the Zionist policy of separation from the indigenous non-Jewish people. This spirit of separation, isolation and redemption was expressed clearly in a speech by David Ben Gurion (one of the leaders of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine and Israel’s first prime minister) to the meeting of the Va’ad Leumi, the Yishuv’s National Council in May 1936: “If we want Hebrew redemption 100 percent, then we must have a 100 percent Hebrew settlement, a 100 percent Hebrew farm, and a 100 percent Hebrew port”.92 Lubya also had an education club. On 29 July 1941, letters were sent from Lubya to the District Commissioner of Tiberias and to the Assistant District Commissioner for the Galilee requesting the establishment of an Educational Club in the village.93 Six additional letters were subsequently written to clarify the aims and specify the regulations of the Club. The Club was to be affiliated with the British Council in Palestine. |