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

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Relations with the British

Relations with the British authorities in Palestine were tenuous from the start due to British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the country. The Palestinian Arab leadership had also rejected the decision by the Great Powers to grant the British a mandate over Palestine.^¹¹⁰ Frustration with British policies concerning the loss of land and Jewish immigration frequently boiled over culminating in the 'Great Revolt' that last from 1936 to 1939.

During the period of the British mandate, around forty-six persons from Lubya worked for the British, including teachers, policemen, tax collectors and guards. For some Lubyans, like Nayif Hassan, joining the police forces was a way to evade hard work on land. “I went with a group of 27 men to join the police because I found working on the land was very hard for me, and they accepted only six of us. My uncle Abdel-Rahman was very angry at Joudi and scolded him for sending his son to the military. I left Lubya on 18 November 1942 and joined the border police in Zarka, near Amman. Later on I was transferred to the border between Turkey and Syria for two months to prevent smuggling between the two countries. Then I returned to Jordan to work as a driver.”
Like the Ottoman regime before them, the British also used Palestinians as pawns in their game of political chess in the region. Nayif remembered when “the police were ordered to go to Iraq to suppress the Rashid Ali Kilani movement^¹¹¹ in Baghdad. When they arrived at Rutba, on the border between Jordan and Iraq, Arab units refused to obey the order to join the British in quashing the revolution. The Iraqis wanted to free their land from the British, and the Arabs in the police, who were majority Palestinian, did not feel they ought to be helping in suppressing their rebellion. The British punished this particular unit and dissolved it. This took place during World War II.”
Sometimes, when a conflict arose between two families or tribes, certain family members tried to entangle the British in the affair with the hope of having them intervene in their favour. “Once Mustafa Abu Dhais and Zaki Ahmad Suleiman, from the Hajjo family, decided to go on a hunting trip,” recalled Yousef al-Yousef. “Ali al-Kiyam, from the Shihabi's saw them leave and advised them against it, but they paid no attention to him and continued on their way. Suddenly, Ali began to shoot in the air to attract the British police to the village, and when they arrived, Ali told them that revolutionaries were planning to enter the village that night. The English usually relied on a few recruited spies who kept an eye on those suspected of being involved in the revolution.”
“On another occasion, Mustafa al-Hauran, a relative of Abu Dhais, took shots at the British police who were stationed close to the small factory of Mustafa Abu Dhais, with the hope of making them suspect Mustafa of doing the shooting and thus destroy his factory. Mustafa had good relations with a certain Jew named Tadres from Tiberias. The latter had given him his shops in Tiberias to prevent the Palestinian revolutionaries from taking them over. Tadres had also given Mustafa the right to administer a quarry (al-kassara). Mustafa was a policeman with the British while the others were enlisted in the border brigades stationed on the frontiers with Lebanon or between Jordan and Iraq.”
Mustafa Abu Dhais was one of the few Lubyans who was remembered as having good relations with both the British, Zionist officials, and Jewish businessmen. “My uncle Mustafa had great influence with the British,” said Husam [last name]. “A good example of that was his being able to free his brother from prison only days before he was due to be executed. His brother [Ramzi] had killed a Lubyan [Saleh Rukiyyi] in a family dispute, but Mustafa succeeded in obtaining a pardon for him from the British Ministry for Colonial Affairs.” When I interviewed Ramzi in Jordan, I was advised not to ask him about that subject, due to its sensitivity.
As the conflict with the British administration and the Zionist movement intensified, suspected or actual relations between Lubyans and British officials increasingly became a source for potential disputes in the village. Once the leadership of the revolution ordered Abu Tal’at to kill his own cousin Mustafa Abu Dhais because of the latter’s relations with Jewish and British officials. He categorically refused. Had he carried out the order, enmity would continue until now among the same hamula. According to Abu Tal’at these disputes claimed the lives of several people in the village.
“[A] man named Yousef al-Jalili, who hailed originally from ‘Arraba but was living in Lubya, was killed when some people suspected him of working with the enemy. Suleiman Fatroush was killed by revolutionaries because he used to go to British camps and drink alcohol. He and another man from the Dalayki Arabs were killed by the revolution as outsiders (khariji).” Having religious connotations, the word khariji refers to the group of Muslims who did not accept or support the representatives that Ali and Mu’awiyya had appointed to decide who should be the next Caliph of Islam. They were called khawarij and deemed by both Sunnis and Shiites as outsiders – i.e., outside religion.
Yousef also remembered a disagreement between two Lubyans named Mutlak and Mustafa. “The former accused the latter of being a spy for the English. Once he even pointed a gun at him and said: ‘Take that bullet,’ but the people intervened and prevented him from shooting.” While some Lubyans spoke about spies in the village, both British and Jewish sources, confirm that they had no collaborators in Lubya itself. According to documents from the Haganah archives, “The relationship between the villagers and the government was normal. There were no mukhbirin (spies) for the government among the villagers.”^¹¹²
The men who played a fundamental role in the 1940s struggle against the British, according to Abu Majid, included “Ahmad Tobi (Abu Ghazi) [who] lived in Saffuriyya but was originally from the Shanashri tribe of Lubya. He died ten years ago in an airplane crash while on his way to the Haj in Mecca. He had volunteered to kill the British Commissioner in Galilee, Andrews, because the latter had insulted the mukhtar of al-Shajara by calling the Arabs dogs. The leader who took the decision to kill Andrews was Khalil al-Issa, Abu Ibrahim al-Kabeer, from al-Mazra’a District of Jerusalem. He was one of the students of Sheikh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam when the latter fled from Syria and became the preacher (al-khateeb) of al-Istiqlal mosque which still exists in Haifa.
“Andrews used to repeatedly say, ‘In all the colonies I served, I did not find anyone bearing any resemblance to you except the dogs. You are producing children without any care. You are ‘mukh-tar’ [a play on the Arabic words that mean ‘without a mind’]. Andrews was killed in Nazareth one day while he was on his way to church. Kenneth Blackburne, Andrew's successor, later wrote a letter to his mother concerning the killing of the Lewis: “ I don’t want you to get worried about me because I am not the same as Andrews. The Arabs have always mistrusted him and been determined to hit him – he was mixed up in all sorts of queer transactions with Jews – and the Arabs knew it. He also knew too much about the Arabs and so they feared him. I have found all sorts of things among his papers-any of which would be sufficient to rouse the Arabs.”^¹¹³

Chapter Six
Land Disputes

There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one’s native land.

Euripides, 431 BC

The great revolt of 1936-39 and the meaning of 1948 for Palestinians can only be understood in the context of the conflict over land. The establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was dependent upon the acquisition of land. “If there are other inhabitants there, they must be transferred to some other place,” said Menahem Ussishkin, a leading Zionist figure and chairman of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). “We must take over the land. We have a greater and nobler ideal than preserving several hundred thousand of Arab fellahiin.”^¹¹⁴

For Lubyans, one’s livelihood was dependent on the land. Language was modified to reflect and voice the natural colors of the land, its trees, and fruits during the four seasons of the year. “I learned to love my land when I was still very young and used to accompany my father to Lubya,” said Abed 'Ajayni.^¹¹⁵^{“Once I saw a snake and wanted to kill it, but my father stopped me from doing so saying: ‘Don’t kill it. It is from our village (}^{bint baladna}^{).’ I knew that my father hated snakes because one killed his brother, but he didn’t want me to hurt that particular one. This is how I was brought up.”}
All of the Lubyans I interviewed stated that they would never sell their land. “We are living by God’s will a good life and we do not need to sell our land,” said Abu Muhammad Kilani. “If you talk to any Palestinian about exchanging or selling his land he will just laugh,” Ahmad Hajjo told me. “It is unthinkable. I believe that a collective solution must be found for our dispute with the Israeli authorities concerning our confiscated land.” Nevertheless, most of the same interviewees also acknowledged that before 1948 village land was sold to Zionist land agents and others acting on their behalf.
The transfer of land from the residents of Lubya to Zionist colonization associations began as earlier as the late 1800s, often facilitated by large absentee Arab landowners. Still, on the eve of the 1948 war, the Zionist movement had yet to acquire sufficient land reserves for the creation of a contiguous Jewish state in the country. The massive displacement and expulsion of the Palestinian Arab population during the war was therefore regarded as a miracle by many in the Zionist movement. One of the first measures adopted by the new state was legislation enabling the transfer of refugee land, including that of Lubya, to the state as the inalienable property of the Jewish people.
The beginnings of land acquisition
Nearly all of the residents of Lubya owned land in the village. According to Abu Majid, distribution of land was divided equally into four parts among all the hamayil. Each quarter was given to a group of families according to their size as follows: 'Ajayni and Hajajwi; Samallout and Shihabi; ’Atwat and ‘Asafri; and, Shanashri, and Fukara. “The officer in charge of this operation, Yasin al-Hamzi (from the Hamzat-‘Ajayni family), was known as ma’moor al-tabu (land registration officer). The land involved in the distribution was either aradi ‘utul, owned by the government and usually rocky and not fit for cultivation, known to the Turks as jiftlik; or al-masha’, land owned by no one, and commonly shared by the whole community.”
In his diary, Abu Isam wrote that “From the north of Lubya to the borders of Tiberias belonged to the Shanashri family. Every family took land parallel to their houses. The plain of al-Hima was divided equally among all the families of the village.^¹¹⁶ Every hamula distributed the land between the families, and then to the different members of each family. They used the measure unit with the name faddan, which is equivalent to 200 dunums.”

Also included in the land distribution scheme were Tallit al-Khayimi, situated 200 metres from the wells of the khan where Arnaud, the Crusader leader killed by Salah al-Din al-Ayyoubi is said to have pitched his tent (khaimi) and ‘Ard al-Kasayir, named to commemorate the defeat of the Crusaders. The dossier on Lubya compiled by Zionist intelligence also noted that there were 100 ^dunums^of^waqf^land^{(religious endowment property) registered in the name of the mosque and valued, according to the land registry, at 65 Palestinian}^liras^.¹¹⁷

Jewish organizations began buying land in Lubya and other areas of the Galilee at the end of the nineteenth century.^¹¹⁸ The Jewish Colonization Association (JCA)^¹¹⁹ along with the Jewish National Fund or Keren Kayemet Leisrael (JNF) were among the most influential and effective organizations in buying land from Palestinians. After World War I, a separate shareholding company, PICA, was founded for the purpose of managing Jewish holdings in Palestine.
At that time, the long-term policy of those Jewish organizations was unclear to Palestinian Arab farmers. For the Zionist movement, however, the acquisition of land was a critical element of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Prior to 1920, for example, Jews owned less than 3 percent (650,000 dunums) of land in the country, the majority of which was in the coastal regions and in Jerusalem.^¹²⁰
Even more problematic was the fact that Palestine was not a land without a people as characterized by Zionist movement and one of its leading figures, British Zionist writer Israel Zangwill.^¹²¹ Acquisition of sufficient land to establish an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine would inevitably result in the displacement of the indigenous Arab or non-Jewish population. According to Theodore Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement,
When we occupy the land we shall bring immediate benefit to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries. While denying it any employment in our own country...The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly...Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us something far more than they are worth... But we are not going to sell them anything back.^¹²²
The process of land acquisition in Palestine was facilitated by the adoption of new land legislation by the Ottoman government and later by the British Mandate administration.^¹²³ This included the Ottoman Land Law and the 1928 Settlement of Tithe Ordinance. ^{[See Hadawi]}^{These laws failed to protect the largely rural Palestinian Arab population and left them vulnerable to land takeovers.}
Many of the Arab ^fallahiin^{, for example, feared that land registration lists could be used by the authorities to conscript men into the army. Others found registration fees too expensive. Palestinians who were able and dared to register their land often had to borrow money from the bank in exchange for mortgaging their share of it. The}^mukhtars^{and the heads of families were the main beneficiaries of this system, and played further on the fears of landowners.}^{According to statistics for 1871-1914, no more than a quarter of Palestinian land was registered.}
In order to avoid taxation, land would sometimes be registered in the name of an absentee landowner or the village mukhtar who would then turn around and sell the land for a profit without the knowledge of the landowner. When the farmer could not pay the tax, the mortgaged land remained the only way to pay the debt. Some families from Lubya emigrated in order to avoid paying the tax. Abu Majid remembered that the Bakrawi family moved to Hauran in Syria, however, later on their son returned to Lubya.
Most of the land sold by Lubyans was the result of negotiations between Abdel-Ghani Beidoun, a Lebanese absentee landowner, and Jewish colonization organizations. Beidoun, Sursok and other rich families were known to own large areas of land in Palestine, and landowners like them had, in general, good relations with the Ottoman regime. Lubyans borrowed money from Abdel-Ghani Beidoun in return for mortgaging their land. Transactions took place at the agricultural bank in Samakh.^¹²⁴
The first land transaction in Lubya took place in 1880. A few plots were sold to Zaki Affandi Beidoun, who later sold them by auction to Abdel-Ghani Beidoun. He in turn sold them to the representative of the Jewish Colonisation Association, Nathan Narcis Levin, who was of French citizenship. Another transaction took place in February 1888, between Mustafa al-Ali and Abdel-Ghani Beidoun. The former mortgaged property registered in his name as per kushans no. 113 and 112.
In 1902 Baron Rothschild bought part of the land of Lubya, but Lubyans “refused to deliver the land to its new owners in spite of receiving the total price of the land.”^¹²⁵ This incident was one of the first of many confrontations between the two communities in Lubya and al-Shajara. One of the main reasons for the confrontation is that the deal took place between Beidoun and the Jewish Colonization Association without the knowledge of Lubyans themselves.^¹²⁶
According to material in the British archives the first requests and petitions to acquire land in Lubya during the period of the British mandate in Palestine were presented in 1923. The majority of land acquisitions in Lubya actually took place between 1920 and 1943. Between 1922 and 1948 Jewish ownership of land across Palestine increased from approximately 1,020 km²(1925) to around 1,734 km²(May 1948).^¹²⁷According to British mandate sources, Jews owned 1,051 dunums of land in Lubya in 1944/45 out of a total area of 39,629 dunums.^¹²⁸Jewish sources state that out of the total village lands (39,629 dunums), PICA acquired 3,484 dunums in Lubya and 2,682 dunums in neighbouring Sarjuni.^¹²⁹
Land agents in Lubya

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