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


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Lubyans I interviewed remembered several Jewish individuals responsible for facilitating land sales in the village. Yosef Nachmani was the person whom all elderly Lubyans had heard of or knew about due to his position with the Jewish Colonisation Association in Haifa. “If I say to you that we didn’t sell, the documents will show the opposite,” said Abu Tal’at. “Yes, a lot of people sold plots of land to the Jews.”

They sold the land through a man named Nachmani. Once a Sheikh from the Khalidi family came and urged us not to sell the land to the Jews. He said: ‘How you can sell one dunum for one pound? This land has been for your grandfathers for thousands of years? You have to be afraid of God.’130 The Arab Committee proposed to buy from those who would sell their land, but nothing happened as a result of this offer.”

According to Um Tal'at, “land was sold to Arabs and to Jews. The sons of Hamza sold land to their uncles in exchange for gold, but they did not draw up official documents to that effect, so they went to Tiberias and sold the same land to the Jews. Nachmani was the Jews’ representative in the affair. Sometimes the Jews gave Lubyans a piece of land nearer to their village in exchange for one nearer to their settlement.”



Abu Wajdi remembered “a meeting when Nachmani came and proposed to our elderly men to come and settle in Tiberias as part of the Tawafra clan, but they refused to accept the offer out of fear of being accused of collaboration. They told him, ‘We stay with our people, wherever destiny may take us.’” Nahom Abbo confirmed Nachmani's role in acquiring land in the village. “Nachmani bought a lot of land in Lubya. The Jews were raising money to buy the land. It was not that they wanted to expel the Arabs, but they did want to own land. The Arabs were seeking to sell their land.”
“Four people from the village helped Nachmani buy land from Lubyans,” said Abu Majid. Due to the sensitivity of the subject, I was asked by the interviewees not to mention their names. “Nachmani pitched a tent especially for the four men and every day slaughtered a sheep and distributed it among them. Mr. ‘X’ was known as the outsider (khariji), because of the help he gave to Nachmani. He had to hide for what he did, until the end of the revolution in 1939. After that the people stopped selling land, but continued exchanging those plots that fell in the vicinity of the two communities’ lands.”
Abu Muhammad Kilani spoke about another Lubyan “who was a middle-man (simsar) and sold land to the Jews during the time of Nachmani. In 1975, ‘M’ came here and I met him at the house of Abu Mahmoud in al-Makr. We stayed all night together. I asked him how much land he owned. He told me that he owned 1,000 dunums which he got from Nachmani, who officially registered them in his name. He had found the land deeds in Amman at the Land Registration Office and distributed the plots as follows: 400 dunums to his son Muhammad, another 400 to his second son Mahmoud, and the remaining piece of 200 dunums to his wife. It was actually his cousin ‘K’ from Tur’an who invited him to come over from Jordan to visit the country.”
“People repeatedly used to ask ‘M’ to sell land in exchange for payment,” said Um Tal'at. “Every dunum at that time coast 90 kirsch. ‘M’ used to work with Nachmani, and even as recently as two years ago, when he visited Lubya before his death, he asked around for Nachmani’s wife in Tiberias.” When I interviewed the brother of ‘M’ in Irbid, I asked him about the accusations against his brother. He denied them categorically. He said that some Lubyans themselves asked him to exchange their land with the Jews.
Different groups from Lubya targeted the main persons who were entangled in land sales. This included the Black Hand Band (‘Isabat al-Kaf al-Aswad). In the late 1940s a revolutionary activist tried to assassinate one Lubyan who was well-known for co-operating with Nachmani. Younis al-Mani131, “witnessed the killing of a Moroccan Jew named Abu Riha, who worked at exchanging our land with neighbouring Jews. I was in Tiberias in 1946 when I saw a man wearing a gallabiyya (an Arab loose dress for men) approach another and suddenly raise his hand and shoot. I shouted: ‘He killed him, he killed him!’ Before falling to the ground, the dying man tried to hold on to the shoulders of Sheikh Abu Khalil al-Tabarani, and the two fell down together.”
“I later saw another Jew holding Abu Riha and lamenting. The man who killed him, Yousef Abdel-Ghani, was from the ‘Isabit al-Kaf al-Aswad, a military branch of the revolution. That same man also killed the mayor of Tiberias a few months later during the fighting, which broke out between the Palestinians and the Jews.” When I was in Jordan in 1996, I tried to meet Yousef Abdel-Ghani, who was one of the main active personalities against people engaged in land sales, but was told that he had died a few months before. He was originally from a poor family in Lubya.

Land sales in the archives
During my research in the Israeli archives I discovered literally hundreds of papers relating to the issue of land in Lubya. At the same time, I found few documents among Palestinians. This illustrates one of the major differences between Zionist and Palestinian relations to the land. The indigenous inhabitants of Lubya took it for granted that the land they planted, harvested and used for grazing livestock was their land.
The following letters from the British Registrar of Lands in Tiberias and Jerusalem and the administration of the Jewish Colonisation Association (JCA) based in Haifa illustrate the level to which the organised land-purchase operations reached and the extent of the co-operation that existed between the British authorities and Zionist officials. From a whole file of papers about Lubya, I have chosen a few letters that will highlight the main modus operandi of the Jewish Colonization Association in Palestine and its impact on Lubya.
On 31 July 1923, the British Registrar of Lands in Tiberias sent the following letter to his headquarters in Jerusalem concerning JCA’s demand to partition the village of “Loubieh”.
The Jewish Colonisation Association bought from Abdel-Ghani Beidoun un-partitioned shares of many plots in the village of Loubieh [Lubya]. Said society requested partition many times during the Turkish Regime and many cases were brought to court on this subject but without success. Lately, the villagers agreed to partition by agreement and a general survey was made in the whole village. The village was partitioned into plots according to boundaries described in the kushan. The excess area of the locality if any was divided in equal shares to the kushan holders of that locality. After measuring and fixing the plots, the JCA and the villagers agreed that the society should take, for all their shares in the 12 plots of which the village is composed, the whole plots of three or four localities in proportion with their shares in the 12 localities. The remaining plots will be allotted to the villagers, so that the society may have all of its land combined into one plot.
The register in which the purchase of the JCA was entered also some of other kushans found in the hand of villagers are missing, also the documents relating to the said kushans are not found in the office, but there is a booklet legalised by the Ma’mur el Tabu [A Turkish word meaning registrar] of 1328 hijri/1910 in which it is clearly shown the number of shares, date, the name of the villagers who sold their land to the said Mr. Beidoun, which figures conform with the Daftar Assas [An Arabic word that means the original registration book ] of Loubieh which is found in the office.
The kushans of ICA are existing and many of the villagers have their kushans in hand so that it will not be difficult to find traces of all the present registered owners of said village.
The Registrar of Lands in Tiberias submitted two transactions to the Jerusalem office as examples of how he thought this partition should proceed, and asking for approval for his plan. The plans were based on the original one that had been signed by landowners in the village. The document reads:
The kushans of the two parties in file no. 479 are produced but in file no. 498 the kushans of Diab el Joodi are lost. He claims that some were lost by the government and he produces the bill of the agricultural bank obtained back after the occupation - in which the numbers of kushans are mentioned. We have an order of the public custodian to register some in the name of Diab el Joodi as he paid his debt. (29/22 order no. 285 of 14 February 1922). I require your guidance as to whether: a general plan will be accepted as basis for the all transactions or a separate form L.R.27 should be prepared for partition....”


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