The Village Files (Acre)

 

  • In the late 1930, a group of Zionist academics suggested to the Zionist leadership to prepare a file on each village in Palestine. Originally the idea was to show that the Palestinian were, as one of them put it, “aliens”, primitive, with loose roots in the country on the one hand and gather much information for their future displacement on the other. The same person wrote to the Zionist leadership “I assume that many of the Arabs who live in the country today are aliens, not only of not having roots in an ancient past, but in fact came as immigrants in recent years”. He was confident that such research would prove that “the common wisdom that the Muslims who dwell in Palestine are indigenous to the country and this is there only homeland”. Further it will prove, he promised, that Palestinian farmers had no legal titles for their land ownership which will benefit the Jewish National Fund (the outfit that was responsible for purchasing land and settling Jews on it), as such “it would enhance the JNF project of redeeming the lands”.

    The need to register the villages was supported by the Zionist leadership was also due the failure by 1940 to purchase lands in any meaningful way for the future Jewish State and a forceful takeover would be necessary.

    One of main experts on the Palestinian society, Ezra Danin, wrote in April 1940 there is a need “to know well the paths, the structures of the villages and identify who lives in them”. He was appointed to head this project. He added the towns and the demand from the data collectors to know who participated in the 1936 Arab Revolt and in what role. An index card library was prepared.

    The files grew in volume and included information of water resources, ancient history (to find out if there was connection to biblical time), land regime, size and quality. As well as the villages’ sources of living, the main clans, and the relationship between them and with other villages, people’s professions, who served in the British army or police, how many weapons were there and up to what was grown on trees and in the gardens. The details were minute. Who is the expert of excavating wells, who founded the schools, who are the teachers etc.

    At first 58, out 1000, villages were surveyed (in 1940). Within a couple of years, it grew to 388 before it covered almost all the villages in Palestine. The information was gathered by a network of collaborators inside the rural community and reconnaissance and espionage journeys into the villages. As one of those taking part in it recalled:

    “We had to learn the basic structure of the village… So that we can attack in the most effective way possible”.

    The village files became operative once they were appended to Plan Gimel, Plan C (see blog…) preparing the Jewish settler community for a possible end of the British mandate. At that stage it included aerial photographs of each village as well.

    These systematic preparations were used as guidance for the future occupiers of these villages and help them to decide whom to execute, whom to expel, which village to destroy and which land to confiscate once the ethnic cleansing began in February 1948.

    There is a good question to be asked. Is it also a valid source for the social history of rural Palestine? Judging from the overview for the villages for the Acre district, brought here, it is a very distorted, orientalist and raciest point of view. The overview describes a primitive rural society, infested with infighting, unwilling to change – with the obvious message that removing it would be justified or tolerable. Other sources tell of the dynamics of change in the Palestinian rural society, of solidarity and steadfastness (one feature that repeated itself is the absence of schools in some villages, this particular report is from 1943, after the second World War, many of these villages were modernized and added schools. This was another aspect of the catastrophe, the Nakba, that when finally life improved and was on the ascendence it was brutally cut short by the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

    What passes in the overview as primitive, stagnated, and helpless was the natural way in which the villages interacted with the ecology and nature around them – the files do present well the richness of springs and well, providing enough water for the villagers, all gone by now; but like all colonialists, the settlers never thought they had anything to learn from the indigenous people. The result was an ecological catastrophe from which Palestine suffers to this day.

    Several final notes:

    • Almost in every village the male population’s age is given in a detailed manner. Especially the age group 18-48. Whether a village was destroyed and expelled or just occupied, this group was apriori suspected as being of “military age” and were sent to prisoners labour camps or executed in more rare cases.

    • Acre is a unique province. The only one where relatively many Palestinian villages remained. The village files do not give any indication that those villages which remained, again quite an exceptional survival during the Nakba (apart from the Wadi Ara area), were left intact by the ethnic cleansing power. They remained because some of them were occupied late in the day, and there was more resistance and fatigue on the side of the Israeli army and in some cases, local commanders were “content” with evicting the people but leaving the villages intact, and thus they were later populated with internal Palestinian refugees.

    • The file enables historians to have a detailed list of the Palestinians killed during the Arab Revolt by British forces and some by internal fighting. More importantly, it described graphically in some cases the methods of killing by the British army, most common running over captives with car in order to kill or maim them as punishment, burning houses or killing stocks.

    • The Zionist discourse should not be overlooked. Whether it is “the troubles” referring to the Arab Revolt, or “terrorists” and inciters when referring to the Palestinians who took part in the revolt.

    • There is an interesting reference to a village which is not in the district, Safuriya, in the name it would be given after its destruction by the Israeli army in 1948 [Zipori]. As in the case of Zionist painters which drew the ominously landscape without Palestinian villages, which turned out be the reality on the ground years later.

    • The Village files tell you how many people guarded the village. The number moved between one to three or four at most. This was crucial information that planted the confidence in the Zionist mind that it would be very easy to occupy rural Palestine.

    Here is the translation of the village files in one district, the district of Acre. As can be seen from the document, an overview prefaced the detailed description of the villages. The files will be in two batches.

    Final comment: where I noted the “village is still there today” does not always tell the whole story, as in most cases the villages were left intact but many of its people were expelled. Most of their land, possession and livestock were robbed.

  • Al-Naqura 21.12.42

    Lebanese al-Naqura 21.12.42

    Kafr Iqrit (Acre province) 21.12.42

    Kafr al-Zib (Acre province) 21.12.42

    Al-Surrwana (Acre province) 22.12.42

    Kafr Yasif (Acre province) 22.12.42

    Al-Basa (Acre province and police) 22.12.42

    Jdeideh (Acre province and police) 24.12.42

    Majd al-Krum (Acre Province, Majd al-Krum police) 5.1.43

    Kuweikat (Acre province) 7.1.43

    Sha'ab (Acre province) 7.?.43

    Al-Miyar (Acre province) 7.1.43

    Al-Rameh (Acre province) 7.1.43

    Dir al-Asad (Acre province) 7.1.43

    Sajur (Acre Province) 7.1.43

    Al-Buke'a (Acre province) 8.1.43

    Dir al-Qasi (Acre province) 8.1.43

    Al-Birweh (Acre province) 10.1.43

    Al Ba'ena (Acre Province) 10.1.43

    Al-Manawah (Acre province) 3.2.43

    Tarshiha (Acre province, Tarshiha police) [no date]

    Tarbiha (Acre province) 24.3.43

    Qasra (Acre province) 24.3.43

    Kafr Dan (Acre province) 1.4.43

    Kafr Yarka (Acre province) 1.4.1943

    Al-Mazra'a (Acre province) [no date]

    Al-Makker (Acre province) 1.4.43

    Abu Snan (Acre Province) 1.4.43

    Jat (Acre province) 1.4.1943

    Al-Ruyas (Acre province) 1.4.43

    Al-Manshiyah (Acre province) 1.4.1943

    Tamra (Acre province) 1.4.43

    Nahaf (Acre Province) 1.4.43

    Suhmata (Acre province) 6.4.43

    Ma'aliya (Acre province) 7.4.43

    Al-Nahar (together with Al-Tel and Al-Hameima) (Acre Province) 7.4.43

    Beit Jan (Acre province) 8.4.43

    Al-Sheikh Danun (Acre province) 8.4.43

    Al-Sheikh Daud (Acre province) 8.4.43

    Julis (Acre Province) 8.4.43

    Sakhnin (Acre Province) 8.4.43

    Sumriyeh (Acre Province) 8.4.43

    Um al-Farage (Acre Province) 8.4.43

    'Arabeh (Al-Batof) (Acre Province) 8.4.43

    'Ayn al-Asad (Acre province) 8.4.43

    Dir Hana (Acre province) 9.4.43

    Al-Kabri (Acre province) 9.4.1943

    Yanuh (Acre province) 9.4.1943

    Fasuta (Acre province) 9.4.1943

    Kafr 'Anan (Acre province) 10.4.43

    Al-Mansura (Acre Province) 15.4.43

    Kafr Sumiy'a (Acre province, Tarshiha police) 15.4.43