Summary
Depopulated village south of Safad to which the authorities forcibly moved the Hulayhel clan of Qadditha in July 1949, where the clan — 110 to 120 people — lived for decades in dilapidated houses and shanties, isolated and without maintenance permits, as Present Absentees (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.22, 202).
Details
- Manna’s wife ‘Aziza’s parents, ‘Ali and Fatima (Shrayda) Hulayhel, were of ‘Akbara near Safad, expelled from Qadditha in 1948; from them Manna learned the suffering of Qadditha’s present absentees (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.22).
- The clan had first been settled, on its December 1948 return, in the depopulated village of al-Ja’una; the July 1949 removal from al-Ja’una to ‘Akbara was carried out by force and against the clan’s wishes, and was denounced in the Knesset by Mapam MK Eliezer Bray, who called it “an assault” by the army and police on the inhabitants of Arab villages in eastern Galilee; Ben-Gurion supported the security forces until the critics quieted (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.202).
- Sayf al-Din al-Zu’bi visited with military governor Elisha Soltz and Mano Friedman and recorded that the village could only be reached on horseback; a road and water were later arranged with Kokhav HaShahar, but visitors up to the mid-1970s still found conditions unfit for human habitation, a potholed dirt road, and houses threatened with collapse for lack of maintenance permission (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.202).
- Friedman and the HaKeren HaKayemet men who visited Abu Husayn at home renewed promises of help that he remembered as just “tranquilizers.” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.202).
Related pages
Nakba and Survival, Qadditha, Mano Friedman, Present Absentees, Safad