Summary
Bedouin clan settled near Mount Tabur (Tabor) in the lower Galilee, most of whom became refugees in Jordan and Syria after a June 1948 massacre of the clan head’s family, and whose remaining members in 1954 answered six months of collective curfew and exile orders by asking the Mount Tabur monastery to convert to Christianity — a move that lifted the siege (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.213-215).
Details
- Relations with Jewish neighbours were generally good before the war, until the 16 March 1948 incident at kibbutz Keshet in which seven Jewish young men were killed, including Eli Ben Tzvi, son of the Zionist leader who became Israel’s second president; Yigal Allon calmed demands for immediate retribution and urged postponing it (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.213-214).
- The vengeance came on 8 June 1948 against the family of clan head ‘Ali Nimr al-‘Agla: the two blind men, two sisters of the clan head and their children who had remained were all killed and their bodies dismembered and hidden in large oil containers, and buried by returning relatives in a collective grave in a cave near al-Mansur spring (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.214).
- A few dozen families who stayed took refuge with their relatives the al-Shibli Arabs; some who lost all their lands became smugglers routinely crossing the borders (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.214).
- At the end of 1954 rifles were stolen from the arsenal of the Shadmot Dvora settlement; settlers and police accused the clan without evidence, the military government imposed a permanent curfew on the whole clan and exiled some of the accused to Shafa ‘Amr, Majd al-Krum and Tarshiha (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.214).
- Clan notables climbed to the Mount Tabur monastery and asked to convert to Christianity; monks contacted the Nazareth churches and the Vatican, clan members began Christian instruction, the press took up the story, and the military government ended the embarrassing issue quietly — clan members retrieved two of the stolen rifles from Jordan, the authorities accepted the theft had been commercial, and the curfew was lifted (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.214-215).
- Manna reads the story as demonstrating both the military government’s wide discretion to impose collective punishment and the remainers’ “craftiness” in exploiting the authorities’ sensitivities (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.215).