Summary
Galilee village a mile west of Safad, cleansed by Moshe Kalman’s Palmach troops on 2 May 1948 under Operation ‘Broom’; in Pappe’s account the best documented of the three massacres staged near urban centres to precipitate flight, its story forming the basis of Elias Khoury’s epic novel Bab al-Shams.
Details
-
The village lay in a low-lying canyon on the road between Mayrun and Safad, graced by a stream surrounded by hot mineral pools; its strategic location and the local Jewish settlers who coveted land nearby made it a target (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.141).
-
It was one of three villages — with Nasr al-Din near Tiberias and Tirat Haifa near Haifa — where, in Pappe’s account, groups of ‘males between the age of 10 and 50’ were executed in order to intimidate the village population and the nearby towns (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.140-141).
-
On 2 May 1948, after a dawn mortar bombardment, Moshe Kalman’s troops herded the surrendered villagers into the centre; a hooded informer picked out the men named on the intelligence officers’ pre-prepared list, who were taken away and shot, and thirty-seven teenagers were shot with their hands tied behind their backs after Yusuf Ahmad Hajjar said the surrendered “expected to be treated humanely” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.141-142).
-
Hans Lebrecht, ordered at the end of May 1948 to divert the village’s stream, found the village totally destroyed with many bodies of women, children and babies near the local mosque, and convinced the army to burn the bodies (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.142).
-
The military documents report seventy people shot in all; other sources give a much higher number, and Netiva Ben-Yehuda’s fictionalised account gives several hundred executed (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.142-143). The discrepancy is recorded on the source page.
-
The remaining villagers were stripped of their belongings, driven to the edge of the village under shots fired over their heads, and banished (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.143).
-
In Chapter 10 Pappe returns to Ayn al-Zaytun as it appears in the JNF’s Birya Forest: the website text erases the thriving Palestinian community wiped out in May 1948, presenting ‘Ein Zeitun’ as a medieval Jewish settlement site with picnic tables and parking (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.266-267).
-
The remains of the Ayn al-Zaytun mosque were turned into a milk farm as late as 2004, its founding-date stone removed and its walls covered with Hebrew graffiti (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.253).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Moshe Kalman, Safad, Tantura