Summary
Large village in the north-western Galilee, the largest of the villages subjected to the revenge version of the ‘destroy-and-expel’ drill in Operation ‘Ben-Ami’ in May 1948, in Pappe’s account; its young men were executed in front of one of its churches after it resisted.
Details
- Bassa, with 3,000 inhabitants, was the largest of the villages — Sumiriyya, Zib, Bassa, Kabri, Umm al-Faraj and Nahr — that the troops of Operation ‘Ben-Ami’ were told had to be eliminated in revenge for the loss of the Jewish convoy to Yechiam (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.173-174).
- It took more than a day to defeat Bassa, because of the resistance from the village militiamen and some Arab Liberation Army volunteers; its resistance was seen as another reason to ‘punish’ the village beyond simply expelling its people (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.174).
- Nizar al-Hanna’s maternal grandmother was a teenager when Israeli troops entered Bassa and ordered all the young men to be lined up and executed in front of one of the churches; she watched two of her brothers, one 21, the other 22 and recently married, being executed by the Haganah (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.174-175).
- The total destruction that followed the massacre spared a Greek Orthodox church and a domed Muslim shrine. The village was vast — 25,000 dunam, 17,000 of them cultivated — and its territory today includes a military airport, a kibbutz and a development town; the remains of its elaborate water system, completed just before the place was wiped out, are still visible (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.175).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Arab Liberation Army, Haganah