Summary
Border village of mostly Christian Maronites, with a few Muslims, which escaped the expulsion ordered for the 5–15 kilometre Lebanese border strip after its dignitaries reached the minorities ministry and the order was changed — most Christians stayed, most Muslims were uprooted, in Manna’s account (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.101, 108).
Details
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Jish’s residents were partially spared the ethnic cleansing of its area: west of Jish, Sa’sa’, Dayr al-Qasi, Suhmata, al-Nabi Rubin, Suruh and Tarbikha suffered uprooting and expulsion (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.97, 101).
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The Israeli army carried out killings including massacres, pillage and rape in Jish as in Safsaf, Saliha, Hula and Sa’sa’, in villages that had put up no resistance (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.98).
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Ordered to evacuate under Moshe Carmel’s border-strip curfew and expulsion orders, Jish’s Christian dignitaries went to Mano Friedman, the ministry of minorities’ representative in the Safad region; Bechor Shitrit and Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi together contacted the army command in the area and managed to get the expulsion order changed, so the majority of Christians stayed in Jish while most Muslims were uprooted to Lebanon (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.108).
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Evicted residents of Kufr Bir’im moved on 19 November 1948 to abandoned houses in Jish, there not being enough houses for all, and Shitrit visited them there the following day with Nazareth’s military governor Elisha Soltz; the government later approved Kufr Bir’im’s people returning from Rumaysh only to live in Jish or elsewhere, not in their own village (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.109-110).
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In eastern Galilee Jish remained at the end of 1948, as did the Circassian village of al-Rihaniyya (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.110).
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Yosef Weitz’s plan to move Jish’s inhabitants to Argentina — code name Operation Yohanan, after Yohanan bin Levi from Jish, chosen because some villagers’ relatives had already immigrated there — won the approval and blessings of the prime minister and foreign minister but failed, most Jish residents continuing to live on their lands (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.182).
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In December 1949 expulsion of Jish with Tarshiha, Hurfaysh, Fassuta and Mi’lya was talked of and approved by Ben-Gurion and most ministers, opposed mainly by Sharett; the villages survived (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.178).
Related pages
Nakba and Survival, Kfar Bir’im, Iqrit, Bechor Shitrit, Mano Friedman, Operation Hiram