Read Palestine

Saliha

Properties2
tags
aliases

2 min read

Summary

Upper Galilee border village whose residents had resisted the presence of the Arab Rescue Army in their village, and which was nevertheless subjected to a massacre by regular Israeli soldiers during Operation Hiram, in both Pappe’s and Manna’s accounts (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.98).

Details

  • In Manna, Saliha is named among the border villages — Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Hula and Sa’sa’ — in which the Israeli army carried out killings including massacres, pillage and rape on the day of occupation or shortly after, in villages that had put up no resistance; Saliha’s inhabitants had even resisted the ARA’s presence, which did not save them (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.98).
  • According to Yisrael Galili’s report at the political conference of the Mapam party, ninety-four people were killed in the massacre at Saliha; documentation published in 1985 based on verbal testimonies lists one hundred and five people killed, with their names and ages (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.98).
  • Manna sets Saliha against Dayr Yasin’s central symbolic place in Palestinian memory: few have heard of the Saliha massacre, carried out by regular soldiers at a late stage of the war, and it was neither unique nor exceptional in the ethnic cleansing of upper Galilee (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.98).
  • Mapam activist Yosef Waschitz wrote a report discussing the savage incidents in Safsaf and Saliha and other villages occupied in Operation Hiram, but Waschitz, Aharon Cohen and others who heard of them did nothing (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.103).
  • Pappe counts Saliha among the thirteen villages captured in southern Lebanon in which executions took place, saying Israeli troops butchered more than 100 people there (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.226).

Where sources disagree

  • Pappe places Saliha among villages captured in southern Lebanon; Manna treats Saliha as an upper Galilee border village of Palestine. The killings figures also differ in form: Pappe’s “more than 100”, Manna’s Galili report of ninety-four and his 1985 testimony list of one hundred and five. All are kept as printed in each source.

Nakba and Survival, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Safsaf, Hula, Operation Hiram

Graph View

Backlinks