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Tarshiha

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aliases

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Summary

One of the largest villages of western upper Galilee, with over 4,000 inhabitants on the eve of the Nakba, most of whom were uprooted during Operation Hiram; its few hundred remaining residents, mainly Christians, refused army pressure to leave and remained, in Manna’s account (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.86, 110).

Details

  • Tarshiha’s aerial bombardment at Operation Hiram’s opening killed dozens and buried others under the rubble of their homes, an example Manna gives of the bombardment of several villages that spread fear and terror among the population (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.86).

  • During its occupation most of Tarshiha’s residents were uprooted and forced to migrate, especially the Muslims who constituted the vast majority, so that only a few hundred residents remained, mainly Christians (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.110).

  • The government wanted to settle some Jews from Romania in the abandoned houses, and the army put pressure on the remaining residents to leave, but they did not submit to the pressure and contacted several parties asking for help, which led to their remaining in their homes (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.110).

  • Tarshiha is named among the places where murders and massacres occurred in the border area, alongside Jish and Sa’sa’, whose proximity did not in the end prevent some villages nearby from remaining (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.110).

  • Communist activists in Tarshiha knew, on the eve of Operation Hiram, of the National Liberation League’s merger into the Israeli Communist Party, one reason the occupation met no serious resistance (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.85).

  • Chapter 4’s remainder (part 5) adds Tarshiha’s looting: soldiers gathered the remaining inhabitants at the church, imposed a curfew and systematically robbed the vacant houses of oil, olives, wheat, cotton, furniture and the dried tobacco harvest; Dubek agent Yusif Nahhas was brought back on 1 November 1948 to collect tobacco from abandoned houses for the company free of charge, an economic motive that let some inhabitants stay or return (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.175).

  • Ten members of the Hawwari family were killed in the aerial bombardment of the village by Abie Nathan, as Manna names the pilot; Fatma Hawwari, grievously wounded and left paralyzed, returned home through the Red Cross in 1950 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.176).

  • On 16 January 1949 a combing operation arrested 33 heads of families with 131 family members; Jibra’il Bishara’s memoirs put about 130 expelled, taken to Megiddo and on to Nablus, Amman, Syria and Lebanon (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.176-177).

  • In the same 16 January 1949 operation another 30 individuals were expelled from neighbouring Ma’liya, as printed there — the same page also prints the village’s name Mi’lya — including historian Elias Shoufani, sixteen at the time, who described the caravan of forced migrants in his memoirs and later returned to Mi’lya (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.177).

  • A government committee on 21 January 1949 chose transferring Tarshiha’s inhabitants to Haifa or ‘Akka — Joseph Weitz wanted the whole village depopulated to settle 1,000 Jews — but villagers, with communists in the vanguard, refused voluntary transfer, refused Bishop Hakim’s June 1949 inducements, and survived a December 1949 cabinet-approved expulsion talk opposed mainly by Moshe Sharett (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.177-178).

  • Romanian Jewish newcomers were settled in confiscated Tarshiha houses while original villagers remained; the military governor used Arab builders, carpenters and ironworkers, unpaid, to repair settlers’ houses; the Supreme Court ruled Fahd Mikha’il Khalil’s house, taken in May 1949 and reoccupied by him in August 1953, had become state property (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.178-179).

Nakba and Survival, Bishop Hakim, Operation Hiram, Jish, Druze

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