Summary
A strip of territory fifty kilometres long and five kilometres wide, from Kafr Qasim in the south to Megiddo in the north, with twenty-seven villages and smaller hamlets and 31,000 inhabitants, transferred from Jordanian to Israeli control under the 3 April 1949 armistice and in May 1949, in Manna’s account (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.151, 188).
Details
-
The transfer agreement included clear commitments that villagers’ rights to land and property would not be violated; Israel, in Manna’s account, respected most commitments but interpreted them narrowly, most original inhabitants stayed, and thousands of refugees in Baqa al-Gharbiyya and other small villages were expelled; estimates of those expelled or forced to migrate from the Triangle vary between 4,000 and 8,500 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.188-189).
-
Jordan consented without consulting or even informing the population; Manna stresses the contradiction that Israel sought to annex a region of tens of thousands of Palestinians while making every effort to shrink the number of Arabs who remained (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.187-188).
-
‘Arif al-‘Arif, under “The Rhodes Agreement and the Tragedy of the Triangle,” accused all Jordanian-side participants in the surrender of the region of treason and wrote in detail about the maps used and how the Israeli side exploited them; no one was held accountable, and the transfer documents remain unavailable to researchers (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.187-188).
-
Under Israeli military rule the southern Triangle’s inhabitants suffered confiscation and plundering of thousands of dunums of al-Tira and Qalansuwa land, a permanent nightly curfew, and repression by police mostly Circassian and Druze under, in Qalansuwa, the Circassian officer Idris Bakir (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.188-189).
-
Late in 1949 Israel began expelling the small hamlets (khirab); military governor Emmanuel Moore (Markovsky) reported that by March 1950 the remaining population of twenty small villages and farms had been forced to migrate; al-Ittihad reported in February 1951 the expulsion of al-Bayada, ‘Ayn al-Sahla, ‘Ayn al-Zaytuna, ‘Ayn Jarrar and others in Wadi ‘Ara (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.190).
-
Triangle villages near the Jordanian border endured seven years of killings and maltreatment in the “border war,” climaxing, in Manna’s framing, in the Kafr Kassim massacre of 29 October 1956 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.187).
-
For the smaller villages, the military governor Emmanuel Moore (Markovsky) informed officials that by March 1950 the remaining population of twenty small villages and farms had been forced to migrate, while Tawfiq Tubi’s Knesset questions concerned small villages numbering thirteen which had been subjected to expulsion (both Nakba and Survival, PDF p.190; recorded as printed in Open questions on the source page).
-
Chapter 5’s “routine repression” section (part 6) restates the transfer clause — a citizen who chose to emigrate could take all his belongings and receive full compensation — and the pressure on Wadi ‘Ara to emigrate, the forced migrants being moved mostly to Umm al-Fahm and Baqa al-Gharbiya; the hamlets named are Bayada, ‘Ayn al-Sahla, ‘Ayn al-Zaytuna and ‘Ayn Jarar, as printed on PDF p.211 (the part 5 pages print ‘Ayn Jarrar) (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.210-211).
-
The border regime’s emblematic incidents in Manna’s telling: the ‘Ara shootings of 23 June 1952, in which soldiers fired without warning on Eid al-Fitr villagers come to see relatives across the border, killing two and wounding five; and the al-Tira search operation of 31 July 1953 — the “Day of the Airplane” — a day-long curfew and house-to-house search after alleged fire at an Israeli airplane, with extensive damage and theft, a miscarriage, and acting defense minister Pinhas Lavon’s satirical Knesset dismissal of “the delicate pianos and aristocratic furniture” in al-Tira’s houses (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.211-213).
-
Some Triangle villages, Manna notes, created special cemeteries for “infiltrators,” and dozens of Triangle citizens were killed each year in their villages during combing and search operations (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.212).
Related pages
Nakba and Survival, Israel–Jordan Armistice Agreement (Rhodes, 1949), Wadi Ara, Kufr Qari’, Al-Jalama, Kafr Kassim, ‘Arif al-‘Arif