Colonizing Palestine by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury;

Author:Areej Sabbagh-Khoury;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2023-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Beʾeri, the person most familiar with Abu Zureiq, claimed in a later interview that a force of al-Qawuqji’s men stayed in the village but that the inhabitants were not really involved in the fighting and maintained a neutral stance between the two sides. However, the mere fact that their village served as a base for attacks sufficed for them to be considered aligned with the enemy forces, even if the settlers had personal relations with them. Beʾeri claimed that the weapons possessed by Abu Zureiq inhabitants did not exceed the norm for an Arab village in that region:

Then, when there was an assault on the village, after the liberation of Mishmar ha-Emek [from the siege], when the village was charged, several small Haganah units attacked Abu Zureiq. We [kibbutz members] were on standby and did not do much. The villagers naturally returned fire; it is customary for homes in an Arab village to possess weapons for defense against neighbors, robbers—after all, here in the valley, until some decades ago, Bedouins would come from the Bisan Valley to raid the villages. This [Haganah attack] failed, and the villagers escaped to the [Jezreel] Valley.34

Beʾeri describes the escape as a spontaneous act but noted that escaping villagers were chased. “And if an escape begins, then everyone is on the run. It’s a matter of hardly an hour. They were chased to the valley, but we let them escape. Very few were killed.”

Beʾeri presented a different account in a letter of April 14, 1948, two days after the conquest of Abu Zureiq, to Haganah chief of staff Israel Galili, Moshe Mann (of Kibbutz Merhavia, member of the Haganah general staff, and eventually Golani Brigade commander), Baruch Rabinov (head of finances at the Haganah general staff), and Yaʿakov Riftin (of Kibbutz Ein-Shemer and a political leader of Hashomer Hatzair). There he wrote of the killing of inhabitants, both during the takeover and while going through village homes after the conquest:

When the village of Abu Zureiq was conquered and its villagers, wishing to save themselves, ran into the fields of the valley, units from the neighboring settlements came out and surrounded them. There was some exchange of fire during which several Arabs were killed. Others surrendered or fell into the hands of unarmed Jews. Most of them were killed. And these were not gang members, as was later written in ʿAl hamishmar [the MAPAM daily] but defenseless, defeated fallahin. Only members of my kibbutz [Hazorea] took prisoners. . . . Inside the village, several people who had hidden there were discovered some hours after the fighting and were killed. . . . Some say there was also a case of rape. But this might merely be a braggart’s tale made up by the soldiers. Afterward all the village houses and the cistern were blown up. . . . of the property inside the houses, and the livestock remaining without shepherds, [our] men took whatever they laid their hands on; one took a coffee pot, another a horse or a cow.

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