Dr Mahmoud Issa
Oral History, Memory and the Palestinian Peasantry:
The Case of Lubya
Oral History: From the Islamic Tradition to Modern Methodology
Oral history was and will remain one of the main sources of our conceptions and
understanding of the different social and historical facts at a specific time in a specific period.
One can say clearly that oral history is as old as history itself, especially before the advent of
writing as a means of communication and later on as a main source for documentation. In the
recent years of Islam in the seventh century and later on, a great controversy dominated the
interpretation and the authenticity of the collected hadeeth (the oral speeches of the prophet
Muhammad) and other prominent personalities, al-Sahaba, who accompanied him in his
prophetic mission. Recollecting all the spoken hadeeths of the prophet from oral resources of
his accompanies and the long period that elapsed until the beginning of its registration poses
a serious question concerning the preciseness and the authenticity of the collected accounts.
It took Islamic/Arabic scholars long years of investigation, analysis, and comparisons to
reach what was believed to be the final version of the exact words of the prophet. AlBukhari, the Arab Islamic historian, was one of the most well known prominent literary
figures of the classical period who challenged the authenticity of hundreds of the different
versions of hadeeths that were recited by different people after the death of the prophet. He
reduced the numbers of hadeeths to less than 2/3 after spending years of collection, analysis,
investigation and comparisons. The process of this analysis demonstrates to us today the
highly scientific and well-researched methodology that our ancestors employed in dealing
with presenting the most authentic registration of the oral accounts of the prophet and his
companions. In many cases, al-Bukhari would travel hundred of miles on his horse to hear
some one who was recommended by others as a reliable and confident source of
remembering the hadeeths of the prophet. One could say that al-Bukhari was one of our Arab
Islamic pioneers in establishing the best techniques and modes of verifying the oral accounts
and histories before writing them down as a credible source of documentation.
With the advent and advancement of printing, the role of the written document and the
validity of its testimony took almost a religious connotation in the plausibility and
authenticity of documents as a vital reliable source of history. But in recent years, and with
the development of colonialist and sub-cultural studies, question marks began to raise
concerning the validity of documents as the only source of recovering the historicity of the
events. Few post modern historians began questioning the ‘objectivity’ of the ‘event’, and the
influence of the ‘subjective’ when recording or registering the ‘objective’ event. Finally, we
are obliged to answer the fundamental question: who made history? And what about the
experiences and the accounts of the ‘illiterate’, the ‘marginal’, the ‘colonised’ and the
‘oppressed’? Are these forces considered to be an inclusive part of our modern history? And
what are the best means of registering and preserving their version of histories?
2
Subjectivity and the personal tendency of those in ‘power’ in presenting their version of the
facts put in doubt the whole concept of ‘total objectivity’. Only recently, oral history began
to establish itself as an independent discipline with its own theories and research
methodologies, especially after people realized the inadequacy of traditional historical
methods. In November 2003 on visit to South Africa to study what south africa have done to
the restitution of land and property in the last ten years post apartheid era, Land Comissioner
Tozi in Pretoria told us that they will employ the oral history technique so as to identify the
lands of the black people who had no written documentation and titles for their expropriated
land; together with other techniques as family geneological trees and cementries of their
ancestors.
Oral History of Rural Palestine
The use of oral history is a more vital and fundamental issue when we regard our own
Palestinian historiography, and the huge lack of information concerning our past and modern
historiography as well, especially because of the strong and dominant discourse of the Zionist
movement, who succeeded to prevail successfully, to a large extent, in marginalising the
indigenous people’s accounts and narratives.
Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written to analyse the Palestinian situation
from almost all aspects: historical, social, economic, psychological, political, etc. But one
fundamental and critical aspect is absent until now, with a few exceptions that I shall mention
later: namely recording history directly from its authentic voices, or 'actors' (to use theatrical
language). The majority of the Palestinian people, fellaheen, the farmers, those who lived all
aspects of 'real' life, whether in daily life: in the fields, in their houses, or in war, imposed on
them from external forces, are absent from history documentation, or to use the Israeli special
term never used by other colonialist powers: 'present absentees'. Not only men, but women
voices too are also absent, neglected and marginalized in many ways, though they are half of
society. The narratives of the neglected, the marginalized, the alienated, are almost totally
absent from our historiography. Until now, we have only the official Palestinian
documentation and the Israeli version of the events. But the question is still being imposed:
why the Palestinians didn't accomplish the main task of narrating their own histories and
accounts by themselves and not through indirect and mostly selective representation of
others?
Is it because of illiteracy among the rural population in Palestine, among many other
reasons? I fundamentally disagree, but let us suppose that this is correct, then we should ask:
where were our intellectuals and revolutionaries? How come that Chinese and Vietnamese
intellectuals wrote books about the participation of Chinese and Vietnamese peasants in their
revolutions, and Palestinian intellectuals did not?
A prior and vital question is: do we really want to know our modern history or not? And
second, do we believe in new definitions of culture and history, far from the elite's concepts
and their vision and version of history?
The following example will concretely illustrate a key point of what I mean: When Sharif
Kana’ana, professor of anthropology at Birzeit University, first presented his proposal to his
colleagues at the university to start a project to record the histories of the destroyed villages,
3
the reaction of his colleagues was cynical and mocking: ‘Looking for the dead debris of the
past? Are you mad?’, he answered when I discussed with him the issue in Oxford while
participating in a conference on Palestinain Refugees in Europe. Nevertheless, Kana’ana
insisted on sending his students to the remains of the villages in Palestine, to meet the
survivors, and to record their narratives. The results are impressive, and the series of the
destroyed villages has reached twenty-seven, out of 531, with the help of other colleagues as
Saleh abd al-Jawad and other collegues at BeirZeit Univ, who felt the necessity of
undertaking
this
huge
project.
Others as Sahira Dirbas, alone, without any institutional support, wrote three books about
demolished villages in Haifa district (Salama, Tira and Birwi) and is still doing research on
her own initiative. At least five other books have been published in Galilee using similar oral
history methods to recollect and register the modern past of the uprooted people. The
question remains: are these private initiatives enough to fulfil the minimum level of rewriting
modern experiences and histories?
After fifty five years of uprooting and exile in one of the biggest ethnic cleansing operations
in modern times, we still have less than forty books written about the destroyed villages,
while the rest -- as many as 531 according to one authority (For fifty years our academics
adopted the number 418 for the villages destroyed in or after 1948, until Abu Sitta1 and other
Israeli sources came up with well documented map showing 531 localities, including all the
localities and helmets in Negev desert). Thanks to the personal engagement of Gassan
Shihabi, who published more than ten books about demolished villages at his own: Dar alShajara-damascus. There may be even more still waiting to have their place in modern
history.
Given the huge loss of documents due to the sudden uprooting of the population from their
houses and lands, there is only one way to fill the gap: to record the lives of the pre-1948
generation through oral history methods as quickly as possible. According to the last estimate
of a Palestinian demographer: Palestinians aged over 68 is between 3.3 and 3.9% of the
whole population. This would make the pool around 210.000 (counting only Palestine and
the Arab host countries, as Rosmary Sayigh wrote in the editorial to Al-Janna magazine,2
concentrated wholly on the issue of Palestinian oral history).
More than fifteen old men and women from Lubya whom I interviewed in the last five years
are dead now. Without their record and words, part of our modern history would be lost.
Already there is a lot that has perished.
Of course there are many theoretical and methodological problems that need to be studied by
those who want to work on a project such as this. I have met with a series of problems when I
started my project to register the accounts of Palestinians from one village Lubya. Just to
mention few of these problematics such as: methods of qualitative interviews, preparation of
questionnaires, choices of place and time, verifications and cross-questioning, the
psychological impact of remembering the past memories, especially when marked by trauma
and tragic events, lapse of time of more than half a century between the event and its newly
recorded oral accounts, fear from persecution as a hindrance to vividly remembering the past(one Lubyan was called by the police of a country after giving interview on the spot of what
happened in 1948 and received a warning not to come back again)-.Even in an old state such
as Denmark, a network of different groups related to national museum are conducting
different projects o record the history of modern Denmark through interviews with old
people, and presented it in especial museum as part of modern Danish history, so that new
4
generations would know what their parents and grandparents thought about their past times.
Other initiatives are incorporating the live stories of the recent refugees in recording their
histories as part of modern Denmark too.
When I started my project on Lubya village, in 1994, it was very modest, and was concerned
mainly with Lubyans living in Denmark. It was amazing to find that from one village alone
there were about one thousand people living there. This led me a step further: to visit the
place itself, something I could only do after I became a Danish citizen. I went there with my
parents and a crew from the main Danish television company. This expedition resulted in a
documentary film of 45 minutes that followed our steps from Denmark to Lubya, and moved
to the families who are still living nearby in Deir Hanna, Nazareth, and Acre.
Weddings, Songs and Celebrations: The Case of Lubya
Tamam 'Ajaini (Deir Hanna), Um Hassan, was born in 1898 in Lubya. She died in 1997 in
Deir Hanna, without visitng Lubya even for one time after the 1948 nakba. The interview
with her had the tone of past memories that refuse to whither or die. Her attitude towards
people has undertones of tenderness and love. ‘May God compensate you for your trouble’,
she said in Arabic when she knew that I had two daughters. In the two months during which I
saw her many times for the purpose of this research project, she refused to talk about Lubya.
‘Lubya is gone (rahat),’ were the only words she uttered. But I did not give up. I continued
encouraging her to speak, and she continued to ask me only about the few old people who
had left for Lebanon and Syria.
One day, unexpectedly, she began to talk. She started with the story of a wedding in the al'Atwat neighbourhood of Lubya. She recounted how she lived with six brothers and their
wives in the same house and how reconciliation took place between families following
disputes. She recalled wedding songs and other broken bits and pieces from her memory. Her
first story was about a dispute between two singers.
The two singers (haddayi) from Deir al-Asad and Hittin were assaulting one another with
verse. One is personifying the female voice, mainly dealing with kinship relations, and the
priority of the cousin to get married with girls from the hamula, otherwise a feud would
ensue. Blood would be spilled if the rules of marriage were not respected.
Kas insab 'al masab
La t'adini ya min sab
Kahwi soda hijaziyyi
Lal-afandiyyi btinsub
Ya minsub la t'adini
Wa bint 'ammi btihmini
Ma'ha saif wa sikkini
Bitkhalli dammak yitba'thar
kumi itla'i waish 'alaiki
Khalli ilhaki minni walaiki
Kannak za'lan bardiek
Mindal janah al-warwar
Mindal mana rayidlak
Willi las'ar bakutlak
Akhalli akhoy yisabbiklak
5
Tabbish rasak bilihjar
Khalli akhook yilakini
Ya bistarji yihakini
Ma'ay saif wa sikkini
Bakhalli dammu yitba'thar
Kumi itla'i waish 'alaiki
Khalli ilhaki minni walaiki
A cup was poured
don't antagonise me
Hijazi coffee is poured
only to the noble
Take care and don't antagonise me
my cousin will protect me
She carries a sword and a knife
with one blow she'll shed your blood
Stand up and don't be afraid
let speech only be between us
I'll turn your anger into peace necromancy is the bee-eater's wing
My brother would interrupt
and crush with stones your head
Let your brother meet me
if he dares to speak
I have a sword and a knife
I will scatter your blood
Stand up and don't be afraid
let speech only be between us.
Tamam, Um Hassan, continued to tell her story in her own lovely way, recounting how the
two poets reconciled after having attacked one another, reflecting the modes of reconciliation
among the fellaheen, in case disputes started. “We lived in one house with my husband
Abdel-Rahman and his five brothers ‘Issa, ‘Abdel-Rahim, Mohammad, 'Eid and 'Ayid. All of
them were married and had their wives and children in that same house. When people came
to visit, they thought that we were sisters. The six brothers were married to women from
different families. One of them, Ghazali al-Wahsh was from al-Maghar. In the house there
was also an inner patio (qa' al-dar) and above it there was an open attic, (siddi). When you
sat there, you felt as if you were sitting in the sky, bil'alali. The entire village was jealous of
the six brothers. I was married to the youngest who also happened to be the strongest among
them. Our mukhtar was Mahmoud Hussein [the father of Abu Tal'at who was also mukhtar in
Irbid until his recent death]. He had four wives, while Yousef al-Mousa had six.3 Lubya was
the mother of all the land (Um al-bilad). There was a struggle between the al-'Atwat and alShihabi families, but al-'Ajaini were the best because they were sensible” commented Um
Hassan..
The tragic episode of a brave woman who refused to marry the man the family proposed,
eloped with her lover, and later being burned in her house by her cousin, Hassan, who was
imprisoned later and executed by the British in Acre prison. Abu Tal'at, the Lubyan mukhtar
in Irbid, judged this tragic event as a result of ignorance among the villagers at the time
being- which gives another clue that elderly people of today have changed their concept of
arranged or exchanged marriages. Abu Tal'at revealed the black chapters of Lubya's history
when people were killed only because of suspicious rumours, concerning relations with the
British and Jews - al-Jalili and Suleiman al-Fatroush case - or even the rumours of love
6
relationship that undergone secretly without the consent of the concerned families or
mukhtars (as we will see in the account of Abu Tala't - Taha's case). Even he was ordered by
the revolution to kill his cousin Mustafa Abu Dheis- the mukhtar's son-, which he refused
categorically. Had he committed this execution, enmity would continue until now among the
same hamula.
”My marriage was the result of an exchange with the family of my sister's husband
Muhammad Ibrahim” commented abu Tal’at, and added “The big wedding celebration (alurs) in which all the village and other neighbours participated, lasted for a whole week. The
village at that time was living in the shadow of a large dispute between its two biggest
families, Al-Shihabi and al-'Atwat. The al-Shihabi family was poor in comparison with the
al-'Atwat, which had large property holdings and owned different small factories. I remember
how this dispute started in the 1930s as a result of having forced a beautiful young girl from
al-'Atwat to marry an old man from al-Shihabi tribe. The girl had refused the arrangement,
especially because she had already fallen in love with Fayiz al-Fawaz. The couple eloped to
Jordan and then settled in Tiberias. However, the girl's uncle, Hassan Taha, managed to
locate their house and to avenge the family honour. He burned the house as well as the
woman with it. The British Government later executed Hassan in Acre prison. This incident
had already poisoned the social life of the village. This sort of incident happened as a result
of
people's
ignorance
at
that
time”.
Harvest Time
Memories of harvest illustrate the kind of social solidarity that prevailed in the village. Those
who did not own land or other means of production also had the possibility of earning a
decent living. People helped one another. The shepherd, barber, merchant, teacher, and imam
of the mosque, as well as every other villager, were connected to one another either socially
or by virtue of their shared interests.
Usually, the entire village, men, women and children all participated in the harvest. Each had
a role to play. Normally, the men were responsible for cutting the grain with scythes. Grain
crops primarily consisted of barley and wheat. The women collected and transported the
sheaves to the threshing floor.
Sa'diya Younis, sixty-seven years old, now living in Copenhagen, still remembers those days:
We used to collect the cut grain in a place called hilli, a gathering place for sheaves. We
made many hillis depending on the size of maris al-ard, or field. Then a man from the family
came with a camel and transported the sheaves to the threshing floor.
In April we began picking by hand: beans, lentils, and lentil vetch. When it was dry we sent
it to be threshed. Then in May as usual, we started reaping the wheat and barley.
During the interview her husband Yousef interrupted to add a well-remembered phrase,
which used to announce the beginning of the harvest season:
fi khamistash ayyar ihmil minjalak wa ghar.
On the 15th of May carry your scythe and start working.
Normally one mule, cow or horse with a threshing sledge was used to thresh the grain. The
type of animal used depended on the financial situation of the family. According to Yousef
‘Issa,
Children were mainly used to drive the animals. After we separated the grain from the straw
7
with wooden pitchforks, we would put each in different sacks. Our family used to produce
about 15 to 20 kail (one kail is about 60 kilograms) and store what it needed in clay bins for
the year. The rest we would sell. The extra straw we sold as animal fodder.
As a child Issa participated in the 1936 uprising and was imprisoned for three months until
the outbreak of the Second World War. He visited 1994 for the first time since leaving the
village in 1948. There was not a piece of land or place that escaped his memory after fortysix years in exile. While I accompanied him on this first visit, and as he walked in the ruins
of the village homes, Yousef started showing me the remains of the five wells in the area. He
found four; then he started looking for the fifth. Only after digging few centimetres with his
fingers, the fifth well was located in Wadi al-‘Ain near his own houshold.
I was astonished at his extraordinary power to remember a piece of stone and an iron nail as a
cover for the well. He commented: ‘Even after one hundred years, and how much they have
done to the land, they will never succeed to erase my memory of the land I lived in twenty
eight years of my childhood.’ Yousef continued his story about the harvest. The work-day
started early in the morning.
”First I would pray, then we would prepare the donkeys and horses and start our journey to
the fields. It took us one hour or a little more to arrive at mawarisna (our plots of land).
Normally we would be five to six from our family. The few people who had no children
hired a muzari', or a sharecropper, who would be paid 5 kirsh for his trouble (one lira = 100
kirsh). We started by harvesting the beans, lentils and lentil vetch, kirsanni, which dried
earlier than other crops. If we didn't harvest the kirsanni in time it would fall to the ground.
After we completed the harvest, we gathered the sheaves, which took four days to
accomplish, and then camels transported it to the threshing floor in Lubya. The families who
did not have enough men to do the work used to hire boys to do the threshing. The boys
would work from eleven until four and we would give each of them one kail, about 60
kilograms, for threshing the whole baidar, or threshing floor. It took about twenty days to
finish the beans and lentils. Then we started collecting the wheat. All during the month of
May we would harvest the wheat and the work lasted well into August.
We used to say:
in fatak 'ab wa ma tharraitka'innak bilhawa ingharramt.
If you do not thresh in August, it is like falling in love with air.
At the end of August we started to collect the corn, and after the corn the miktha
(watermelon), then the okra, tomatoes and zucchini. We also learned the art of planting
miktha without water”.
Every day and every month had its full agenda of work, from the early morning to the late
evening, especially the summer days of harvest. On the eve of their departure from Lubya in
1948, residents of the village left everything in their villages deprived of the benefits of their
hard work. Overnight, village life was exchanged for life in a refugee camp, and the endless
ques for basic necessities such as flour and oil, which the villagers had once provided for
themselves as the product of their hard work. ‘There we were lords of our life; here in
Denmark, we are no more than refugees, stateless refugees’, lamented Yousef as he
compared life in Lubya to that in Denmark.
At the end of September the olive season began and we normally did not have enough, so we
bought what we needed from 'Ailaboun and Rami. There were two oil mills in Lubya, one
owned by Hassan Abu Dhais and the other by Qwateen. They used to halter a horse to the
8
main stone, and it would circle around the stone. Normally the owners of the mill took one
pitcher of oil for every twelve pitchers produced. Al-Sharkasi, his real name was Sa'id alShami and he originally hailed from Kufr Kama (his brother was an officer in the British
border army), owned a grain mill. For every kail, he took two or three kirsh, or a rub'iyyi (a
pot used by villagers to weigh the grain), which is one quarter of the saa', one saa'= 5kg.
The millstone can still be seen, though the mill was demolished in 1948.
Those who lived well and earned a good income, those in the middle, and those who were
poor which meant that they had no land to plant and no permanent job [there were only two
families in Lubya who did not have land of their own. It is because they arrived late in Lubya
after the land was distributed among its people]. Those people used to work on the land of
others. Their salary was four kail, while their wives received 1½ kail. This meant that a
couple could earn 5½ kail, or about 75 kilograms of flour. This was enough to cover the
family's needs for the whole year. Many transient workers came with their camels from
Julise, Kufr Yassif and al-Bi'ni to work at transporting the sheaves. For every twelve kails4
they transported, they would be given one. In the late thirties two hamulas, about twelve
families from al-Asafra and Samallote in Lubya, bought a tractor and used it for their own
benefit as well as rented it out at the usual rate, which was one kail for every 12.5
Sa'diyya Ali, Youssef's wife, refused to be photographed during her first trip to Lubya. She
did not want to reveal herself to the others, especially among the ruins of Lubya and her
childhood. Sa'diyya wept most of the time, and sometimes attacked us for convincing her to
come back to see Lubya. ‘Why did you bring me here, to torture me by seeing the ruins of
my house’to the hell with all the Arab leaders who didn't move to help us.’ Only after she
had seen the film on television, and when it was too late, Sa'diya said: ‘Now I want to be
interviewed.’
Sa'idiyya was unlike Um al-Abid - whom we will meet later when dealing with Lubyans
inside Israel - who was not afraid to be interviewed, speaking about the past without any
hesitation. As with all the women in Lubya, Sa'idiyya's narrative is more warm and more
detailed, when remembering the daily life of her youth.
In winter, the people prepared for spring by sowing and planting. Sa'diyya Younis
remembered a proverb about the necessity of being ready to work in December:
al-ajrad: illi ma bishid bilijrad, 'ind al-salayib bihrad.
He who does not work hard in December will be sorry when harvest time comes.
Village women made braziers, which were the stoves of that time, from clay and water that
would then be dried in the sun. They used a kind of soil called hizria to make jars, vessels
and vats. I remember that when I was a child, we did not have a primus, or kerosene cooker.
We used to cook and warm ourselves on the brazier for which we collected wood from the
nearby villages of 'Ailaboun and al-Maghar. The primus was used in Lubya only later, just
before our expulsion in 1948.
Modes of Social Reconciliation
When one villager was killed by another from a different hamula or other village the accused
was required to bow in front of an assembly of the victim and offer his neck as the price of
reconciliation. Usually, the victim's family would grant mercy to the accused in front of all
the people gathered to witness the reconciliation process. Sometimes, however, the enmity
continued as illustrated in the following account by Tammam Ajaini. Residents of the village
9
of Sakhnin were not allowed to marry girls from Lubya even though they were not involved
directly in the feud.
One day two men from Sakhnin killed Hussein Hajjo near 'Ailaboun. First his kin suspected
that people from 'Ailaboun did the killing, but later on everyone knew who the killer was. He
arrived one day in Lubya holding a handkerchief, stood in front of 100 men and said: 'Kill
me if you will, I committed a mistake and ask for your mercy.' Reconciliation had then taken
place. Later, however, a man from Sakhnin proposed to a girl, Khadra, from Lubya, but my
[future] husband objected to the marriage saying that we will not give one of our daughters to
the enemy. I must have been ten years old then. I was married when I was twelve but they
didn't hold a party for me. I had three sons and two daughters in all. Two of my sons died
early, one from snakebite and the other fell from the horse. I worked in the fields for many
years. All my family is living together now as they did in Lubya. Before I left Deir Hanna,
Um Hassan insisted on giving me 2000 shekels from her savings as a present for my
daughters. To avoid upsetting her, I took the money and gave it to her son-in-law, to give
back to her.
Mythologies of the Past
Ramzia (living currently in Nazareth) the daughter of mukhtar Hassan Abu Dhais, born in
1925, is the wife of Abu Isam who had written the above papers before his death. She is also
the mother of ten children, eight boys and two girls. When asked to recount what she
remembers about Lubya and its history, she chose to begin with the battle against Arab alSubeih.
The battle against Arab al-Subeih was mentioned by many of the elderly Lubyans that I
interviewed. The story, in which the tribe revenges the killing of the head of their hamula, is
part of the mythology that Lubyans bestowed upon themselves as brave people. While the
account is real, there is an exaggerated dimension to the story because Subeih was a powerful
tribe and the source of fear among other villages. Abu Dhais, the man killed in the story, was
Ramzia's grandfather. It is likely that she heard the story in her house while a young girl.
The battle between Lubya and the Subeih, a tribe well known in the whole area, happened
long ago in the time of my grandfather. The Subeihs came to Lubya, ate, slept, and received
all the hospitality required from us, but left the village stealthily after stealing a few cows
from the farmers. My grandfather followed them, accompanied by a small group, which
included my father. A known fighter from the Subeih, named Jalmoud, and my grandfather
were killed in the ensuing battle. My father returned home and vowed to disperse the Subeih
tribe, which is exactly what happened later on.
Ahmad, Ramzia's son continued, as most elderly Lubyans did, reciting the events that took
place against the Subeih tribe during the Ottoman era. This story is part of the family
heritage, especially since the man murdered by the Subeih tribe was his grandfather. He
referred to an unconfiremed rumour that Abu Dhais hamula descended from Druze
leadership. Kais Firro, Professor at Haifa University, and specialist on the Druze, had also
heard of the same episode, but has not found concrete evidence to support these claims.
I would like to add a few things to what has already been said concerning the battle with
Subeih. My grandfather was fourteen years old when his father was killed. One year after the
first battle with Subeih, the latter tried again to invade Lubya, but the Lubyans this time were
ready for them. The Subeih had a brave fighter named Jalmoud, and among the Lubyans
there was a man named Kayid6 who was so blind that he sometimes rode his horse in the
opposite direction. Kayid killed Jalmoud during the battle because Jalmoud didn't pay due
10
attention to him; after the battle, the Turks put the rest of the Subeih leadership in prison. The
son of Subeih, Nimir, came back a few years ago. There is also a very well known story
about a dispute that occurred between the inhabitants of Hittin and the Druze community
living there.7
Abu Muhamamd Kilani8, passed away two years ago in al-Makr (Akka)- is a blind man. But
it was amazing for me when I accompanied him on a visit in Lubya where he started telling
me about his house, the cave beside, who was living where near him from his hamula. He is
talking
as
if
he
is
still
living
in
Lubya.
About our fight with Subeih, I was not yet born when it happened. (He went on, however, to
recount almost the same story as the others about what had taken place, but with more
details).9 Saleh Effendi (a title for land owners) who owned 8,000 dunums, including all alMakr village, supported the Lubyans in their war against Subeih, and he is buried right here
near where I live in al-Makr. Now there are Lubyans living in Tur'an,10 al-Mashhad11, and
Kufr Kanna.
Concerning disputes and the way of solving them Zahra reflected on her earlier experiences
by saying, This was the domain of men, but my uncle personally used to solve disagreements
that used to occur in the village from time to time. I still remember well when Fayiz al
Fawaz, the son of Sheikh al-Shihabi, eloped with a Sa'da, a woman from al-'Atwat. Her uncle
had burned her and was later executed by the British in Acre. I also heard that X… was
released after only six months in jail because his brother bribed the British police.
Internal Displacement
Subhiyya Muhsin Gouda (currently living in Deir Hanna) is a brave woman who worked all
the past fifty years, side by side with her husband for 24 years to help bringing up a family of
twelve children. Even after the death of her husband, she continued working all the days,
including the holidays, to support her family. Her memory of the past is as fresh and clear as
her active engagement today. She used to accompany us every time we visited Lubya. She
accompanied the Danish team who were taking shots of the documentary film of The
Ancestors Land in 1995.
Unlike other women of the village, her character is strong, confident and not afraid of any
thing concerning her memory of the past, her personal life, her attack on Mustafa Abu Dhais
when he returned to Deir Hanna and refused to sell them the plot of land that he had taken
from the Israeli authorities as an exchange for his land in Lubya. Actually she new more than
the old people about all the corners and alleys of her suburb, Hara, where she lived until
1948. She was lucky to stay there because of an accidental and far relation with a relative in
Deir Hanna. But the life at that time was not as easy as one could think. Here are few
memories of the harsh times following Lubya's occupation.
“I was born in 1942, but I still remember the day when we left Lubya. I was very hungry and
when I asked a woman in Nimrin, a nearby village, to give me bread, she refused. We
continued our way to 'Ailaboun where my mother baked for us loaves of bread on a piece of
corroded metal. We arrived in Deir Hanna and slept in a cottage, then moved to another
village where we stayed for three years. We rented one room for 7 people and when my
brothers started working, we were able to build an additional room. I still remember how the
water penetrated through the roof, and when it rained it sounded as if a herd of goats was
11
running on the roof. I got married at seventeen and it was, and still is, our habit to marry from
within the same family, not outside. I worked with my husband for 24 years, picking fruits,
olives, and vegetables from our land and selling them. In spite of that, I managed to have
nine daughters and three sons”.
“The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”;
Milan Kundara
It was amazing to me how fresh the memory of the old people still was after more than 50
years of exile. Although Lubya was totally demolished, and planted over with trees to cover
the crime, named as 'South Africa Forest', and one of two Jewish kibbutzim built there had
been given the name 'Lavi', a falsification of the word Lubya, as usual supported by the Old
Testament, where 'Lavi' occurs- this was the decision of the committee for renaming Lubya
to Lavi; yet nonetheless my father and mother found the remains of our house, and five trees
that my father planted when he was young. Now the trees are high in the sky. After tasting
leaves of the tree he carved his name on its root, only his name and the date. He said to the
television reporter, ‘I won't exchange a tent on the ruins of my house for all the palaces of the
queen of Denmark.’ His words were printed the next day in many major Danish newspapers.
While I was in South Africa , a marvelous event of planting a memorial tree for my village
Lubya by the minister of water affairs and forestry Mr. Ronnie Kasrils, of Jewish Faith, in
the first of September 2000, at the occasion of World Summit, is in itself an event with a
historical significance. The forset which was planted on the debris of Lubya is called South
African Forest. And the act of planting a tree and a few words to commemorate renaming the
village to its original name from a South African minister is in itself a story to undo the
injustices that befell our own village fifty five years ago. The memorial reads as follows:
“Lubya: dedicated by the honourable minister, Ronnie Kasrils (minister of water affairs and
forestry):
To the palestinain village of Lubya upon whose ruins a forest was built where cows were
permitted to graze but the displaced occupants are not allowed to return” 12.
Khaled Said, visited Lubya after forty years in exile. Although he was eight years old when
left Lubya, nevertheless, the memory is still fresh as it was then:
”You may ask how I found my family's home when I arrived in Lubya on the morning of the
5th August 1990. I left Lubya when I was 8 years old. I asked my companions to just take me
to Bir Judi (Judi's well) and the flat big rock beside that well where I used to play marbles
with my childmates; and I asked them to leave me discover my grandfather's house; which I
found easily. If you ask me how I could remember I will say: there was something in me
through all my life that persists and insist that I'll come back one day. It was a great dream. It
became a reality for Khalid Said on his first encounter with Lubya in 1990.13
In addition to the oral interviews with old, middle and young generations of Lubyans, I found
it necessary to do archival research in Israeli institutions as the Zionist archives in Jerusalem,
the Hagana museum in Tel Aviv, the land registration in Nazareth as a complementary
resource for the oral accounts of the villagers’ . There I found extreme valuable material in
English, Arabic and Hebrew, such as lists of names; statistics giving the numbers of wells,
olive trees, donkeys, camels, etc ; also plans of the village, the only picture of Lubya taken
from the air, in 1945; a photograph of Lubya's club; names of Lubyans whose land was
12
confiscated; and stories of those who fought in battles in and around Lubya. The archival
Israeli material gave details of their version of what happened in Lubya, how they attacked,
how they met fierce defense, how they failed the first time.
The interviews I conducted with two former Haganah officers who were involved in the
occupation of Lubya, and the accounts of the main leaders of the Jewish force that occupied
the village, were recorded without sparing any detail. It shows clearly that the Lubyans
fought with all they had in terms of simple and basic weaponry14 against a well equipped
army supported by aeroplanes, canons, and armoured vehicles. The assessment by the leader
of the attack on Lubya, Ya’acov Dror, demonstrates that the Lubyans themselves, without
support from the Arab Salvation Army, and before the arrival of help from other villages had
succeeded in repulsing the first main Jewish attack on their village. According to the Israeli
military assessment of the battle, Lubya was the first place in Palestine to have repulsed the
Jewish forces. Only on the third attempt, and after the occupation of the nearby cities of
Tiberias and Nazareth, was Lubya conquered after three consecutive days of shelling (18-21
July 1948). The official story of the fall of Lubya that appears in ‘the History of the War of
Independence’ erroneously reads: ‘Lubya fell without fighting, and the road to Tiberias was
open to us’.15
Lubya's struggle to defend itself and its existence is yet more contradictory evidence to the
official Israeli story that the Palestinians left their homes following orders from Arab leaders.
(All the research done about this period has not yet found any concrete proof to support these
claims).
I found other valuable documents in the libraries of Nablus and Jerusalem. All these were
immensely valuable for the history of the village. Indeed one way I used them was to
stimulate recollections among the respondents -- for example their plots of land, the photo
and other documents -- all of which was extremely helpful in the research. One of the old
men in Yarmuk camp, Karzoon, made a drawing of the village with all the houses and the
names of their owners, and when I put the aerial photograph over [his] drawn one it was
almost 100% perfect. He had woken up at night and started drawing the village houses, and
afterwards his son helped him to draw the plan properly, and it was signed by many mukhtars
and personalities from the village to confirm that it was correct.
Although it is only through practice that one can properly control the recording and later
editing and transcription of the interviews, there is an urgent need to train people in this new
methodology. The project needs to be adopted by a university or institution so as to train the
few who are interested to continue this work. The destroyed villages are only one possible
topic, there are tens if not hundreds of projects that could uncover recent histories which are
still lying in the dark.16 As long as our modern history is not recorded properly, the mistakes
will continue on the same basis, and the representation of the Palestinian people will never be
as it should be.
The experience of Ghassan Shihabi in al-Yarmuk camp, in Dar al-Shajara, is a good example
of villagers themselves publishing books about their own experiences. Shihabi published a
book about Tantura before Teddy Katz wrote his study of the massacre. 17 Because Shihabi's
book is in Arabic, no one knows about it, while Katz's study became famous, even though he
subsequently withdrew his accusations against the Israeli army. Teddy assured me last time I
saw him in Jerusalem that he will continue his claims about the massacres committed in
Tantura.
13
People do not always agree about this or that version of the story. I will give an example: a
book about Lubya written by Ibrahim Shihabi provoked another man from another family,
Yousef Abu Dhais, to write another book about the village because he thought that Ibrahim's
book was incomplete. I think this is normal, and a positive sign. We could solve this problem
by pushing to establish a qualified committee to help, coordinate, and support future projects,
and to archive what is published already. Most of our modern documents are in the Zionist
archives, in UNRWA, in the UNCCP, and when we shall Restitute our own history remains
an open question. Could it be the task of the Right of Return Coalition Committees, Or a
special institution for oral history? Or a well-known Palestinian university? The new Israeli
historians have done a lot to reveal the ethnic cleansing policies of the successive Israeli
official narrative. The rest of the job among the Palestinians is waiting for Palestinians to
rewrite the modern history which is not written yet.
Endnotes
1 Abu-Sitta, Salman: Sijil al Nakba 1948 (arabic),London-Palestinian Return
2
. Al-Janna, Arab resource Center for popular Arts, Beirut, Lebanon, 2002
3
Centre, 1998
. Other interviewers confirmed that Mahmoud Hussein married four women, but not at the
same time.
4
. Measures of weight are, one kail = 12 saa', one 'ulba = 6 saa', one mid = two saa', one saa'
= 5kg.
5
. One kail = 20 Palestinian kirsh. One Palestinian jinaih = approx. one English Pound.
6
. Yousef Issa told another story about kayid: When people crossed over from Jordan to steal
cattle from Lubya, Kayid without fail would follow them because he could not stop his horse.
So he would shout ‘khayyal il-khail kayid’ (kayid is a brave rider) and the thieves would run
for their lives, abandoning the stolen cattle. They came to Lubya one day and asked to meet
this brave man; they were astonished to find out that he was very small and short. They felt
ashamed that he was, in fact, the one who prevented them from stealing.
7
. Ibid. Abu Dhais made the Druze leader dismount from his horse from the right side and not
from the left. This was considered as an insult at that time.
8
. Interview with Abu Muhammad Kilani, Yousef Mohammad Ibrahim Yousef, on 19/10/95,
in Lubya.
9
. The additional details he gave concern the exact number of four men from Subeih who
came to Abu Dhais farm. Those four, after spending the night in Lubya, followed farmers to
the east side of the village, to Karim al-Sheikh Saleh, where they stole some cows. Abu
Dhais and his cousin Abdel-Rahman Mutlak called after them to return the cows, but the
Subeihs refused, and Abu Dhais shot and killed one of them. Abu Dhais himself was later
killed in revenge.
10
. Zahra Azzam and her sons, and Khadija al-Sheikh from Samallote who has a brother Sa'id
in Sweden. Um Ali, Rashida, from Tur'an, who married Yihya Shihabi in Damascus, visited
her family two years ago and came to Abu Mohammad's house in al-Makr.
11
. The interviewee contacted Hilala's son Hassan Issa in Al-Mashhad and confirmed to him
that his mother was 105 years old when she had died two years before. ‘I brought him a letter
with me from his uncle Abid Ruman Zain in Berlin’, said Abu Muhammad.
14
12
Special thanks to: the energetic Zakiya Fareed who arranged all our interviews and
the main appointments of the tour; to the chairman of MRN Iqbal Jassat who took the
responsibility for the whole visit , to Uri Davies who presented the MRN and the
Deputy Minister Mr. Aziz Pahad of “an Eyewitness Report: Visit to the South African
Forest, Golani Junction, planted by the Jewish National Fund, the friends of JNF and
the women’s zionist organisation of SA to cover up the Remains of the 1948
Destroyed Palestinian Arab Village of Lubya”, based also on the manuscript I have
written about Lubya’s historiography. Both Iqbal and Uri wrote an official protest for
the deputy minister for using the name South Africa to cover up the debris of the
palestinian village Lubya.
. An interview with Khalid Said (born in 1940) on the 12 November 1998 in Burj alBarajneh refugee camp Beirut.
14
. ‘There were between 100 and 120 men (including a small infantry detachment from ASA)
armed with 100 rifles, two machine guns, two Bren guns, two mortars with only two shells,
and between 70 to 100 rounds of ammunition for each rifle’. This is according to an
interview with both Haj Sa'id al-'Abid and Fawzi Mahmud Abu 'Alul, conducted by Nafez
Nazzal, in 'Ain al-Hilwi Camp, Lebanon, on 18 and 19/2/1973. (Nazzal. p.81).
15
. Walid Khalidi, All That Remains (Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, USA,
1992), p.527 citing (Benny Morris, M:xv, 200-203; N:81-83; T: 186-87, 250-51).
16
.This project of the demolished village will continue through the coming years with a
museum exhibition that will comprise all the documents, the transcripts of 700 interviews,
photographs , and a model of Lubya before its destruction in 1948. This exhibition will move
from one city to another and to other museums in Europe, with the hope of eventually
sending it to Palestine. Others from the same village or area will be asked to contribute to the
exhibition when it reaches their city. This project is an educational one for university
students, for lay people interested in our culture, and for Palestinians born after the 1948
nakba, so as to know their roots and their origins.
13
17
.