Al-Bassa

Al-Bassa stood close to the Lebanese border, nineteen kilometers north of Acre. It was an ancient place — the Bezeth of Roman sources and probably a Crusading village — and under the early Ottomans it was the seat of the nahiya; Napoleon described it in 1799 as a village of 600. By the Mandate years it had become one of the largest and most developed villages in the north, its population divided almost evenly between Muslims and Greek Catholic Christians: some 25,258 dunums of hills and plains, more than sixty shops and eleven coffeehouses along the Haifa–Beirut highway, a Sunday wholesale produce market, an agricultural cooperative with over 150 members, and a village council that had paved roads and running water. Among its institutions were two mosques, two churches, three schools — including the only Christian high school in the Galilee — and eighteen shrines holy to both faiths. The 1945 survey counted 2,950 people.

The village suffered twice in a decade. On 7 September 1938, during the Arab Revolt, a company of the Royal Ulster Rifles and a detachment of the 11th Hussars carried out a reprisal in al-Bassa after four of their soldiers were killed by a landmine nearby: houses were blown up, and villagers collected by the troops were put on a bus that was forced over a mine laid by the soldiers themselves; at least twenty Palestinians were killed. Then, on 14 May 1948, in the last days of the Mandate, the Haganah stormed al-Bassa in Operation Ben-Ami. After its capture, Palmach troops concentrated the villagers in the local church and shot a number of youths — one witness said five were killed inside the church, another counted seven outside it — before the population was driven out. The village was almost completely destroyed; at least sixty of its Christians were held at al-Mazra’a for more than a year, and eighty-one residents became internally displaced citizens of Israel. The great majority, around ninety-five percent, were pushed north into Lebanon, concentrating in the Dbayeh refugee camp east of Beirut.

The site was repopulated with Jewish immigrants and renamed Betzet in 1951, and the ruins spread into the northern quarters of the town of Shlomi. A 1992 inspection found that although most houses had been destroyed, a number of historic buildings survived — two churches, a mosque, and a maqam — among them the domed shrine of al-Khidr. Al-Bassa’s refugees keep a village association with branches as far as Lansing, Michigan, whose annual gatherings draw hundreds.

Sources

• Al-Bassa — Palestine Remembered
• Al-Bassa — Zochrot
• Al-Bassa — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)