Al-Ja'una

Al-Ja’una stood on a slope of Mount Kan’an at about 500 metres, five kilometres from Safad, overlooking the Ghawr — the low ground along the Jordan — on every side but the west, and close to the western edge of the highway running down to Safad and Tiberias. In 1596 it was a village in the nahiya of Jira, in the liwa’ of Safad, with a population of 171, paying tax on wheat, barley and olives, on goats and beehives and a water-powered mill. In the late nineteenth century it was a stone village of between 140 and 200 people cultivating fig and olive trees.

Its whole population was Muslim. Al-Ja’una had a boys’ elementary school founded under the Ottomans. In modern times most of the villagers worked in agriculture or in construction, and despite meagre water they planted grain, olive trees, Indian figs and grapes: in 1944/45, 248 dunums were planted in cereals and 172 were irrigated or used for orchards, out of a total of 839 dunums, of which 824 were Arab-owned. The 1931 census counted 799 people in 149 houses; PalQuest gives 1,150 for 1944/45. The land area is small because much of it had already gone: it was from the villagers of al-Ja’una that the land for Ro’sh Pinna was bought in 1878, the first Zionist settlement in the Galilee, which failed and was re-established in 1882.

The fate of the village was tied to that of Safad. Benny Morris writes in one place that the residents of al-Ja’una were evacuated some time before 2 May 1948 and that this increased the panic among the people of Safad; elsewhere he writes that al-Ja’una was depopulated a week later, on 9 May, at the same time as the final attack on the city. Either way it was occupied during Operation Yiftach, which was launched in the second half of April.

Some people remained in al-Ja’una at least until June 1949. At midnight on 5 June army trucks surrounded al-Ja’una, Qaytiyya and al-Khisas and forced the inhabitants aboard — “with brutality … with kicks, curses and maltreatment,” in the words of the Mapam Knesset member Eli’ezer Pra’i — and dumped them on a bare hillside near the village of Akbara, nearly five kilometres to the southwest. When Pra’i protested, Ben-Gurion replied that he found the military’s reasons for the expulsion sufficient. Akbara served as a dumping ground for the remainders of several depopulated villages, and refugees from al-Ja’una remained there, in Israeli sources quoted by Morris, under degrading conditions of over-population for years. It is not clear when the village was finally emptied.

Ro’sh Pinna lies southeast of the village site. Its population was under 400 at the beginning of 1948; by 1953 it had 1,480 residents, most of them immigrants, and it expanded well beyond the area its founders had bought, onto land that had belonged to al-Ja’una. The settlement now occupies the village site. Many of the village houses remain, some in use by the residents of Ro’sh Pinna, others abandoned and destroyed. The entrance of one house has a basket-handle arch.

Sources

• al-Ja’una — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• al-Ja’una — Zochrot
• Al-Ja’una — Wikipedia