Al-Khalisa

Al-Khalisa lay on a low hill on the northwestern edge of the Hula plain, twenty-eight kilometres from Safad and about 150 metres above sea level — high enough to be spared the periodic floods of Lake Hula, which it overlooked to the north and the south. It stood on the highway running from al-Mutilla in the north down to Safad and Tiberias, close to the Lebanese border, and its proximity to Lebanon and Syria made it a commercial centre. In 1596 al-Khalisa was a village in the nahiya of Jira in the liwa’ of Safad with a population of 160, paying tax on wheat and barley, on beehives and water buffalo, on orchards and on a water-powered mill. Europeans passing in the late nineteenth century found a small stone village on a plain, surrounded by streams, with about fifty inhabitants. The Bedouin of the al-Ghawarina clan founded the village and made up most of its people; Temimi and al-Katib, who visited in 1916, described the reception given them by the head of the tribe and the large rug-floored guest house in which they were received.

The houses were built of brick and of basalt cut from the hillside. In 1945 the population was 1,820 Muslims and 20 Christians. Al-Khalisa had a boys’ elementary school that also took pupils from neighbouring villages, and a village council that ran its affairs. The villagers drew their drinking water from several springs and lived by both agriculture and trade: of 11,280 dunums, 3,775 were planted in cereals in 1944/45 and 5,586 were irrigated or used for orchards. A weekly market sold the produce of al-Khalisa and the villages around it.

On 11 May 1948 the Haganah rejected al-Khalisa’s request for an agreement, and the Israeli historian Benny Morris reports that the villagers then felt threatened and decided to leave. They would also have heard that Safad, the capital of their subdistrict, had fallen that same day. Yigal Allon, who commanded Operation Yiftach, intended to expel as much of the area’s population as possible during the offensive, which makes the refusal of a truce unsurprising. Zionist forces probably moved in shortly afterwards as part of the general offensive in eastern Galilee. Plan Dalet had called for the occupation of the British police station in the village, but it is not clear when that order was carried out. Zochrot dates the occupation to 11 May and names the Palmach’s First Battalion; PalQuest, following Khalidi, places the fall of the village on 25 May. Villagers interviewed later by the Palestinian historian Nafez Nazzal gave a fuller account: they fled after hearing of the fall of Safad and took refuge in Hunin to the northwest, while the village militia stayed on for a few days until it was heavily shelled from the settlement of Manara and saw an armoured unit approaching. The militiamen retreated through the hills, the roads being under Zionist control, and made their way to Hunin. From there the villagers were displaced to Lebanon. In the following weeks a few returned briefly to dig up money they had buried in their land or to harvest tobacco and grain, and reported that Israeli forces had burned and destroyed many of the houses. “The village was in ruins,” said one of them.

The settlement of Qiryat Shemona was established on the village site in 1950. Stone rubble from the houses marks the ground. The school and the Mandate government’s office buildings stand abandoned, as do the village mosque and its minaret. The level land around the site is cultivated by Qiryat Shemona; the mountainous parts are pasture or woodland.

Sources

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