Al-Salihiyya

Al-Salihiyya stood on flat ground in the Hula plain at about 75 metres, next to the intersection of the Jordan River with Wadi Tur’an, which ran down into Lake Hula some four kilometres to the south. It was twenty-five kilometres from Safad, linked to the neighbouring villages by a network of secondary roads around which its houses were clustered, with a small marketplace at its centre. Its people were traditionally associated with the Ghawarna, the name given to the inhabitants of the drainage plains of the Hula valley. Travellers in the late nineteenth century described a village built of adobe brick on arable land beside a marsh, with a population of about ninety; the Survey of Western Palestine in 1881 called it a mud village of about ninety Muslims. The Scottish canoeist John MacGregor was held prisoner there in January 1869 and on his second night ate with the village shaykh and fifty other men — a bean porridge with buffalo cream, served on a communal wooden plate, the company behaving, he wrote, with propriety and good breeding but without constraint.

A visitor in 1936 recorded that the main industry of al-Salihiyya, as of the other Hula villages, was harvesting the papyrus groves of the lake and making papyrus matting — fine work for interiors, coarser work for building — and that the reed huts were weatherproofed in winter by adding layers until a roof might be eight or nine mats thick. The villagers kept chickens, geese and buffalo, grew some wheat, maize and millet on land made hard to plough by an invasive grass they called najeel, fished the lake with drag and cast nets, and worked as guides in the duck-shooting season. The same visitor feared for their future, noting that the whole area had been taken over by Jewish colonists who intended to drain it. The village had a mosque and a boys’ elementary school. The 1931 census counted 1,281 people in 257 houses, all Muslims but for two Christians; the 1945 statistics counted 1,520, all Muslims, holding 4,528 of the village’s 5,607 dunums, of which 4,230 were allocated to cereals and 23 were irrigated or planted in orchards.

The occupation of al-Salihiyya is one of the thinnest entries in Khalidi’s survey: a single sentence, that it fell on 25 May as part of Operation Yiftach. Israeli sources add a little. They record that the village had traditionally been friendly towards the Yishuv, and that in late May 1948 the Haganah reported an argument in al-Salihiyya between the young men and the elders — the young men thinking it best to approach the Jews, hand over their arms and stay, the elders fearing that if an Arab army did reach the area they would be judged traitors and the village destroyed. The Haganah’s own account of what followed is four sentences long: they wanted negotiations, the Haganah did not show up, and they became afraid. The village was depopulated on 25 May 1948 by the Palmach’s First Battalion.

No Israeli settlement was built on the village land. Kefar Blum, founded in 1943, lies just to the northwest on land that traditionally belonged to Qaytiyya. The village has been obliterated and no trace of it remains; the residents of Kefar Blum cultivate the surrounding ground.

Sources

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