Alma

‘Alma stood on uneven ground in the heart of Upper Galilee at about 675 metres, ten kilometres from Safad and about four kilometres south of the Lebanese border, linked by secondary roads to the villages around it. Edward Robinson and Eli Smith, travelling in 1838, give its full name as ‘Alma al-Khayt. The Crusaders called the site Alme. In the Ottoman tax registers of 1596 it belonged to the nahiya of Jira in the liwa’ of Safad and had a relatively large population — 288 Muslim households and 140 Muslim bachelors, together with seven Jewish households and one Jewish bachelor — paying tax on goats, beehives, a water-powered mill and a press used for olives or grapes; its prosperity was put down to its closeness to Safad. James Finn, the British consul in Jerusalem, passed between 1853 and 1856 and described a country of abundant volcanic basalt, with women and children beating the olive trees with poles and gathering the fallen fruit, and noted that the people called their small district al-Khayt and boasted of its extraordinary fertility in corn. Victor Guérin found 200 Muslim inhabitants in 1875; the Survey of Western Palestine in 1881 described a stone village of about 250 in the middle of a fertile plain with a few gardens.

The village had a pool on its eastern edge and two water tanks, on the southern and southwestern sides. Its people were Muslims. They kept a mosque and an elementary school, which they shared with the neighbouring village of al-Rihaniyya. They lived mainly from the land, raising livestock and growing crops, especially grain and fruit, their orchards concentrated on the northern and northwestern outskirts. In the 1942/43 season olive trees stood on 750 dunums of village land — the largest area given to olives in the Safad subdistrict — of which 550 dunums were bearing, and the fruit was processed at two horse-powered presses. In 1944, 7,475 dunums were allocated to cereals and 983 were irrigated or planted in orchards. The 1922 census counted 309 Muslims, the 1931 census 712 in 148 houses, and the 1945 statistics 950, all Muslims, holding 17,240 of the village’s 19,498 dunums — a land area larger than that of most other villages in the subdistrict. Several ancient ruins lay nearby, and three inscribed architectural fragments from an ancient synagogue, in Hebrew and Aramaic, were found on the surface of the village site between 1914 and 1957.

Israeli units reached ‘Alma on 30 October 1948, in the later stages of Operation Hiram. Benny Morris reports that the villagers had largely stayed put, despite the massacres committed by Israeli forces the previous day at Safsaf and Jish, both about six kilometres to the southwest. The Israeli Minority Affairs Ministry later listed ‘Alma among the villages that had surrendered during the operation and were therefore not “punished.” Morris records that its residents were uprooted and expelled all the same, and that ‘Alma was the one village in the area where this happened although no resistance had been offered. He does not give the circumstances: it was either carried out by units of the Seventh Brigade during the attack itself or implemented after an official decision taken in the following weeks.

The settlement of ‘Alma was built on village land in 1949, about half a kilometre east of the village site, and repopulated on 1 September 1949 with immigrants from Libya; a group of Italian converts to Judaism, the Jews of San Nicandro, arrived in 1953 and later left, and Cochin Jews came from India after them. The village site is fenced in and holds the rubble of the former houses, covered with thorny grasses. One truncated stone wall with a door and two windows still stands. The land is planted with fruit trees by Israeli farmers.

Sources

• ‘Alma — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• ‘Alma — Zochrot
• Alma, Safad — Wikipedia