Ayn al-Zaytun

Ayn al-Zaytun lay on the western slope of Wadi al-Dilb beside the road into Safad, at about seven hundred metres. Its name — spring of the olives — points to the water in the wadi, which the fourteenth-century geographer al-Dimashqi may have had in mind when he described a spring between Mirun and Safad that gushed for an hour or two and then abruptly withdrew. In 1596 the village had 622 people and paid tax on wheat, barley and olives as well as on vineyards and orchards. Nineteenth-century visitors found a stone-built village of two to three hundred people on a hill north of Safad, ringed by arable land. Because it stood so close to the subdistrict capital it was regarded as a suburb of Safad, and as it grew its stone houses extended southwards towards the city. The population was entirely Muslim, with an elementary school and a mosque; the villagers grew olives, grain and fruit, especially grapes, and drew drinking water from a well and a spring 800 metres to the north. In 1944/45 they numbered 820 and held 1,100 dunums, 280 sown in cereals and 477 irrigated or planted in orchards.

The village was attacked well before it was taken. The New York Times reported that early on the morning of 3 January 1948 a raiding party killed one villager and bombed four houses, and that firing continued in the neighbourhood through the day. Then, as a prelude to the occupation of Safad during Operation Yiftach, Palmach troops came down on Ayn al-Zaytun from the north and occupied it on 1 May 1948. Villagers interviewed in 1973 recalled that the assault began at three in the morning with a barrage from eleven mortars followed by two platoons on the ground; the armed men decided on a tactical withdrawal, but the rest of the villagers stayed in their homes.

When the troops entered, the inhabitants were rounded up. The men were separated out and taken away; the others were humiliated and driven off with shots fired over their heads, an account given both by the villagers and in Israeli sources. Some of the men were later expelled and allowed to rejoin their families, but thirty-seven, selected at random, were held. According to Benny Morris they were probably among a group of about seventy people killed in a gully between Ayn al-Zaytun and Safad on the orders of Moshe Kelman, commander of the Palmach’s Third Battalion; Morris records that Kelman had difficulty finding soldiers willing to do it and finally gave the task to two men, and that in anticipation of a Red Cross visit he ordered the prisoners’ hands untied to conceal that the killing had been done in cold blood. Several villagers who tried to go home over the following days were fired on and one was killed. Palmach sappers burned or blew up the houses on 2 and 3 May, partly in order to terrify the population of Safad, who could watch from the hills nearby; the sight had a demoralising effect in the city and in the villages of eastern Galilee.

No Israeli settlement was built on the village lands. The rubble of the stone houses is scattered across the site among olive trees and cactus. A few deserted houses remain, some with round arched entrances and tall arched windows, and above one doorway the smooth stone is carved with Arabic calligraphy. The well and the village spring survive; the mosque had been converted into a milk shed by 2004, its foundation stone removed and Hebrew graffiti added.

Sources

• ’Ayn al-Zaytun — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• ’Ayn al-Zaytun — Zochrot
• Ein al-Zeitun — Wikipedia