Dayr al-Qassi

Dayr al-Qassi stood on a rocky hill at the centre of western Upper Galilee, at about 675 metres, twenty-six kilometres from Acre and about five kilometres south of the Lebanese border. A road paved during the Second World War linked it to Fassuta in the north and Tarshiha in the southwest and divided the village into an eastern and a western hara, the eastern quarter standing higher. The first element of its name, dayr, “monastery”, suggests it may once have had a monastery and a Christian population; the Crusaders knew it as Cassie, and in 1220 Beatrix de Courtenay and her husband Otto von Botenlauben sold it with other land to the Teutonic Knights. In the 1596 Ottoman tax records it was a village in the nahiya of Jira, in the liwa’ of Safad, of 24 Muslim households, paying tax on wheat and barley, goats and beehives. In the early eighteenth century it was a fortified village under a local shaykh, Abd al-Khaliq Salih; Daher al-Umar brought it into his domain in 1740 by marrying Salih’s daughter, and later ceded it to his son Ali. Victor Guérin estimated 350 Muslim inhabitants in 1875; the Survey of Western Palestine in 1881 found a village on a ridge encircled by fig and olive trees and arable land, with about 200 people.

The houses of the modern village were of adobe brick, the more recent ones of stone. An elementary school was established during the Mandate. Dayr al-Qassi had two mosques, one in each quarter, two shrines — one for Shaykh Jawhar and one for Abu Halyun — and a zawiya of the Shadhiliyya Sufi brotherhood. The villagers took their water from the springs of Fassuta and al-Mansura and from a large pool in the village itself that collected rainwater. Most farmed, growing grain, legumes and olives; some entered the civil service in the cities and others worked on British military bases. They held their land in common with the people of Fassuta and al-Mansura: 34,011 dunums between the three, of which 6,475 were allocated to cereals in 1944/45 and 1,617 were irrigated or planted in orchards. The 1922 census counted 663 Muslims and the 1931 census 865 in 169 houses. For 1945 the sources diverge — PalQuest states that the counts of Dayr al-Qassi, al-Mansura and Fassuta were amalgamated and gives only the combined total of 2,300, being 1,420 Muslims and 880 Christians, while other references carry a separate figure of 1,250 for Dayr al-Qassi, 880 Muslims and 370 Christians. The combined total is the one both agree on.

Dayr al-Qassi was defended by the Arab Liberation Army and came under Israeli control on 30 October 1948, probably after the capture of neighbouring Tarshiha, as part of Operation Hiram. It was bombed at the same time by Israeli aircraft, which the Israelis said was a mistake; seven residents were killed. After the assault on Tarshiha, according to the History of the War of Independence, some of that village’s defenders withdrew along a hidden road that ran through Dayr al-Qassi and north to Rumaysh in Lebanon — the route the Haganah called the “Qawuqji Road,” the main ALA supply line into Upper Galilee.

The people were not expelled during the attack. Benny Morris notes that some 700 were still living in Dayr al-Qassi, al-Bassa and Tarshiha two months later, in December 1948, and that there was then a suggestion of settling new Jewish immigrants in those three villages, which Aharon Zisling objected to on the ground that untrained immigrants should not be placed on a strategic border. The argument was put to the Israeli cabinet on 9 January 1949 and overridden by a decision to encourage introducing olim into all the abandoned villages in the Galilee. Morris records that this was achieved at Dayr al-Qassi by 27 May 1949; he does not say when the villagers were expelled or where they went. Other accounts date the final expulsion to 27 May 1949 and say that most went north into Lebanon. By June 1949 the whole northern area was reported to have been “Judaised” — Tarshiha, Suhmata, Dayr al-Qassi, Tarbikha, Meirun, al-Sammu’i, Safsaf and al-Ras al-Ahmar.

Elqosh, established in 1949, occupies part of the village site; Netu’a followed in 1966, Mattat in 1979 and Abbirim in 1980, all on village land. A few stone houses are still used as residences or warehouses by the people of Elqosh, and the debris of the destroyed houses is strewn over the site, where fig and olive trees and cactus grow. In 2004 some of the remains were removed by mechanical equipment during excavations by the Israel Antiquities Authority. A history of the village by Ibrahim Khalil Uthman was published in 2000.

Sources

• Dayr al-Qasi — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Dayr al-Qasi — Zochrot
• Dayr al-Qassi — Wikipedia