Ghuwayr Abu Shusha

Ghuwayr Abu Shusha, known also simply as Abu Shusha, stood on a small, slightly elevated hill overlooking Lake Tiberias, two kilometres west of the shore and about 150 metres below sea level, eight kilometres from Tiberias. A secondary road linked it to the Tiberias–Safad highway and others to the villages nearby. When the American biblical scholar Edward Robinson passed in 1838 he could see only the remains of a few stone houses and a shrine, though the fertile plain below was being planted by the al-Ghawarina Bedouin and the al-Samakiyya tribe used some of the buildings as storehouses. Several springs supplied drinking water. The villagers were Muslims and kept a shrine for a Shaykh Muhammad, a local sage.

They lived by agriculture. Orange groves covering 200 dunums west, north and south of the village were owned by Jews; the villagers themselves grew vegetables and grain on the eastern part of the land. In 1944/45, 1,848 dunums were allocated to cereals, 1,377 were irrigated or planted in orchards and 21 were in citrus and bananas. The 1944/45 count gives 1,240 Arabs and 157 Jews. Nearby Khirbat Abu Shusha held the ruins of water-powered mills that had stood beside Wadi Rubadiyya.

The Palestinian newspaper Filastin reported that forty Jewish militiamen attacked Ghuwayr Abu Shusha at three in the morning on 3 January 1948. The villagers met the attack; the son of the village mukhtar and an unidentified woman were killed, and three of the attackers also died.

What happened in April is recorded two ways. Benny Morris describes panic leading to an exodus after the occupation of Tiberias, apparently in two waves on 21 and 28 April 1948, and makes no mention of a direct military attack on the village; he adds that the evacuation of Ghuwayr Abu Shusha demoralised the inhabitants of Safad and helped precipitate its fall. The villagers, interviewed a generation later, remembered it differently. They said they had not been alarmed by the fall of Tiberias and were prepared to defend the village, but that when the Arab Liberation Army supplied them no arms they decided to evacuate the women, children and old men to al-Rama, leaving forty-eight men with some thirty-five to forty rifles between them. At dawn on 24 April, while the armed men were asleep west of the village, the Palmach took Ghuwayr Abu Shusha in a surprise attack. The men decided not to counterattack, since there was no one left in the village to protect. Zochrot gives the occupation date as 24 April and the Palmach as the occupying unit.

The villagers stayed at al-Rama until it too fell at the end of October, returning to their village from time to time to retrieve their belongings; when al-Rama was occupied they were ordered across the border into Lebanon. Some ended in the ‘Ayn al-Hilwa refugee camp in southern Lebanon, where they were interviewed in 1973. Morris records that the village lands were acquired by the state and leased in the summer or early autumn of 1949 to the settlements of Migdal, about a kilometre to the south, and Kibbutz Ginnosar, almost two kilometres to the east; the leases ran for one year, and he does not say whether longer leases or title followed.

Ginnosar had been established east of the village on what was traditionally village land in 1937. Livnim was founded on village land about a kilometre northwest of the site in 1982. The site is covered with thorns and wild vegetation, including Christ’s-thorn trees and cactus. The shrine of Shaykh Muhammad and the remains of a mill can be seen among piles of stones and a few olive trees. The lower ground is planted in bananas and citrus; the higher ground is used by Israelis for grazing.

Sources

• Ghuwayr Abu Shusha — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Ghuwayr Abu Shusha — Zochrot
• Ghuwayr Abu Shusha — Wikipedia