Hunin

Hunin stood on Mount ‘Amil at about 650 metres, on the edge of a slope overlooking the northern section of the Hula plain, twenty-eight and a half kilometres from Safad and very close to the Lebanese border. Like al-Mansura and Tarbikha it was part of Lebanon until 1923, when Britain and France delineated the Lebanese–Palestinian border. It had two springs and a reservoir on the southwestern edge of the site. The Crusaders built the castle of Chastel Neuf there in 1179; Ibn Jubayr, passing about 1183, described a fortress still in Frankish hands, its defenders surrendered to Salah al-Din towards the end of 1187, the Crusaders retook it in 1240, and the Mamluk sultan Baybars drove them out for the last time in 1266. Yaqut al-Hamawi, who died in 1228, records Hunin as a village in the mountains of ‘Amila overlooking al-Hula; al-Dimashqi, who died in 1327, called it “the castle of Hunin” and described it as an administrative centre with villages under its jurisdiction.

Daher al-Umar rebuilt the castle in the eighteenth century, and it was then that the Shia village began to develop beside it. A mosque was built in Hunin in 1752; its dedicatory inscription has been read, tentatively, as consecrating the prayer house to Ja’far al-Sadiq, the sixth Shia Imam. The village was badly damaged in the earthquake of 1837. Late nineteenth-century travellers described a stone village joined to the ruined Crusader castle, standing on a low ridge, with about a hundred residents; the surrounding hills were uncultivated but there was farmland in the valleys below. Hunin had a mosque and an elementary school for boys, and agriculture was its mainstay: in 1944/45, 5,987 dunums were allocated to cereals and 859 dunums were irrigated or planted in orchards. The 1931 census counted 1,075 people in 233 houses; the 1944/45 figure of 1,620 is amalgamated with those of Hula and Udaysa, as are the land statistics for 14,224 dunums.

Like almost all the villages of the Galilee panhandle, Hunin was caught in Operation Yiftach, which ran through April and May 1948. The dates in the record do not agree. An Israeli military intelligence report stated that Hunin was evacuated by its residents on 3 May, before Zionist forces had reached it; a Palmach report claimed that Arab forces ordered the villagers to leave by 14 May. Neither is consistent with the recollections of eyewitnesses interviewed twenty-five years later. People from al-Khalisa, two and a half kilometres to the southeast, remembered that on the morning Safad fell — 11 May — they decided to evacuate their women and children to Hunin, and that when al-Khalisa was captured a few days later its militia retreated there too, before moving on to Lebanon along with the people of Hunin itself. Zochrot dates the occupation to 31 October and names the Carmeli Brigade. What is not in dispute is the intention behind the operation. Its commander, the Palmach chief Yigal Allon, wrote afterwards that it had been thought imperative to cleanse the interior of the Galilee and create Jewish territorial continuity in the whole of Upper Galilee — achieved partly by direct attack and partly by a campaign of psychological warfare.

The village was not emptied at once. Benny Morris records a Palmach raid in May that drove most of the villagers to Lebanon and left about 400 behind. In August 1948 the mukhtars of Hunin and other Shia villages met the Jews of kibbutz Kfar Giladi and declared their willingness to be good citizens of Israel; the proposal reached the government and was backed by the Minister of Minority Affairs, Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit, whose ministry recommended an agreement with the roughly 4,700 Shia of the region. It was not accepted. Through August the army forced more of Hunin’s inhabitants out, and Morris records that four village women were raped and murdered by Israeli soldiers during that summer. On 2 September 1948 the army raided the village, blew up twenty houses, killed a son of the mukhtar and nineteen other people, and expelled those who remained. Most took refuge in Shia villages in Lebanon.

Misgav ‘Am had been established on the northern part of the village lands in 1945. Jewish immigrants from Iraq and Yemen founded Margaliyyot on village land just south of the site in 1951. The cemetery, the elementary school and the Crusader castle remain. The castle is a tourist attraction; the school is used by Israelis as an agricultural warehouse. The land around is cultivated by the settlers.

Sources

• Hunin — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Hunin — Zochrot
• Hunin — Wikipedia