Khirbat al-Wa'ra al-Sawda'

The village stood on a small plateau of volcanic rock at about 25 metres, overlooking Wadi al-Hamam and Lake Tiberias, seven and a half kilometres from Tiberias. The Palestine Index Gazetteer classified it as a hamlet. A secondary road linked it to the highway that ran along the lake shore into Tiberias, and a dirt road ran southwest to Hittin; the houses were grouped in an irregular pattern around the crossing of the two. Its people belonged mainly to the ‘Arab al-Mawasi, with some families of the ‘Arab al-Wuhayb, and their stone houses were surrounded by the tents of those who had not built permanent homes. All were Muslims. Two shrines dedicated to local shaykhs, ‘Umar and Musa al-Qadhim, stood in a khirba on the northern outskirts; the villagers performed religious ceremonies at the second of them.

Agriculture was the mainstay. Olive trees were planted on the northern part of the land and grain was grown in the bed of Wadi al-Hamam; 2,027 dunums were allotted to cereals in 1944/45, out of a total village area of 7,036 dunums. A few archaeological sites lay nearby, among them two khirbas holding building foundations, stone cairns, cisterns, a cave, a well and a trough hewn in rock. The 1944/45 population was 1,870 and the 1931 count 1,060, but both figures are amalgamated with those of ‘Arab al-Mawasi and ‘Arab al-Wuhayb, as are the land and housing statistics; there is no separate published count for the village alone.

No account of the occupation of this village has been published. Walid Khalidi could set out only two possibilities, and the record has not since been closed. The first is that it was captured in the wake of the fall of Tiberias on 18 April 1948, when Haganah forces struck at some of the villages around the city to consolidate their hold and drive out the inhabitants of its hinterland. The second is that it was captured during Operation Dekel, as the forces that had taken Nazareth advanced eastwards towards Tiberias — in which case it would have fallen in mid-July, along with nearby Hittin, shortly before the second truce.

What is recorded is an oral report from the villagers of a massacre of ‘Arab al-Mawasi in late October or early November 1948, after the second truce. According to them, Jewish soldiers rounded up fifteen men, took them to the nearby village of Eilabun and shot them. Two survived by feigning death, but the soldiers had withdrawn only a short distance; after some minutes they returned and shot each of the bodies again, this time in the head. Fourteen men died and were buried in a nearby cave. The one survivor escaped to Syria along with other ‘Arab al-Mawasi; others joined tribes in the inner Galilee.

No Israeli settlement was built on the village lands. Ravid stands three kilometres west of the site but not on its land, and Arbel, built in 1949, about two kilometres southeast on the lands of Hittin. No traces of the houses remain. Stone terraces are the only indication that a village stood there. The site and the land around it are used largely for grazing, though some of it is cultivated by Israelis.

Sources

• Khirbat al-Wa’ra al-Sawda’ — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Khirbat al-Wa’ra al-Sawda’ — Wikipedia