Nasir al-Din

Nasir al-Din stood on the crest of a slope running down towards Lake Tiberias and the city of Tiberias, three kilometres away, with springs to the east, southeast and south and a spur road joining the highway to the city. It took its name from a figure whose shrine stood north of the village and who was said to have been killed fighting the Crusaders and buried there; a second shrine, for a Shaykh al-Qaddumi, stood a kilometre to the west on Tall Ma’un. The village had no plan to speak of, its houses scattered roughly north to south. Its people were Muslims who lived by farming and stock-breeding; in 1944/45 the lands of Nasir al-Din and neighbouring al-Manara together came to 4,185 dunums, of which 4,172 were sown in cereals. The 1931 census counted 179 people in thirty-five houses; by 1944/45 the recorded population was ninety.

Before taking a city, Haganah units frequently made an example of a village beside it, to spread fear among the townspeople and start a flow of refugees. In the capture of Tiberias, Nasir al-Din was the village chosen. On 11 or 12 April 1948 two platoons of the Golani Brigade based in the Jewish quarter of Tiberias moved on it. The fighting lasted about four hours because the attackers met unexpected resistance.

The accounts of what happened differ in detail but not in kind. Benny Morris writes that some non-combatants were apparently killed and some houses destroyed, and that most of the population fled to Lubya or to Tiberias, from where British troops moved them on to Lubya. Nafez Nazzal, working from eyewitnesses, records that every house in the village was destroyed, that some inhabitants including women and children were killed, and that the rest were expelled, and he names seven of the dead. Arif al-Arif gives ten killed and the houses burned. A British communiqué quoted in the Jaffa daily Filastin reported eight men, one woman and an unspecified number of children killed, and the paper confirmed that stone houses had been blown up and mud houses burned. Some Palestinians described it as a second Deir Yassin. The arrival of the survivors in Tiberias broke morale there, and the attack also cut the city off from the large neighbouring village of Lubya. Tiberias fell on 18 April. Morris notes that a few people remained at Nasir al-Din after the attack but were made to leave by 23 April; the circumstances are unclear.

There is no visible sign of the village. Residential buildings belonging to the city of Tiberias stand on part of the site and its land; the undeveloped remainder is used for grazing.

Sources

• Nasir al-Din — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Nasir al-Din — Zochrot
• Nasir ad-Din, Palestine — Wikipedia