Safsaf

Safsaf sat on a low hill inclining slightly southwest, seven kilometres from Safad and on the eastern side of the Safad–Tarshiha road, at some 750 metres. Its name is the Arabic for willow, and it was called Safsofa in Roman times. The Ottoman survey of 1596 recorded 138 people in the nahiya of Jira paying tax on wheat, barley, olives and fruit as well as goats and beehives. Nineteenth-century travellers noted that the doorway of the mosque had been built with ornamented stones taken from an earlier public building, which may mean the site was abandoned for a time and then resettled. The modern village ran northeast to southwest, with a mosque and a few shops at its centre and an elementary school established during the Mandate. All its inhabitants were Muslims; in 1944/45 they numbered 910 and held 7,391 dunums, 2,586 of them sown in cereals and 769 irrigated or planted in orchards, with fruit and olives on the land to the north.

In the early months of the war Safsaf served as the headquarters of the Arab Liberation Army’s Second Yarmuk Battalion, commanded by Adib al-Shishakli, later president of Syria. It was the first village occupied in Operation Hiram, falling some time before dawn on 29 October 1948 to two platoons of armoured cars and a tank company of the Seventh Brigade. The official Israeli history states only that the village was occupied after a brief battle.

What followed was recorded on both sides. Israel Galili, formerly head of the Haganah national staff, listed the acts committed there: fifty-two men tied with a rope and dropped into a well and shot, of whom ten were killed; women pleading for mercy; three cases of rape; a girl of fourteen raped; another four killed. Villagers interviewed later by the Palestinian historian Nafez Nazzal described a three-pronged assault they had not expected, the retreat of the militiamen and ALA volunteers to Lebanon, and the rounding up of those left behind at the northern edge of the village. One villager recounted that soldiers ordered four girls to fetch water, took them instead to empty houses and raped them, and that about seventy men were blindfolded and shot to death one after another in front of the assembled villagers, their bodies thrown onto the cement covering of the village spring and buried under sand. In the days afterwards Israeli troops came back and told the inhabitants to forget what had happened and to stay in their homes; instead they slipped away at night, four at a time, until Safsaf was empty. Most went to Lebanon.

Israel established the settlement of ha-Shahar, later renamed Sifsofa, on village land in 1949, and Bar Yochay in 1979; both stand very near or on the village site. The ground is overgrown with grass and scattered trees, among which a few terraces and piles of stone from the destroyed houses can be seen, and a few of the houses are lived in by Israelis. Part of the surrounding land is farmed by the settlements and the rest has been forested. The relevant Israeli military files remain classified.

Sources

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