Sa'sa'

Sa’sa’ stood on a rocky hill in the heart of the upper Galilee mountains, at the intersection of roads running to neighbouring villages and to Safad. The geographer Abu Ubayd Allah al-Bakri, who died in 1094, passed through it travelling from Dayr al-Qasi to Safad. In 1596 it was a village of 457 people paying tax on wheat, barley, olives and fruit as well as goats, beehives and vineyards, and in the late nineteenth century a place of three hundred surrounded by vineyards and olive and fig trees. Its houses of mud and stone were built in attached rows separated by narrow winding alleys, and several springs supplied it with water. Its people were all Muslims; there was a small market with a few shops, a mosque and two elementary schools, one for boys and one for girls. The villagers had cleared the wild trees around the village and replaced them with apple and olive trees and vines; of 14,796 dunums, 4,496 were sown in cereals and 1,404 irrigated or planted in orchards. Because Sa’sa’ lay on a road network close to the Lebanese border, the British built watchtowers and wire fences there in the late 1930s to cut Palestinian fighters off from support across the frontier. The village stood over a Bronze Age settlement whose walls, tombs, cisterns and olive and wine presses have been unearthed.

Two massacres were committed at Sa’sa’ in 1948. On 15 February a Palmach force from the Third Battalion raided the village; its commander, Moshe Kelman, had orders to blow up twenty houses and kill the largest possible number of fighters. The attackers came in at night, placed charges against a number of houses and set them off. The History of the Haganah — which called the raid one of the most daring in the depth of enemy territory — put the result at ten houses wholly or partly destroyed and “tens” of people killed, and quoted the operation’s commander saying it had planted great fear in the hearts of the surrounding villages. Press reports contradicted the claim that the village was a military base: according to the New York Times, a large party of armed men entered without opposition, planted the charges, killed eleven villagers, five of them small children, and wounded three, demolishing three houses and badly damaging eleven others.

The second massacre came on 30 October, when the village was occupied during Operation Hiram. The Haganah’s own account says Sa’sa’ was taken with ease and that the Seventh Brigade met no resistance; nevertheless acts of what Israel Galili, formerly head of the Haganah national staff, called mass murder were committed there, and Galili told Mapam leaders the week afterwards that some villagers were also expelled. Some villagers had already fled on the morning before the occupation after watching an Israeli plane bomb Safsaf and Jish and hearing gunfire through the night; others left on learning what had been done at Safsaf. Detailed accounts of the killings at Sa’sa’ itself are not available. The Israeli northern front commander Moshe Carmel described what he saw by the roadside shortly after the occupation: a tall man bent over, scraping at the hard rocky soil with his fingernails under an olive tree, laying in the hollow the body of a baby that had died in its mother’s arms and covering it with soil and small stones.

Kibbutz Sasa was established on the village site in 1949 and Mattat in 1979. Some of the old olive trees remain and a number of walls and houses still stand, several of them in use by the kibbutz — one with an arched entrance and arched windows. The village mosque was turned into the kibbutz cultural centre. Much of the surrounding land has been forested and the rest is farmed.

Sources

• Sa’sa’ — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Sa’sa’ — Zochrot
• Sa’sa’, Palestine — Wikipedia