Tarbikha

Tarbikha stood on the flat part of a plateau that rose gradually towards the west, bordered by a wide wadi, at about 550 metres and twenty-seven kilometres from Acre. It looked east over its two satellite villages, Suruh and al-Nabi Rubin, and a network of secondary roads linked it to Ra’s al-Naqura and to neighbouring villages along the Lebanese border. It stood on the site of the Crusader Tayerebika, from which it took its name; in 1220 Beatrix de Courtenay and Otto von Botenlauben sold Tayerbica with their other land to the Teutonic Knights. In 1596 it was a village in the nahiya of Tibnin, in the liwa’ of Safad, with a population of 88, paying tax on wheat, barley and olives, on goats and beehives, and on a press used for olives or grapes. In the late nineteenth century it was a stone village on a ridge of about a hundred people who cultivated olives. Tarbikha belonged to the province of Beirut in the late Ottoman period and came under Palestinian administration only after the First World War, when Britain and France drew the border. Its inhabitants were Shia Muslims, as were those of the villages across the line in southern Lebanon.

The houses were of stone with wood-and-mud ceilings, clustered at first around a watering pool; some two-storey houses of reinforced concrete went up towards the end of the Mandate, and new building stretched along the Ra’s al-Naqura–Banat Ya’qub road. The village had two mosques and an elementary school founded after 1938 with an enrolment of 120 pupils in the mid-1940s, and also a customs office and a police station for watching the Lebanese border. A Cultural Reform Association — jam’iyyat al-islah al-thaqafiyya — was founded in Tarbikha in 1945 to improve social, educational and medical conditions. The village land was mountainous and cut by wadis but had flat stretches too; springs, reservoirs and wells supplied water. Most of it was pasture, but the villagers grew grain, olives and other crops, and tobacco production increased towards the end of the Mandate until its quality began to match that grown in Turkey. Numerous khirbas on the village lands, some holding ancient olive presses and rock-hewn tombs, attest to a long history of habitation. The 1931 census counted 674 people in 149 houses, all Muslims but one Christian. The 1945 statistics counted Tarbikha together with Suruh and al-Nabi Rubin: 1,000 Muslims between the three, holding 18,563 dunums, of which 3,200 were allotted to cereals and 619 were irrigated or planted in orchards.

Tarbikha was assaulted during Operation Hiram by the Oded Brigade at the end of October 1948, and was one of the first of the border villages to be captured when Israeli units swept into them afterwards. Some time during the second week of November the Oded Brigade entered the village and ordered its people to cross the border into Lebanon. The Israeli forces met no resistance, according to the account of the occupation in the History of the War of Independence. Benny Morris nonetheless quotes the commanding officer of the Northern Front saying that his forces had been forced for military reasons to expel the villagers of Tarbikha among others. Afterwards the army did not let the Arabs gather the crops they had planted; the crops were gathered instead by the Jews of kibbutz Tarbikha, and the villages were left unguarded, open to anyone passing.

Morris records that by 27 May 1949 Jewish immigrants had been settled in the village, which was renamed Shomera; the land was settled by immigrants from Hungary and Romania as part of the policy of Judaisation of the north. Even Menachem was established very close to the village site in 1960, Netu’a in 1966, Kefar Rosenwald in 1967 and Shetula in 1969, all on village land. About twenty of the village houses are now occupied by the residents of Moshav Shomera; some of the roofs have been remodelled and given a gabled form, and stones from the original houses embellish the roof of the moshav’s central shelter. In 1994 the refugees of the seven border villages, classified as Palestinian refugees since 1948, were granted Lebanese citizenship.

Sources

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