Umm al-Fahm

Umm al-Fahm sits on the hills above Wadi Ara, the pass that carries the road from the coastal plain to the Jezreel valley — the route armies have used since the Bronze Age. It was a hill town of farmers and charcoal burners; the name means “mother of coal.” In 1948 it lay outside the area allotted to the Jewish state and behind the lines held at the end of the fighting by Iraqi forces, and its people neither fled nor were expelled.

What changed their nationality was a document. The Israel–Jordan General Armistice Agreement, signed at Rhodes on 3 April 1949, moved the demarcation line so that the “Little Triangle” — the belt of Arab villages running from Wadi Ara in the north to the Kafr Qasim area in the south, Umm al-Fahm among them — passed to Israeli control when Iraqi forces withdrew and Jordan assumed their positions. The agreement moved the line in stages, offset by a deviation in Jordan’s favour in the Hebron–Dead Sea sector, and it promised the inhabitants of the affected villages that they “shall be entitled to maintain, and shall be protected in, their full rights of residence, property and freedom,” with prompt and full compensation for any land they left. Tens of thousands of Palestinians in the belt became Israeli citizens overnight, without moving. Like all Palestinians inside Israel they were placed under military government, which controlled travel, work and residence by permit until it was abolished in 1966.

Most of their land did not survive the transition. Expropriation under the Absentees’ Property Law, the Land Acquisition Law and successive “public purpose” seizures reduced the town’s holdings to a fraction of what its families had cultivated, while the state pursued an explicit policy of settling Jewish communities among and around the Arab towns of the Galilee and the Triangle. That policy — the “Judaization” of the Galilee — is what brought Palestinians inside Israel into the streets on 30 March 1976, the first Land Day, and it is the frame within which Umm al-Fahm’s politics have been conducted ever since.

The town grew into one of the largest Palestinian cities in Israel and a centre of its political and religious life, including the northern branch of the Islamic Movement. It was also one of the flashpoints of the October 2000 uprising, when Palestinian citizens across the country demonstrated against the killing and wounding of Palestinians in the occupied territories at the outbreak of the second intifada, and Israeli police, including special sniper units, opened fire with live ammunition and rubber-coated steel bullets. Thirteen unarmed young men were shot dead between 1 and 8 October in the protests as a whole — twelve of them citizens of Israel, one a resident of Gaza — and hundreds were injured; most of those killed or seriously wounded were hit in the head, neck or chest. The Or Commission of Inquiry, reporting in September 2003, found that there had been no justification whatsoever for the gunfire that caused the thirteen deaths, and that sniper fire had been used against demonstrators for the first time since 1948. No police officer, commander or official has ever been indicted.

Sources

• Jordan–Israel General Armistice Agreement, 3 April 1949 — PalQuest
• The October 2000 Killings (October Uprising) — Adalah
• Land Day, 30 March 1976 — PalQuest