What is the Safsaf massacre in Palestine ?
Before going into the details of the massacre carried out at Safsaf, let’s delve into the village history first.
History:
The village, situated on a low hill that inclined slightly to the southwest, was linked by a spur to a highway leading to Safad. Its name, Safsaf, meant 'weeping willow' in Arabic.
The village was called Safsofa in Roman times. According to Yaqut, it was harried in 950 CE by the Hamdanid ruler of Aleppo, Sayf al-Dawla.
In 1596, Safsaf was a village in the nahiya of Jira (liwa' of Safad) with a population of 138, all Muslims.The villagers paid a fixed tax rate of 25% on several agricultural items, including wheat, barley, olives and fruits, as well as other types of produce, such as beehives and goats; a total of 3,714 akçe. A quarter of the revenue went to a waqf (religious endowment).
In 1838 Safsaf was noted as a village in the Safad district, while in 1875 Victor Guérin described it as a village with fifteen Muslim families.
Safsaf, circa 1870.
In 1881 the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine reported that Safsaf was a small village situated on a plain, with a population of about 100. They also noted that 'ornamented stones of a preexisting public building' had been built into the doorway of the mosque; this may have indicated that the site had been abandoned for a time and then reinhabited. The villagers cultivated olive and fig trees and vineyards. A population list from about 1887 showed Safsaf to have about 740 inhabitants, all Muslim.
In modern times the village lay on the eastern side of the Safad-Tarshiha highway and extended in a northeast-southwest direction. All of the residents of Safsaf were Muslims. A mosque and several shops were located in the village center, and an elementary school was established during the British Mandate. Agriculture, the chief economic activity, was both irrigated from springs and rainfed. Fruits and olives were cultivated on the land north of the village.
In the 1922 census of Palestine, Safsaf had a population of 521 Muslims, increasing in the 1931 census to 662, still all Muslims, in a total of 124 houses.
Safsaf in 1938.
In the 1945 statistics the population was 910 Muslims, with a total of 7,391 dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey. Of this, a total of 2,586 dunums were allotted to cereals; 769 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards, while a 72 dunams was built-up (urban) area.
Safsaf, circa 1940.
The Massacre:
Safsaf was the first Palestinian Arab village to be occupied during Operation Hiram. In the early months of the war, the village had been the headquarters of the Arab Liberation Army's (ALA) Second Yarmuk Battalion, led by Adib al-Shishakli (later president of Syria), according to Palestinian historian 'Arif al-'Arif. It fell some time before dawn on 29 October 1948, and was the scene of one of several massacres committed during the operation. Two platoons of armored cars and a tank company from the Sheva' (Seventh) Brigade attacked the village.
Evidence of a massacre in which around 70 villagers were murdered by Zionists comes from several contemporaneous Israeli government sources and Arab oral history. The assault on Safsaf began with heavy aerial and artillery bombardment in which many civilians were killed, including refugees from other villages. After the occupation, there was a massacre (according to Israeli and Palestinian sources) of approximately 70 villagers. Those killed were executed by shooting, bayoneting and drowning. Another 30-40 men were reported missing by the Mukhtar of the village.
According to Israeli documents 52 villagers had their hands tied, were shot and killed, and were buried in a pit. At least 4 women were reported to be raped by the Zionist army, including the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl, although the complaint of the Mukhtar suggested widespread rape. He wrote:
“All this is nothing compared to the savage acts committed against the women and young girls, violating their virginity.”
Looting was reported, the fingers of one of the Palestinian female victims were cut with a knife to steal the rings. At least two internal inquiries were initiated during 1948–49 by the IDF, but their reports remain classified and hidden by the Israeli government to this day.
- Israeli accounts:
A key source are the diaries of Yosef Nachmani, a senior officer in the Haganah, who was also director of the Jewish National Fund in Eastern Galilee from 1935 until 1965. He visited Safsaf or the area around it on 6 November, accompanied by the Israeli Minority Affairs minister Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit. The men were briefed by Immanuel Friedman, a representative of the Minority Affairs ministry, who talked about "the cruel acts of our soldiers." The Nachmani diary was released by the Israeli government in the early 1980s. It had been published before, but with the passages about the massacre omitted.
On 6 November 1948, Nachmani wrote:
"In Safsaf, after ... the inhabitants had raised a white flag, the [soldiers] collected and separated the men and women, tied the hands of fifty-sixty fellahin [peasants] and shot and killed them and buried them in a pit. Also, they raped several women..."
After listing other atrocities and massacres in other villages—Eilaboun, Farradiyya, and Saliha—Nachmani writes:
"Where did they come by such a measure of cruelty, like Nazis? ... Is there no more humane way of expelling the inhabitants than by such methods?"
Moshe Erem reported on the massacre to a meeting of the Mapam Political Committee but his words were removed from the minutes. According to notes of the meeting taken by Aharon Cohen, Erem spoke of:
"Safsaf 52 men tied together with a rope. Pushed down a well and shot. 10 killed. Women pleaded for mercy. 3 cases of rape ... A girl of 14 raped. Another four killed."
- Palestinian and Arab accounts:
The Israeli accounts in broad detail are supported by Arab witnesses who told their stories to historians. According to Nafez Nazzal, who interviewed survivors in Ain al-Hilweh camp in 1973, witnesses spoke of four rapes and the murder of about 70 villagers. Villagers said that when the attack began on the village, the militiamen were braced to defend it but were surprised by a three-pronged assault. One militiaman said later:
"We did not expect them to fight on three fronts. When none of the Arab armies joined the fighting, we retreated, together with the ALA volunteers to Lebanon. We left behind most of the villagers, many dead or injure...."
Those left behind said that Israeli soldiers had entered Safsaf around sunrise and ordered the villagers to line up in a spot in the northern part of the village. One villager told Nazzal:
"As we lined up, a few Jewish soldiers ordered four girls to accompany them to carry water for the soldiers. Instead, they took them to our empty houses and raped them. About seventy of our men were blindfolded and shot to death, one after the other, in front of us. The soldiers took their bodies and threw them on the cement covering of the village's spring and dumped sand on them."
Muhammad Abdullah Edghaim was born 15 years before the Nakba. He had attended elementary school in the village until the seventh grade and had completed his first year in Safad's high school when the city fell into Jewish hands in May. No longer able to attend school, he was at home when a mixed unit of Jewish and Druze soldiers entered his village on 29 October 1948.
Their arrival had been preceded by heavy bombardment that had killed, among others, one of Galilee's best known singers, Muhammad Mahmnud Nasir Zaghmout. He died when a shell hit a group of villagers working in the vineyards to the west of the village. The young boy witnessed the singer's family trying to carry his body to the village, but they had to abandon the attempt due to the heavy shelling.
Every one of the defenders of Safsaf, among them ALA volunteers, was waiting, for some reason, for a Jewish attack to arrive from the east, but it came from the west and the village was quickly overrun. The following morning the people were ordered to assemble in the village square. The familiar procedure for identifying 'suspects' now took place, this time also involving the Druze soldiers, and a large number were picked out from the captured population. Seventy of the unfortunate men were taken out, blindfolded and then moved to a remote spot and summarily shot. Israeli archival documents confirm this case. The rest of the villagers were then ordered to leave. Unable to collect even their most meagre personal possessions, they were driven out, with the Israeli troops firing shots above their heads, towards the nearby border with Lebanon.
30-40 men were reported missing by the Mukhtar of the village.
Even though Israeli documents acknowledge four rapes, including one of a 14 year old girl, the complaint of the Mukhtar suggests widespread rape. He writes:
“All this is nothing compared to the savage acts com- mitted against the women and young girls, violating their virginity.”
The oral testimonies, unlike the Israeli military archives, tell of even worse atrocities. There is very little reason to doubt these eyewitness accounts, as so many of them have been corroborated by other sources for other cases. Survivors recall how four women and a girl were raped in front of the other villagers and how one pregnant woman was bayoneted.
A few people were left behind, as in Tantura, to collect and bury the dead- several elderly men and five boys. Mahmoud Abdulah Edghaim, one of the main sources for the atrocities, is today an old man, still living in the refugee camp of Ayn Hilwah. His little hut is surrounded by the many weeping willows he planted when he first arrived there almost 77 years ago. This is all that remains of Safsaf.
Israel established the colonial settlement of Kfar Hoshen, later renamed Safsufa, in 1949 on village lands. A second colonial settlement, Bar Yochay, was established in 1979, also on village lands. Both are very near, if not on top of, the village site.
Safsaf now.
In 1992 the village site was described:
"The site is overgrown with grass and scattered trees among which can be seen a few terraces and piles of stones from destroyed houses. A few houses are inhabited by Israelis. A fraction of surrounding land is cultivated by the settlements, and the rest is forested."
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