Al-Khisas, Hula Valley, eastern Galilee · night of 18-19 December 1947 · 10-15 killed, among them 5 children · ~470 driven from their homes (most after the raid; the last 50-55 expelled in June 1949) · Palmach night raid that blew up houses over their sleeping residents - months before the State of Israel existed and before any Arab army entered Palestine.

This is the second post in a series going through, event by event, how Palestinians have lost their lives or homes since 1947. The rules from the first post about Lifta still apply: every event carries at least one source a pro-Israel skeptic would accept, and where sources contradict each other I report the contradiction instead of picking the convenient number.

The village

Al-Khisas lay in the Hula Valley in the far northeast of Galilee, near the Syrian and Lebanese borders. The 1945 British census counted about 530 inhabitants, some 470 of them Arabs, living from farming and fishing on land largely owned by the Emir Faour family. It was a small place with no strategic weight of its own.

What happened

On the night of 18-19 December 1947, troops of the Palmach’s 3rd Battalion - the elite strike force of the Haganah - raided al-Khisas in retaliation for the killing of a Jewish man near a neighboring kibbutz days earlier. The raiders blew up houses in the dark with their residents inside.

The two main historians differ on the toll, and honesty requires showing it:

Both agree on the five children. Both agree the victims were civilians. And this time the perpetrator is not in dispute: it was the Palmach, and the raid is documented in the Haganah’s own records as used by Morris.

What makes al-Khisas unusual is the paper trail at the top. Morris documents that the raid was severely criticized within the Jewish leadership: the Arab Division of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department condemned it for having “unnecessarily spread the fighting to a hitherto quiet area.” Pappe adds detail I have verified against his text (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, pp. 57-58): the operation against Khisas had been cancelled by the Haganah High Command, but Yigal Allon, the Palmach commander in the north, went ahead anyway; a New York Times correspondent pressed the Haganah, which first denied and then admitted the raid; and “Ben-Gurion issued a dramatic public apology, claiming the action had been unauthorised but, a few months later, in April, he included it in a list of successful operations.” For that last sentence Pappe cites primary sources: The New York Times of 20 December 1947, and Ben-Gurion’s speech to the Zionist Executive on 6 April 1948 (his note 34). Pappe’s handling of sources has been criticized, by Morris among others, so I state exactly what rests on him - but here he points to a dated newspaper and a dated speech, both checkable. The apology and the success story refer to the same night, five months apart.

Note the date. The raid came three weeks after the UN partition vote, five months before Israel’s declaration and the entry of any Arab army. Whatever set al-Khisas’s villagers in motion, it was not an Arab invasion.

What happened afterwards

Much of the population fled after the raid. Morris dates the main depopulation to 25 May 1948. But al-Khisas was not finally emptied even then: some 50-55 villagers stayed, or came back, and lived in the village for over a year under the new state - until the night of 5-6 June 1949, when the Israeli army expelled them and trucked them to ‘Akbara. That is a year after the war in the north had ended, and it is worth stating plainly: the last people of al-Khisas did not flee a war, they were removed by a state at peace.

Kibbutz HaGoshrim was established on the village lands in September 1948. The former manor house of Emir Faour operates as part of a hotel today.

Sources