Israel Matzav

Why Abu Mazen fled Safed

Nearly two weeks ago, I noted a confession by 'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen, whose public profile (in English) claims that he is a 'refugee,' on 'Palestinian' television that his family had voluntarily left Tzfat (Safed) in 1948, and had not been expelled by the Jews as he would have you believe. If he's a 'refugee' he (or his father) made himself one.

But Tzfat wasn't just a town where the Arab armies urged the 'people' to get out of the way so that they could drive the Jews into the Sea. The inimitable Sarah Honig recalls the background of Tzfat and why its Arab population was so fearful as to flee. (Warning: This is graphic).

In August 1929 Husseini rallied Arabs to slaughter Jews on trumped-up allegations of Jewish takeover attempts at the Temple Mount. Sixty-seven members of the ancient Jewish community of Hebron were hideously hacked to death. That was the most notorious massacre, but others were perpetrated throughout the country. In the equally ancient Jewish community of Safed, 21 were butchered no less gruesomely (a cat was stuffed into one old woman's disemboweled abdomen). A child and young woman, due to be married the next day, were cold-bloodedly shot dead by Arab constables whom British mandatory officers assigned to watch over the majority of Safed's Jews who sought safety in the police courtyard.

The British proposed that all Safed Jews be evacuated "for their own safety," as was the case in Hebron. The offer was vehemently refused. Thereafter, principally during the 1936-39 mufti-led rampages, the Hagana and Safed's own IZL cells protected the town's 2,000 Jews.

Nevertheless, on the ill-fated evening of August 13, 1936 Arab marauders managed to infiltrate and invade the modest Unger home in the old Jewish Quarter, just as the family ate supper. They murdered the father, Alter, a 36-year-old Torah scribe, his daughters Yaffa and Hava (nine and seven respectively) and the six-year-old son, Avraham.

In his book Safed Annals author Natan Shor includes the following eyewitness account from one of the first neighbors who soon chanced by: "The boys heard groans from one of the houses. We entered and in the middle of a dark room - furnished only by a table, a broken chair and a bookcase crammed with mostly religious volumes - lay a man's body. His skull was bashed in. Half the head was missing. We saw only a beard, part of a nose and the right eye... The corpse lay in a pool of blood and brain matter... In the next room amid the dishes, lay three little bloodied lifeless children. Two of them were still open-eyed. An old woman, the grandmother, ran around from room to room, crazed with grief. The mother, herself wounded (probably left for dead), went from child to child. She didn't yell or wail. Staring intently, she repeated quietly over and over in Yiddish: 'If it were only me instead of you.' Her hand bled profusely and an amputated finger hung by a strip of skin."

SUCH WAS the uprising for which Abbas's kinfolk assumed they deserved just reckoning. Ironically, Jews were alarmed by the Arab exodus, figuring it presaged a formidable onslaught by invading Arab armies (which indeed came). In many areas (Haifa, for instance) Jews begged and pleaded with local Arabs to stay. But Arabs in Safed and elsewhere - heeding their leaders' exhortations to pull out and hounded by fears arising from their own vengeful traditions (but not Jewish ones) - did what was prudent in light of their surmise that Jews would behave according to Arab codes.

On the eve of the April 16, 1948 British withdrawal from Safed, the mandatory authorities turned over the town's police facilities and Mount Canaan's military fort to the Arabs. They offered to escort all Jews out of town "for their own safety." As in 1929, the Jews refused unequivocally, though memories of the horrific carnage should have inspired more dread among them than among the fleeing Abasses.

Read the whole thing. And the next time you hear a story about a 'poor Palestinian refugee,' consider the possibility that he or his ancestors brought that status upon themselves.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:51 AM