The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé

as they could to the Israeli development town of Migdal Ha-Emeq, built on the ruins of their villages after their occupation in July. Malul is gone without a trace; in Mujaydil two churches and a mosque were the only remnants until recently of the Palestinian presence. The mosque was destroyed in 2003 to make room for a shopping mall, and only the churches survive.
    The village of Mujaydil had 2000 inhabitants, most of whom fled to Nazareth before the soldiers reached their houses. For some reason the army left these intact. In 1950, after the intervention of the Pope in Rome, the Christians were offered the opportunity to move back but refused to do so without their Muslim neighbours. 10 Israel then destroyed half the houses and one of the village’s mosques. Mujaydil’s al-Huda Mosque had been built in 1930 and was twelve metres high and eight metres wide. A
kuttab
– an elementary Quranic school – was nearby. The site was famous for the elaborate system it used to collect the rainfall from the mosque’s roof into a well. A tall impressive minaret was added to the edifice in the 1940s.
    The Christian sites were equally picturesque. Part of the Russian Orthodox Church is still there today, though its walls are long gone. It was built in honour of the brother of the Russian Czar, Serjei Alexandrov, who had visited the place in 1882 and who donated the money for its construction in the hope that local Christians of other denominations could be converted to Orthodox Christianity. But after he had left, the local representative of the Orthodox Church in Palestine, Patriarch Nikodim, proved less insistent on the missionary task he had been entrusted with and more genuinely concerned about education for all: he opened the church toall the denominations in the village and ensured it functioned most of the time as the local school.
    The village also had a Roman Catholic church, built in 1903, which housed on its first floor a trilingual school for boys and girls (teaching was in Arabic, Italian and French). It also had a local clinic for the benefit of all the villagers. This church is still there and an old family who decided to come back from Nazareth to take care of the site, the Abu Hani family, now looks after the lovely orchard and the school.
    As in other places in Palestine, it is worthwhile to dwell a little on the local history of the village as it demonstrates how not only houses or fields were destroyed in the Nakba but a whole community disappeared, with all its intricate social networks and cultural achievements. Thus in Mujaydil the Israeli army obliterated a piece of history that included some fine architectural specimens and a series of significant social developments. Just twenty years before the Nakba, the proud villagers decided to transform, actually modernise, the old traditional system that placed the mukhtar at the head of the village community. Already in 1925 they had elected a local council, whose first project was to provide lighting along the village’s roads.
    Mujaydil was a unique place in many other aspects. Apart from its religious buildings and modern infrastructure it had a relatively large number of schools. In addition to the two schools associated with the churches, there was also a state school, the Banin School, known for the magnificent trees that provided shade for the pupils during their breaks, for the well situated in the middle of the school yard and for the fruit trees that surrounded it. The village’s main source of collective wealth, which supported all these impressive constructions, was a mill, built in the eighteenth century, that served the villages in the vicinity, including the people of the ‘veteran’ Jewish settlement of Nahalal (Moshe Dayan, who came from Nahalal, mentions his father’s reliance on this mill).
OPERATION PALM TREE
     
    Mujaydil was taken in the military operation to take over Nazareth and the villages around it, which was codenamed ‘
Dekel
’,