The church in al Bassa
b.
We parked outside the technical college in the town that is now called Shlomi, a few miles east of the Mediterranean and just south of the border with Lebanon. It was midday and hot and the streets were empty. The buildings were like any buildings: low, dull, corporate. There was a textile factory too, and the offices of a medical insurance company, the streets well-paved, everything trim and groomed except for the chaos of thistle and blackberries and figs around the ruins of the old Orthodox church and the Muslim shrine and the old stone house between them with its six high arched windows. I climbed through the rubble into the shrine and I stood beneath its dome. The floor was littered with trash and broken stone, the ashes of a fire. The church’s door had been boarded up, its windows half-bricked over with concrete blocks, but someone had piled rocks beneath one window at the back of the building and I was able to reach the ledge and hoist myself up by the bars. Inside, I could see that the floor of the church was empty save a single wooden table in the middle of the nave and a pile of white boulders where the altar had once stood. The plaster coating the vaulted ceiling was stained and cracked and chipping away in welts, revealing the brickwork beneath. I took pictures.
Shlomi didn’t become Shlomi until 1950. Before that it was al Bassa, a prosperous Palestinian town of more than 3,000 people, almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims. I learned this later. I read up. Al Bassa had been a center of resistance, I learned, first against the British during the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939 and later in 1948, when local militiamen took part in an attack on a caravan of Haganah troops. (This occurred just before the paramilitary Haganah was formally reorganized as the Israeli army.) More soldiers arrived in May of that year as part of Operation Ben Ami. Their orders: “to attack for the sake of occupation … to kill the men, destroy and set fire.” In a little more than a day, most of the villages in the west of the Upper Galilee had been emptied of their occupants. (The rhetoric of conquest varies little over time: David Ben Gurion told the legislature of the newly declared state of Israel that “The Western Galilee has been liberated.”) But al Bassa, Ilan Pappe writes, took a little longer to subdue, and was for that reason punished more severely. According to one version, all the young men were lined up in front of the church and shot. The women were ordered to bury their brothers, husbands and sons, and leave the village. In other accounts the massacre took place inside the church. Later, soldiers destroyed all but a few of the 700 houses in al Bassa. The technical college was built atop two cemeteries, one of them Christian, the other Muslim.
Did I mention that the giant, sprawling fig trees to the left of the church were diseased, their leaves coated with thick, green, fungal growths? Or that the whole time I was there the air stank of grease and roasting meat and the tang of decay from the chicken processing plant across the street? I could hear the whirring of the plant’s giant fans and the beeping of forklifts reversing across the lot. On the roof, a worker hid out in a shady spot and smoked a cigarette, watching me watching him.
Reader Comments (4)
You are a propagandist and a liar, apparently at least the third generation of your family to take on this dubious role. There is a late-adolescent aura in the weird intensity of the photographs of you posted on the internet. Remember Camus's admonition that after the age of 30 a man is responsible for his own face. You're over ten years late. I find comic your courageous defiance of the most civilized government and society in the Near East, when all around it the vicious, brutal, thieving, oppressive, persecuting, murderous,examples of Paul Johnson's well-named "Caliban's kingdoms" manage to escape your hyper-sensitive attention.
The "peace process" is stalled because the Palestinian leadership doesn't want peace; they want all of the land of Israel, but they have failed again and again to take it. ( I'm not going to quibble over names, but "Palestine" was used by the Romans to try to obliterate the name "Judea", with its obvious associations.) If you want to help your friends on the West Bank, both those with blue eyes and those without, encourage them to think of and act on their children's futures. I promise you that Israelis do with respect to their own, which is why no independent Palestine ( the only real solution ) will emerge anytime soon.
It's almost cute, David, the way you frost your racism with adjectives.
Who the hell is b.? And what does this oracular pronouncement mean? Inquiring minds want to know. Is this you, Ben? Or one of your groupies? I assume that the use of the terrible R-word is supposed to make me melt into a lipstick stain like the former White House correspondent, the wicked witch of the West! Or in my case, a whiff of dry vermouth and an olive stain. Dream on, b.!
I don't want you to melt, d. Why would you think that?