The Fassuta Exception

The village that was nearly destroyed by Israel in 1948 but now resists Hezbollah's advance.

A man in his fifties, a few days of stubble on his face, stalks a village in his reservist uniform, rifle in hand. “Whoever lives in this country needs to give, to contribute,” he tells the television reporter. “Whoever doesn’t contribute…they can go to the other side.” The border with Lebanon is a few minutes away; most of the other communities in the area were evacuated the week after October 7^th, but many of his people remain.

The man is Issam Asiy, and his village is Fassuta, one of only two all-Christian villages in Israel (the other is Mi’ilya in the Western Galilee). Half of the village left following the outbreak of the ongoing war of attrition between Israel and Hezbollah, but many insisted on staying. It was a similar story in the nearby Druze village of Hurfeish, where 80% of the men work for the security services. This is in contrast with the Jewish communities in the area, the vast majority of whom decided to leave.

To understand this issue more fully, we need to go back to October 1948, when Fassuta was captured by the Israeli army during Operation Hiram, which aimed at capturing the Upper Galilee from the Arab Liberation Army (ALA). Following the conquest, the IDF planned to expel the population of Fassuta and other villages in the area to create an Arab-free zone 5-10 km along the Lebanese border, the logic being that it would be harder to secure the border if it was inhabited by people who had supported the enemy during the war.

Crucially, though, not all the villages on what became the Israeli side of the border had resisted the IDF advance. As Benny Morrris explains in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited: “Roughly, villages which had put up a fight or a stiff fight against the IDF units were depopulated: their inhabitants, fearing retribution for their martial ardour, or declining to live under Jewish rule, fled, or, in some cases, were expelled. The inhabitants of villages that surrendered quietly generally stayed put and usually were not harmed or expelled by the IDF.”  In general, majority-Muslim villages tended to fight or support the ALA (although there were exemptions), while none of the Druze or Circassian villages resisted the Israelis.  

In mixed villages that resisted, for example Tarshiha and Jish, the Christians usually stayed put while the Muslims fled or were expelled. These decisions generally determined what happened to the villages after the war. Of the villages that surrendered only Alma was uprooted and expelled; of the villages that resisted, only Eilabun (mostly Christian), where the inhabitants were allowed back, exists today.

Some of the villages that didn’t resist, however, were in this strip close to the border, including Fassuta, Bir’im, and Iqrit. The plan to expel them was made towards the end of 1949, but objections from the Foreign Ministry meant it wasn’t implemented wholesale. As Morris explains: “The clearing of the borders of Arab communities in the wake of the hostilities was initiated by the IDF but, like the expulsions of the months before, was curbed by limitations exposed by the civilian leadership and was never carried out consistently or comprehensively.”

So Fassuta and the Maronite village of Jish (Gush Halav) survived, while Maronite communities like Bir’im, Al Mansura, and Iqrit were expelled, although the people of Bir’im and Iqrit were told their expulsion was only temporary. Meanwhile, several Bir’im residents were shot by ALA troops in Lebanon and seven Bir’im children died of exposure. In late November 1949 Ben-Gurion decided to allow them back into Israel, but not to their village. Instead, they settled in abandoned Muslim houses in Jish.

The residents of Bir’im and Iqrit, now internally displaced, pleaded unsuccessfully to the Israeli authorities to be allowed to return. They had high-level support from Bechor-Shalom Shitrit, the Minister of Police, and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who a few years later became Israel’s second president, but the IDF and intelligence services remained opposed. Both villages were mostly destroyed; today only their churches remain standing. However, in 1953 the Supreme Court ruled that they should be allowed to return, a ruling that has never been implemented, despite occasional promises to the contrary, including by Menachem Begin.

Today, Bir’im and Iqrit host the annual ‘March of Return’ on Nakba Day, while the church still sometimes hosts weddings and other events. The Bir’im church is located in a national park, a few meters away from an ancient synagogue. In another reminder of this history, the code name for the Munich Massacre was Operation Iqrit and Bir’im.

Let’s return to Fassuta. Here is a village that somehow managed to survive 1948, whose residents are now unequivocal about their Israeli identity. As the local priest, Abu Na Michael, explained to the reporter: “It’s true we’re Arabs, Christians, Israelis. We have an Israeli ID card, Israeli passport…We’re not Lebanese, not Syrians, and not Jordanians. We’re Israelis in every way.” Meanwhile, Sharif Blut, who owns a local restaurant, seems to try to disassociate himself from the wider Arab community of Israel: “There’s no crime here, there’s no balagan. You hear what’s happening in the Arab sector, unfortunately, every day.” Since October 7^th, he’s applied for a gun license. “They [Hezbollah] want to destroy us,” he explains.

The village currently has a security team of 20 men; Sharif says 400 men with rifles are needed. Fassuta hasn’t been harmed by the cross-border shelling thus far, but its residents insist that this is a matter of luck, and not because Hezbollah are trying to avoid firing at them. Issam says that the security is at 10% of what it needs to be, before acknowledging – reluctantly – that part of the reason for this is that their village is not Jewish.

Of those living along the border, 43 out of 51 communities have been given mandatory evacuation orders, including the Bedouin village of Arab al-Aramshe and the Alawite village of Ghajar, which is literally divided in two by the Israel-Lebanon border. The remaining communities, most of which are Arab, have been given the opportunity to evacuate, but a majority have decided to stay.

“History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes,” Mark Twain reportedly said. Last week, I explored some of the ironies of Hamas’s use of underground tunnels in light of their use by Bar Kochba nearly 2,000 years earlier. And now we have the irony of people who resisted displacement by Israel in 1948 now remaining sumud, steadfast, in the face of the threat by Hezbollah, emphasizing their Israeliness while acknowledging the persistence of discrimination. There is also the irony of the imagined Arab-free border strip now being populated almost entirely by Arabs, who are prepared and even proud to be the first line of defense against Hezbollah, while most of the area’s Jews have fled to the hotels of Tiberias.

I don’t know what the implications of this will be going forward, but this sentiment reflects a wider trend of Israel’s Arab citizens (sometimes referred to as Palestinian citizens of Israel) feeling more Israeli after October 7^th, despite predictions that the country would descend into mutual bloodshed as it did in May 2021, although it must be acknowledged that the climate is such that many Arabs are afraid to speak out against the war. Either way, at the time of writing, the government is due to cut around 15% from a special multiyear plan that was implemented in 2021 to address various inequalities faced by Israeli-Arabs, a larger cut than that applied to other programs to pay for the war. There is still hope that this cut will be reduced, and it is especially important to do so, given the unexpected opportunity for greater integration and togetherness that this terrible war has provided, as demonstrated by the heroic spirit of the people of Fassuta.