The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappé

The original villagers were expelled and the governmental ‘naming committee’, a body in charge of replacing Palestinian names with Hebrew ones, decided to call the occupied village Ein Hod. One of the five families of the Abu al-Hija clan found refuge in the countryside nearby a few miles to the east and settled there. Stubbornly and courageously refusing to move, they gradually created a new village under the old name of Ayn Hawd. The success of this branch of the Abu al-Hija clan is quite remarkable. They looked for refuge first in the nearby village of Tirat Haifa, only to discover that that village had been occupied the day before. They were chased into the canyons near their own village but managed to hold out there. The Israeli commander reported that ‘the operations to cleanse the pockets of resistance of refugees in the Wadi east of the village continue’,17 but they failed in their attempts to drive the family away. The rest of the people of Ayn Hawd were scattered, some as distant as Iraq and others as near as the Druze villages overlooking Ayn Hawd from the top of Mount Carmel.