In February, 1920, one week before the attack on Tel Hai in which early Zionist activist Joseph Trumpeldor and his comrades were killed, 120 farmers and their families left the moshava agricultural community in Metula to seek shelter in neighboring villages. The Galilee panhandle was delivered to the French Mandate (which controlled all of Lebanon and Syria) at the end of World War I. Arabs and Druze fought the French regime, and Jews were sometimes suspected of collaboration with the French. Only three years later, the panhandle became part of the British Mandate.
Meir Ben Dov, 70, an archaeologist and third-generation resident of Metula, is piecing together a book about the moshava and writing down the legendary tales of the evacuation of the farming community. His grandfather and grandmother, members of the celebrated Lishansky family, with other farm families, found a safe haven in the khan (caravansary) in Nabatiya, which then, as now, was the capital of mountainous South Lebanon and mainly inhabited by Lebanese Shi'ites (called mtewleh at the time).
Kfar Giladi residents also left their settlement during those volatile days and found shelter with Shi'ite leader Sheikh Kamal Assad Bek in the village of Taybeh.
Why did escaping Jews choose to seek asylum in these particular settlements? Ben Dov says that Jewish farmers enjoyed far better relations with their Shi'ite neighbors than with any other ethnic group in the region.
The ethno-religious mosaic on the slopes of the Hermon and surrounding mountains was highly varied in those days. There were Druze, left behind when most of their brethren abandoned the region for the East following bloody battles between Druze and Christians in 1860; Bedouin who sold dairy products to families in Metula; Maronite Christians, Catholics, and Greek Orthodox. One of them, a doctor in Marjayoun, treated Ben Dov's grandmother with leeches.
There were Alawites, like Bashar Assad, who became the military elite that controls Syria. Still living in the village of Ghajar, east of Metula, the Alawites were considered unsophisticated rubes because, in addition to other practices, they banged on pots during eclipses of the moon to repel the demon attempting to devour it. The clamor was heard all the way to Metula.
There were Circassian, Kurd, Moughrabi, and Turkmen villages in the Golan and, of course, Sunni Muslims in the eastern town of Rashaya al-Foukhar. Residents of "Rashaya" made ceramic utensils and sold them throughout the region. Nawar, Muslim gypsies, forged iron, sharpened knives, made horseshoes and lined bronze cooking pots with zinc to prevent poisoning.
Ben Dov says that, in many cases, central regimes intentionally settled minority groups in the area because of its strategic location as a point of passage between the coastal plain and interior regions and because minority groups are typically loyal to the government. They tend to fight among themselves but often turn to reigning governments to settle scores between them. This may be why, during the latter years of the Ottoman Empire, rulers allowed Jews, including the farmers in Metula, to settle in the region. There were so many minorities in the area, there might as well be another.
When the Metula farmers returned from exile to the moshava in 1920, they discovered that their Arab neighbors did not loot the farms and did nearly no damage to them. Relations with the neighboring Shi'ite village of Kila were especially warm. The families that worked the relatively large Jewish farms required hired labor. Most of these hired hands came from Kila and were considered "part of the family." They helped to plow fields with bulls and knew how to geld the animals to tame them and make them suitable for work. They did yard work, herded sheep and guarded fields. They also sold the farmers wooden utensils for home and field - plows, handles for hoes and brooms made with sira kotzanit, a type of poterium plant. After the harvest and threshing, they received their wages in the form of meticulously weighed sacks of wheat.
Once a year, Shi'ite villagers in the region gathered for a massive feast in the yard of Sheikh Assad Bek in Taybeh. This reception represented an expression of loyalty to their leader. In those years, rumor had it that the Mtewleh Shi'ites were very strict in their observance of ritual purity and that they did not use dishes touched by a foreign hand.
Famous hunter Yehezkel Hankin, brother of early pioneer and "Redeemer of the Valley" Yehoshua Hankin, traveled throughout the region and visited the homes of Shi'ites while hunting wild animals to deliver to taxidermist Yisrael Aharoni, considered the father of native Israeli zoology. Hankin says that if a non-Shi'ite drank from a pitcher in a Shi'ite home, the latter would break it to pieces. Ben Dov says that while this practice may have been common in an earlier period, when he was a boy in Metula, in the latter part of the British Mandate, he knew his Shi'ite neighbors well, and they ate and drank with the Jewish settlers without limit.
Author and archaeologist Pesach Bar Adon, who lived among Bedouin tribes in the Beit She'an Valley and the Upper Galilee in the '20s and '30s, was one of the very few outsiders who participated in the Shi'ite Ashura ritual in Nabatiya. Then, as now, tens of thousands of residents gather in the capital of the southern mountain region, march together on the 10th day of Muharram (the first month in the Muslim calendar) and beat themselves till blood is drawn to commemorate the martyrdom of Husayn Ibn Ali, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammed, who died on that day in the Battle of Karbala. Then called, "Aziz Effendi," Bar Adon published many stories about the Ashura that were very popular in those years.
Turban is Iranian
Hassan Nasrallah was born and raised nearby in the village of al-Bazuriya, not far from Tyre. Ben Dov says that, in the past, religious figures in the region did not wear the turban and robes worn by Nasrallah. This style of clothing is apparently the result of Iranian influence and the long years that many religious leaders in South Lebanon spent studying in Iran. The traditional garb of Shi'ites in South Lebanon is somewhat different from that of other ethnic groups. The men wore the kaffiyeh and akal (traditional Arab headcloth and cords) and wide, low-crotched sharwal trousers. Married women did not wear veils - they wore white head scarves and narrow, ankle-length pants covered in a short dress.
The southern Shi'ite region has changed considerably since those days. Agricultural families with many children moved to south Beirut. Mohammed Ayil, who, 60 years ago, as a young boy from Kila, cleaned farmer Ben Dov's yard in Metula, became a construction worker and contractor in Beirut. From there he moved to Kuwait and became a wealthy man. Relatives told Ben Dov that all of Ayil's sons and daughters studied at Beirut University. One is a doctor, one a lawyer, and one an engineer. They are probably part of the rising upper-middle class of Shi'ites in Lebanon that is changing the Christian character of that multi-ethnic nation.
