decided to retreat in a southeasterly direction, to ’A^¯ ra and ’Ar’ara, where the Iraqi army was encamped. Abu¯  Da’u¯d summed up Ijzim’s last week:^H For seven, eight days [there was bombing and fighting] night and day. That began on the main road. The army, the  Hagana, soldiers, people from Ijzim, ’Ein Ghaza¯l and Jaba’. One would shoot the other. Then, they [the Arab fighters] were left without arms, they had no bullets. They were about to run away. Shari¯f was from the leaders, officers, and ’Abdalla¯h Zeida¯n, my uncle, my father’s cousin. One [Shari¯f] says let’s give up, the other [’Abdalla¯h Zeida¯n] says no, and one says yes. They fled during Ramad an, in the afternoon, only men, going towards Bat Shlomo. Count Bernadotte, the United Nations’ mediator, was in Haifa during these crucial days. On the 25th at mid-day, the fighters begged the Iraqis by radio to call him to their rescue although they also said of Bernadotte on the same radio transmission: “What can we do? They can violate the truce because Count Bernadotte is on their side.”⁵³ Bernadotte did not interfere and on the next day Ijzim fell; the transmitter was now being used only for arranging vehicles to be sent to evacuate the women and children.⁵⁴ When the army entered Ijzim, it was practically empty. Six hundred women and children were in nearby Khirbet Qumba¯zeh,⁵⁵ either waiting for their caravan to leave for Wa¯di¯ ’A^¯ ra or, as some were too young, old, sick or injured to walk another fifteen kilometers to ’A^¯ ra, they were getting organized to go to Dalyet al-Karmel and ’Isfiyyeh, only five kilometers away. The hilly escape route to ’A^¯ ra was not safe. When the IDF realized the villagers were retreating through this route, ambushes were arranged along the route, near Wa¯di¯ Mileh and Qani¯r⁵⁶  and roughly sixty people were killed on their way to ’A^¯ ra.⁵⁷  H ajid H ad Sa¯leh (the name is probably misspelled in the UN document), an elder of Ijzim, and ’Ali Moh ammed H a¯nu¯ti¯, a Sheikh of Ijzim, were questioned on 30 July 1948 by UN investigators regarding the  circumstances  of  the  fall  of  the  village  and  the  flight.  In  their  joint  statement  they described what followed the last attack on 25 July: . . .After these heavy attacks, women and children started for al-Ma¯qu ¯ra. During the move, women and children were attacked by plane machine gun fire but I could not estimate the casualties because everyone scattered. The men left the village and went back through the mountains to Jeni¯n. The women and children were in charge of Shari¯f. Most women and children went to ’Isfiyyeh, Dalyet al-Karmel, ’Ar’ara and ’A^¯ ra. The people returned.⁵⁸ Jews stole cattle, sheep and machine-gunned the flocks and people. They stole money from the women. You can still find dead in the mountains. Nobody was allowed to take baggage.⁵⁹ Abu Na’i¯m recalled the day of retreat:^H The people in the front lines were afraid of being caught and killed. They began [escaping]. We were in Ma¯qu ¯ra—my family. People started passing by. “What happened?” [we asked]. They said—“we cannot hold on.” They just threw down their rifles [saying]—“We have no ammunition, we have no food, we cannot carry on.” Then he came, Shari¯f, and said “Let’s talk, wait a couple of hours.” People did not wait and everyone began. . .  one fled, everyone started to flee. . .. Shari¯f was probably one of the few men to suspect that whoever left would not be able to come  back.  In  those  last  critical  days  in  Ijzim,  Shari¯f  lost  his  influence  and  there  was  a snowball effect among the escaping villagers. He chose to stay in Ma¯qu¯ra, on his farm, yet ironically, a few years later he was compelled to sell the property to no other than Ya’aqov Salomon, the Jewish lawyer from Haifa. THE AFTERMATH Ma’oz, a Jewish officer who was outside the village when it was captured, remembered the scene when he approached the village after it was abandoned. He described the following when we met at his home in Haifa:^H There were villages that we would walk into and the houses were barren and poor. Shacks. . .. But in this village there were stone houses, streets, two-story houses. You could tell the population here had a different standard ANTHROPOLOGICAL HISTORIES OF A PALESTINIAN VILLAGE 23