of living. It also explained to us why they insisted on staying there. They were surrounded and should have left much earlier. Reflecting on the villagers’ escape, Ma’oz noted: They sensed something was evolving from all kinds of directions. They did one of the cleverest things they could have done, they simply decided to leave the three villages. I do not know today whether they were given the chance or simply no one paid attention. They walked through one of the valleys, crossed Wa¯di¯ Milek (Mileh in Arabic) and off to the direction of Umm al-Fa¯hem. Some elderly people and some women and children were found in the vicinity of the three villages and were transferred by the Jewish forces to the Iraqi lines. Roughly forty bodies were found in two concentrations, behind Ijzim’s mosque and near ’Ein Ghaza¯l’s school. It was clear that there was not enough time to bury the dead and the corpses were covered with a thin layer of earth.⁶⁰ The Arab states filed a complaint to the UN central truce supervision board concerning the Israeli violation of the truce. A UN board investigated the case and found the great majority of the refugees in the Jeni¯n area, in August 1948. From this report we hear that in the case of Ijzim, thirty-two people were reported killed, twenty-five were reported missing and 4153 were located.⁶¹ The villagers who sought refuge at Dalyet al-Karmel were transferred to the Arab  lines  by  the  IDF  in  six  buses  on  17  August  1948,  after  they  were  made  to  sign  a document stating they were going of their free will.⁶² Those who evaded the first transfer were “collected” and placed near the border on 23 August⁶³ and again, in an operation named “Tie” on 6 October.⁶⁴ The correspondence between the Custodian of Arab Property, the body established by the Jewish State to supervise Palestinian land and goods, and the army testifies that individual soldiers  as  well  as  organized  army  units  were  the  first  to  plunder  Arab  possession.  For example, a tractor was taken by the Alexandroni unit just a couple of hours after the army entered the three villages.⁶⁵ Later, Jewish neighbors from the area gathered to “collect” what they could. An IDF report described the following: “. . .. In the villages Ijzim and ’Ein Ghaza¯l Jews were seen coming with carts from ’Atlit and the nearby surroundings and looting Arab property.”⁶⁶ In the autumn of 1948, few Jizma¯wi¯ families were permitted to come back from Dalyet al- Karmel and live in Ijzim. They were prevented from returning to their own homes so they settled in other Jizma¯wi¯ houses and most of them had to work on Shari¯f’s farm, which was still active in Ma¯qu¯ra.⁶⁷ The Israeli Minister of Minority Affairs, Bekhor Shitrit, a personal friend  of  Shari¯f,⁶⁸  wrote  a  letter  to  General  Avner,  the  head  of  the  Military  Government (Hamimshal Hatsva’ee ), in favor of protecting these families and allowing them to remain in Ijzim.⁶⁹  This  letter,  like  other  letters  found  in  this  file,  testifies  to  the  diverging  attitudes between the Minister, on the one hand, and the local army officer in charge, on the other hand.⁷⁰ The  Jizma¯wi¯  families  who  stayed  in  Ijzim  “shared”  it  with  soldiers  and  new  Jewish immigrants from Czechoslovakia. Abu¯  Na’i¯m described how in the spring of 1949 the army decided to expel the Arab families from the village houses:^H One morning the army surrounded our dispersed neighborhood. They said—“You must move to your khirbeh [Ma¯qu ¯ra]. You have nothing to look for here.” We said to the soldiers [whom they personally knew]—“What’s this?” They said—“We are sorry, we are just following orders. We know we have eaten with you and sat with you”. . .. It wasn’t like today, when an officer says something the whole world clamors. He gave the order to get out. Efrat: And you had no one to turn to in this matter? Abu ¯  Na’i¯m: No one to turn to. We didn’t even know there was police. We didn’t know how to reach the police. The world was a closed state—no one knew what was happening in his surroundings. A  few  Jizma¯wi¯  families  remained  in  the  vicinity  of  Ijzim,  at  khirbet  Ma¯qu¯ra  and  its vicinity, some until the 1970s, when they were eventually made to move out. The only one to EFRAT BEN-ZE’EV 24