Kibbutz Lavi

Kibbutz Lavi is a settlement founded in 1949 by British colonists on the site of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Lubya.

Ethnic cleansing

As Ilan Pappe writes:

Another means used in 1948 and in 1967 was renaming Palestinian villages as Jewish settlements – more often than not by appropriating the Arabic name of a destroyed Palestine community for the new settlement. In 1949 a naming committee facilitated transforming the destroyed villages of 1948 by Hebrewizing their Arabic names and thus the Palestinian village of Lubya became Kibbutz Lavi and the Palestinian city of Asqalan became the Israeli city of Ashkelon. After the 1967 occupation, the settlement of Tekoa was built next to the West Bank village of Tuqu’ and on its land.

The entire area of what once was Lubya is fully camouflaged by a pine forest with a well-advertised recreational park. A large sign at the official entrance welcomes visitors to the “Lavi Forest.” In large Hebrew letters, it prominently gives credit to the park’s sponsors and overseers: The Ministry of Education, The Sports Authority, The Lower Galilee Regional Council and the Kfar Tabor Local Authority. A map of the “Lavi Active Recreational Park” is shown with official recognition in smaller English letters given to the South African Jewish community that originally footed the bill for the forestation project. Abu Maher stood before the sign and shook his head as if to say: “How many authorities, local and worldwide, can one battle? How can we, refugees, make our voice heard over the din of their official discourse?”

Last Friday, a long line of people wound its way along the narrow trail that leads up a hill that is adjacent to Golani Junction in the north. A few carried the flags of Palestine. Others held yellow signs with the names of places that no longer exist: a school, a cemetery, a neighborhood. The village’s displaced persons walked into the forest under which the remains of their homes are buried. Their visit has become a ritual.

This time, though, the DPs were accompanied by what, in terms of current reality in Israel, was a rare, unexpected, almost inconceivable sight: a group of 14 Jews from South Africa, who came to apologize and ask forgiveness for donating money to the Jewish National Fund, which used it to create The South Africa Forest here in 1964, on what remains of the village of Lubya. The group felt cheated. They were told they would help make the wilderness bloom. As children they deposited their allowance in the iconic blue-and-white JNF boxes, and afterward contributed to the purchase of “tree certificates” at bar mitzvahs, birthdays and weddings. Then they found out where the money went.

It emerged that the JNF’s aim was to cover up the destruction of such villages, to conceal the blame and consign the memories to oblivion. In 2012, in the wake of a documentary film by Mark J. Kaplan, “The Village Under the Forest,” about what happened to Lubya, the group founded a South African branch of an international organization calling itself Stop the JNF.

Nakba denial

Today the Kibbutz gives a very different (false) account of its formation:

The first settlers, mainly young men and women who escaped from Nazi Germany in the "kindertransport" (children's train), found refuge in the Bachad movement in England. In this framework they established farms in which they performed agricultural work and studied Hebrew, while getting accustomed to communal living in preparation for Aliya to Israel and establishing a kibbutz. Kibbutz Lavi was started when a group of young people arrived at a barren hill in the heart of the Lower Galilee, alongside the road connecting Tiberias and the Golani Junction. Lavi was the last kibbutz to take hold of the land in the "state on its way" manner. There was no preparation for settlement, no water, no means of sustenance. The hardships and the sacrifices of those early pioneers are unimaginable today.

Connections

• King David High School, Liverpool

Resources

• Official website: kibbutzlavi.com
• https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/ethnic-cleansing-by-all-means/