Ethnic cleansing in Ethnic cleansing in Palestine

It is not surprising that within a general war, some larger ethnic groups seize the opportunity to clear out smaller ethnias. In the general ethnic cleansing or mass migration that took place in the Mandatory Palestine in 1947, no one noticed the evacuation of seven minority-within-minority villages. Those were the Metawali villages of  Tarbikha, Saliha, Malkiyeh, Nabi Yusha, Qadas, Hunin, and Abil al-Qamh. Their lands were distributed among the nearby kibbutzim and moshavim, and the larger Palestinian villages that had sided with the Jews in the War of Liberation. It is not widely known that the Jewish forces were very weak (and tired) in the Galilee region, and that the Galilee was conquered thanks to the collaboration of the Druze ethnic minority, the Chechen Muslim villages, the Christian villages and the Bedouins that hated and were hated by the Palestinian fellahin. Also the villages of the descendants of African slaves brought here by the Arabs, like Jisr-al-Zarka, sided with the Jews. I heard that the political secretariat of the Jewish Agency, headed by Golda Meir, distributed sacks of gold coins to secure their allegiance. We learnt that from English colonialists, like the political agent Colonel Lawrence. All the villages (except two Christian villages on the Lebanese border) that allied themselves with the Jews emerged untouched from the Palestinian Naqba, they still exist and prosper. They are the Israeli Arab minority. That is their secret shame.


What were those Methawali that some unknown (non-Jewish) hand ethnically-cleansed during the chaos of the 1947 war? The Palestinians follow the Sunni tradition of the Islam, like the Saudis and Jordanians, as against the Shi'a, followed mainly in Iran. Within the Sunni, the  Shafi'i madhab (legalistic thought) is one of the four schools of Islamic law, the one practiced in Palestine, while the Methawali followed a different interpretation. In the Middle East, people hides their real ethnic and religious identities, and the Methawali adopted an ambiguous coloration of Sunni, although with light philosophical disagreements with the Orthodox Sunni majority, with the idea that they could - should the need arise - present themselves as faithful Shi'a. The Alawites are another ethnia that never cleared up what they believe and to where they belong but now that they life depends from Iranian military assistance, they count themselves as Twelvers.  Within the Islamic world, till the return of the Jews to Eretz Israel, Palestinians were barely considered Muslim: almost no village had a mosque, and there was not one Islamic college in the country. The Palestinians - especially in the Galil - started to hit their foreheads against the tarmac only as a reaction to the presence of the Jews. It could have been different, but "It was written" that they would oppose the rise of Judea.