Village files

Village files were military intelligence documents based on a card index system, with detailed data on every Arab village in Mandatory Palestine. Gathered by the SHAI, they were the basis of Haganah and Palmah operations during the 1940s. The files answered the need of combat intelligence for the number of men in the village, the number of weapons, the topography and so on, dealt with the research of traces of ancient Jews in the villages, and with the possibility of buying land from the villagers and settling it.

The suggestion for these files came from Luria Ben-Zion, an historian from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who wrote in 1940 to the Jewish National Fund (JNF) that "This would greatly help the redemption of the land". Yossef Weitz, the head of the JNF settlement department immediately suggested that they be turned into a "national project". Yitzhak Ben-Zvi suggested that, apart from topographically recording the layout of the villages, the project should also include exposing the "Hebraic origins" of each village.

According to Ilan Pappé, in the early 1940s, topographers, (aerial) photographers and Orientalists worked on the files. Moshe Pasternak, who joined a data collection operation in 1940 said:

According to Gil Eyal, the information was rather gathered between 1945 and 1947 when between 600 and 1000 villages were "surveyed by scouts and informers as well as aerial reconnaissance".

According to Pappé, later the files were updated and much more details of the inhabitants were added. Towards the end of the Mandatory period more military information was added, like the number of guards and the number and quality of arms in a village, next to the already present information on how best to attack a village. The final update in 1947 focussed on creating lists of ‘wanted’ persons in each village. The main criteria for inclusion were participation in actions against the British and the Zionists, and affiliation with a Palestinian political party or leader. Typically 20 to 30 out of 1500 inhabitants were on the lists.

According to Pappé in the late 1940s these files contained 'precise details […] about the topographic location of each village, its access roads, quality of land, water springs, main sources of income, its sociopolitical composition, religious affiliations, names of its mukhtars, its relationship with other villages, the age of individual men (sixteen to fifty),' an index of hostility based on the level of the village’s participation in the revolt of 1936, and a list of everyone who had been involved in the revolt with particular attention for those who had allegedly killed Jews.

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Wikipedia