Talk:Degania Bet

History: mix-up?; wrong & missing redirects
Umm Junieh redirects here, to Degania Bet, and the story of Umm Junieh is also told here. - Degania Alef, not Degania Bet, was first established at Umm Junieh/Umm Juni. The land and memorial site there still belongs to Alef, not Bet. At the most one can connect U.J. with Bet because the Bet houses come slightly closer to the U.J. area, while Alef only has plantations right next to it, but the distances are comparable, neglectable, and altogether that would be a stretch. So maybe it was a plain mistake :-) ? If that is the case, then pls. move the whole Ottoman period paragraph from this page to the Alef page.

- There is an article about Al-Manshiyya, Tiberias that deals with two villages, Al-Manshiyya and Umm Junieh, together (bad enough). Now having "Umm Junieh" automatically redirect here, not there, is not correct. What can be done? One cannot have a double redirect (and creating a disamb. page only for this doesn't make much sense), so more massive cross-reference on both pages ("Al-Manshiyya, Tiberias" and "Degania Alef" [and anyhow, not not Bet, see above]) would make the most sense to me; once that is done, which one gets the redirect becomes less important. True, Degania did get the lands of Umm Junieh, it is also by far more famous, but that name belongs to a preexisting hamlet. "Umm Juni" doesn't redirect to either, and it should, since it's used more frequently, accurate or not as it might be. Who wants to disentangle Al-Manshiyya from Umm Junieh? Ah, no, not me! ArmindenArminden (talk) 19:31, 17 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Yes, some fixing is required. I've been meaning to make a map.  Note that there was a previous discussion on Commons. Zerotalk 00:11, 18 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Incidentally, in the cadastral maps ca. 1940, there is no boundary between the two Deganias. I assume it means the land of both was owned by the JNF still. Today too? Zerotalk 01:08, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi Zero, and thanks (wrote on my talk page that "In British maps of the mandate period, the site is called "Kh. Umm Jūna". I don't know a source calling it that while it was still a living village."). On "Al-Manshiyya, Tiberias" there is a reference to Khalidi giving 69 Arabs for U.J. in 1922, twelve years after the kvutza first settled there, ten years after it moving as "Degania" to its permanent location, and two years after the establishment of Bet, which seems strange. There was some overlap elsewhere, in older moshava-type colonies, where Arabs and Jews lived for a while, and Jews learned from the Arabs how to survive on the land, but even there ten years would sound strange. And the Deganias were strongly ideological groups, very unlikely that they ever had Arabs working for them, or on their land along with them. Maybe Bedouin were counted as part of a site close to their winter/summer encampment. Anyhow, you have maps showing that sometime between 1918-48 it was a khirbet, that's clarified. So '''no reason to call it Kh. U.J. throughout'''! No Alef-Bet boundary? Lazy Brits :-) Kibbutzim never owned the land, they got it on lease for something like 99 years, with the condition that they use it for agriculture. Since the 2000s, during privatisation, this became a big problem when kibbutzim tried to create new non-member residential areas called "extension" ("harhava"). The intention was to both make some money from selling the new houses, and get new permanent residents with children into the aging communities, w/o forcing them to become members. They had to go through the courts and it took years until it was allowed, since that's not agriculture. I don't have a quick source for that, but it shows that the land is still controlled by some state institution and the initial leasing contracts stay valid. I guess the Land Administration office is in charge rather than the JNF, but who knows. Anyhow, that has little to do with Umm Junieh being dealt with at Degania Bet rather than Degania Alef. If there is no reason I'm not aware of for that (Hudra?), then please move it to Alef. It comes down to whether there was any Arab PERMANENT population of (not at) old Umm Junieh after 1920 (D. Bet established), or even 1922, when the Jewish kvutza of Degania (Alef) moved from Umm Junieh to its permanent location a bit up the river. Cheers, ArmindenArminden (talk) 04:52, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Historical perspective
Hi, and great work! May I have some suggestions? 1- It's funny to see how one's focus (yours, mine) with the past becomes literally visible. You chose the strong colour for the past, which includes several places which are gone (Samakh, Ubeidiya, Manshiya) or greatly diminished (Bitanya), and the light green for the thriving, present ones. Would you consider swapping them? 2- You set 1948 as the separation date. Masada and Sha'ar HaGolan belong to the "old" places, since they were established in 1937, even before Manshiya, and they're not marked as such. 3- Why is the map here and not at Deg. A? 4- Re. captions: "Kinneret" with no qualification is confusing. I suggest "Kinneret (moshava & farm)". For those who live in Israel or come as tourists and use the common sources available to them, Kinneret simply means Sea of Galilee. "Kinneret Group" is not used by anyone except the 1940 British map. "Kibbutz Kinneret" is how it's known, and some stick to the obsolete (it's been a large, not at all small "group" for decades) "Kvutzat Kinneret". I would use "Kibbutz". They came together as a "kvutza" in the farm in 1913, moved to the crt. location in 29, and kept on developing since. A kvutza used to have ca. 15-20 people, they are now closer to 700. 5- This might not matter much at this stage yet :-), but things are evolving. Tzemach, little more than a road junction for many years, is developing again and I guess it will become a town in the foreseeable future (a large road station, an even much larger open-air mall with shops, restaurants and indoor playground, a McDonald's, bookstore, two factories, a container depot, workshops, the expanding Regional College including dorms, the old train station is becoming a museum & study centre, a sports & arts centre, a beach-for-pay and an outdoor concert venue, the Bet Gabriel complex with cinemas and exhibition rooms...) The spaces in between them get built up and they'l be joined in one unit before you know it. So you see, not just "in the past". Location, location, location - road junction! Next to Umm Juni now there's - don't laugh - the national Vipassana centre (transcendental meditation), which is the navel of the world for some. From "mother of kibbutzim" to ummmmm... ummmm... Keeping a historical perspective is more than needed; keeping the present in focus as much so. Cheers, ArmindenArminden (talk) 22:00, 20 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your very helpful suggestions. I uploaded a new edition (refresh browser as needed). (1) Regarding colors, I want to show the old and new extents of places that were there before 1948 and are still there now.  It doesn't work visually to have a weak color for the small old core and a strong color for the large modern extent that surrounds it.  That's the only reason for the assignment of colors.  Actually the meaning of "extent" is poorly defined; I've just approximated the areas that maps show to be covered by buildings, ignoring the odd isolated building. (2) I still have to work on the names of places. I've been following the spellings on Google Maps, but I think it would be more useful to adopt the spellings used by our articles.  That will be the next edition. (3) I still don't know when Umm Juni ceased to exist as an Arab village. In Arthur Ruppin's diary from the early days of Degania he writes of Umm Juni as an abandoned village (without saying what had become of the inhabitants), but this was not true.  In Zvi Shilony's book "Ideology and Settlement" (p. 235) he says that the two huts at Umm Juni that the Degania pioneers occupied were provided to them by the sheikh of the village. A stronger proof that Ruppin was not being honest is that the 1922 census reported Umm Juneh with 79 Muslims.  Degania appeared separately.  So Umm Juni was an Arab village at least into the 1920s.  There is no mention of it in the 1931 census, though. (4)I didn't put the map in Degania Aleph due to lack of space, but room should be made for it. Zerotalk 02:40, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi. I see, thanks. About Ruppin: no, he didn't lie. See Aryeh L. Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land-Settlement and the Arabs, 1878-1948, Transaction Publishers, 1982. All from pp 99-106 might interest you, but do read the bottom part of 105 and into 106. The land of Umm Juni was split in half by the Persian effendi, the Jews bought one half, the Arab felaheen vacated it and kept on working the other as tenant farmers of the effendi. So the mud huts on top of the hill went to the Jews, who added their own wooden hut. Don't know where the felaheen had their tenancy, maybe across the river, maybe on the same side. There is nothing left, mud huts disintegrate quickly. On page 99 and on you can read about the Bedouin (two Delaike tribes): they were indeed moving around, were raiders and had seasonal encampments. One moved to Trans-Jordan fleeing Turkish police after some murder. See p. 101: Ubeidiya and a village up the plateau, Kafr Misr ("Egypt village") were newly settled by Egyptians 60-70 years before the Jewish land purchases of ca. 1900 (they were most likely people brought in by Muhammad Ali during his invasion), the Circassians of Kafr Kama had arrived 20-25 years earlier, and around Sejerah there had been Algerian refugees for ca. 40 years (incl. at Kafr Sabt, of Saladin & Battle of Hattin fame; wonder what happened there between 1187-1860s?). The book says that only few Lower Galilee villages "had been settled for a long period of time". Ruppin had many faults, but was a German academic, would spin but not lie. Read up about the 19th century in Palestine, many villages disappeared (became a khirbet), there were wars & trouble, new Arab settlers were brought in by the Egyptians and the Turks resettled Chechens & Circassians in the region. And don't forget the Germans (Templers or others), the American Protestant colonies (Jaffa, Jerusalem) and the Powers who moved in after the Crimean War, buying all they could. Rothschild, the "Friends of Zion" and later the Zionists were part of a larger, moving picture. Once settled, everybody tried to hold on and expand, but the oriental chaos & corruption meant that there was a large gap between what a European would have called land property rights, and reality. The felaheen didn't trust the Turks, didn't register their property out of fear they would be a) taxed and b) drafted, had the sheikh or mukhtar do that for the whole community, and those and their families took care of themselves eventually. When the Brits arrived, they had to preserve much of what they inherited, and tried to put some order into the mess, but had a hard time doing so. So don't try and use European standards here, especially not for the late Ottoman and early Mandate time, it simply doesn't work. Cheers, ArmindenArminden (talk) 08:02, 21 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Although I have cited Avneri's book repeatedly on Wikipedia, it is rather propagandistic. But in any case, what he writes does not disprove what I said. Umm Juni was not abandoned at the time Jews moved in, and there is no reason whatever to suspect that the villagers lived on the other side of the river. The Jews occupied only a part of the village and that's why they only had two huts out of a village of about 20 families. Since the village was on the boundary of the Jewish property (at that time), it's possible that the boundary determined who used what. You can see the boundary (line of small dots) on map "20-23" here, which is undated but probably from 1932.  The 1943 map ("20-23 21-23") omits that boundary. Shilony writes, with two sources, "By agreement with the sheikh of this village, two mudbrick huts attached to his home were emptied, and near them the cabin brought in sections was swiftly put together." I see no reason to doubt it.  As for what Ruppin wrote, his coyness about the fate of the locals was perfectly typical; you can call it spin or lie as you prefer, I see little distinction. Zerotalk 09:58, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Incidentally, this 1925 PLDC map is worth a look, and this earlier one ("1923?" according to the catalogue). [[User:Zero0000|Zero]talk 10:09, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

I see your point. I never said the Arab villagers lived on the other side of the river, I only said that I don't know where their remaining lands were. I am not sure which boundary you mean; is it the dotted line to the south of "Kh. Umm Juna - Canal - Ford", Z-shaped and cutting the -200 m contour line? Because that one looks like the N boundary of Kfar Gun/Bet Zera - the map is from 1940 after all. Or if you mean the really small dots right next (W of) the words "Kh. Umm Juna", that can't be, it's not a viable plot for anything. The Romny commune and the next group did agriculture after all. I am not sure this map is of any use for that. Also, it does not fully reflect the topography, it lets you believe that the Umm Juni site (where the name is written) would be at the same level as the flood plain to the west, while it is clearly towering over it at a relatively great height. The terrain falls sharply to the south (a slope, can be used for agriculture) and west (ravine, of no use). The remaining Arab village could have stood on any side of the Jewish colony, except directly west of it. Usually farmers try not to build on useful agricultural land; now it's all useful there, I don't know about the early 1900s (non-regulated flood plain), it's just harder to bring water up the hill and all the canals (as of 1940) are, logically, marked west of the Jordan. For the eastern part Degania B (or the two Deganias together?) built a pumping station pushing the water up the hill to an aqueduct (see south of "Deganya b"), but that was much later. That's why I thought there were a possibility that the village might have stood west of the river, with some buildings up on the "promontory" (where the name is written). But I don't know, and this map seems of little help. Now, from what you quote from Shilony, I can imagine that the whole village (20 families is very little) probably stood up on the hill, stretching towards the east, where the terrain is both level and harder to irrigate. Absolutely nothing remains. What I don't get either: how were the mudbrick huts "attached" to the sheikh's house? Seems nonsensical, then his house would also have been lost to the Romny group, and it doesn't show on any photo nor is it mentioned anywhere. Mystery. All the rest makes perfect sense. The two small maps seem to show the Jewish property, "green line" :-), right? But they omit Degania B (est. 1920) and Degania Gimel (1920-22), one sets Umm Junieh right on the river bank and one leaves it out altogether, and both indicate that the Jewish-owned land didn't reach to the river bank. Between the wooden hut (they rebuilt it recently trying to set it in the exact right location by using the old pictures) and the ravine there are hardly 25 metres. You can squeeze in a few huts, but I wonder... That would explain Shilony's "adjacent home", but otherwise it doesn't make much sense. Who knows. I guess the green/red line was drawn too far to the east, otherwise there would have been no Jewish Umm Juni. A bit useless here, these two maps. ArmindenArminden (talk) 11:05, 21 August 2016 (UTC)


 * By "attached" I just understood that they were close by, not necessary with a physical attachment. On map 20-23, not the one called "20-23 21-23", Um Juni is not marked. The absence of a grid identifies it as one of a series that commenced in 1928. No year is shown, but by the late 1930s such maps had the Palestine Grid printed on them, so it dates from earlier than that.  The boundary is not the one you see.  Go north to the next word "Canal" (spanning the join), and just above that is a zig-zag line of dots that are not connected by lines (dashed or otherwise). The convention was that connected lines of dots were definite boundaries and unconnected lines of dots were indefinite boundaries. This line of dots would have passed very close to the edge of the village (which isn't shown). I also find the PLDC maps a bit mysterious. At the National Library of Israel there are also other maps that show "Jewish land". Like this one dated 1930. Also, on the Degania web site I just found "In 1926 the first settlers of Kibbutz Beit Zera settled in the huts of Umm Juni, since by this year no more Arabs were no longer living there."  Which presumably means that Arabs were living there earlier.  GIven the 1922 census, we have a window 1922–1926 for when they left. Zerotalk 13:04, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

... unless they mean the 2 huts from the Jewish side of the fence. A "kvutza" could fit in with some good will :-) If Khalidi doesn't say much about them (or does he?), I guess we spent too much time on it already. 79 Muslims in 1922... They might be the nucleus of that Manshiya place along the road, or part of why Samakh grew after 1918, or who knows what. This size of a group does not guarantee viability in an autonomous village. I wonder whether the Baha'i did sell the rest of their land possessions there. There are so many places where Arab hamlets and Jewish "kvutzot" came and went... This would be of more relevance if we knew what hamulah (clan) they belonged to, or whether they were recently settled Bedouin rather than old felaheen, that might give an indication about where they went and become part of a wider socio-historical picture. As it is now, I'm giving up. Also, that dotted line: it needs to demarcate a closed area which is neither Degania Bet, Aleph, nor Beit Zera, and I don't see it. I would bet it's just the boundary between Aleph and Bet, then yes, it would be contiguous with what's marked as the boundaries of those two kibbutzim, and the British surveyor had enough ("Jews to the left & Jews to the right, Degania here, Degania there") and used the unconnected dots. Same as that border with Egypt down near Aqaba, where the mess was only sorted out at the other end of the century, after the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. At 30-40 degrees Celsius and among not-so-friendly locals I don't blame them at all. I myself failed a topometry exam once and had to study my... head off, and boy was it boring. ArmindenArminden (talk) 17:03, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

Why I don't think building 20-smth. mud huts is such a big deal: ArmindenArminden (talk) 18:56, 23 August 2016 (UTC)