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20-425: First time mentioned in 1366. Yosef Weitz and Wincenty Krasiński were born here. During World War II, the local Jewish population was kept imprisoned in a ghetto . In September 1942, an Einsatzgruppen perpetrated a mass execution killing 700 Jews according to Soviet archives. 50°28′34″N 25°10′47″E  /  50.4761°N 25.1797°E  / 50.4761; 25.1797 This article about

40-696: A location in Rivne Oblast is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Yosef Weitz Yosef Weitz ( Hebrew : יוסף ויץ ; 1890–1972) was the director of the Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). From the 1930s, Weitz played a major role in acquiring land for the Yishuv , the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine . In 1932, when Weitz joined

60-567: A transfer committee, Ben-Gurion rejected the idea, and no such committee was ever established. In his capacity as director of the Forestry Department, he initiated projects to destroy Arab property, ordering personnel to create obstacles for Arabs attempting to return to cultivate their fields, to destroy villages, and to render habitable other villages in order to enable Jewish settlement. He had discussed these activities with Ben-Gurion on June 8, and according to his diary, gained

80-558: The 1948 Palestine war , ~750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the newly created Jewish state. Weitz firmly believed that Israel should not allow them to return, and he convinced Israeli leaders to raze the empty Palestinian homes and villages in order to prevent the return of the refugees . As head of the JNF Forestry Department, Weitz put his visions of Israel as a forested country into practice. He wanted to plant millions of trees not just to decorate

100-523: The Night of the Bridges on June 16, 1946. Kibbutz Yehi'am was established in his memory. Sharon Weitz, another son, followed in his father's footsteps and later took over as director of the Forestry Department. In 20 December 1940, Weitz wrote in his diary: In the middle of 1941, Weitz began to develop a plan for the practical realisation of Arab transfer. Between 22 June and 10 July, he wrote: During

120-543: The 1947%E2%80%931949 Palestine war During the 1947–1949 Palestine war , or the Nakba , around 400 Palestinian Arab towns and villages were forcibly depopulated , with a majority being destroyed and left uninhabitable. Today these locations are all in Israel ; many of the locations were repopulated by Jewish immigrants , with their place names replaced with Hebrew place names . Arabs remained in small numbers in some of

140-527: The Arab residents who had lived in the cities that became a part of Israel and were renamed ( Acre , Haifa , Safad , Tiberias , Ashkelon , Beersheba , Jaffa and Beisan ) fled or were expelled. Most of the Palestinians who remain there are internally displaced people from the villages nearby. A number of the towns and villages were destroyed by Israeli forces in the aftermath of the 1948 war, but it

160-478: The Israeli landscape, but also to cover up the emptied Palestinian villages that had been destroyed so they could never be rebuilt. On April 18, 1948, Weitz wrote about the list of villages he wanted to be ethnically cleansed first: He was spurred on by David Ben-Gurion , who told Weitz he wanted a billion trees planted within a decade. In 1949, he proposed a division of labor between the Israeli government and

180-642: The JNF, there were only 91,000 Jews in Palestine (about 10% of the population) who owned just 2% of the land. Weitz oversaw the program to purchase properties from absentee landlords and run the Palestinian tenant farmers off their land. However it soon became clear that the purchase of small lots of land would not even get close to fulfilling the Zionists ' dream of creating a Jewish-majority state in Palestine. It

200-413: The JNF. The government would engage in applied research in planting techniques, especially in arid areas, and the development of a timber industry . It would also establish plant nurseries. The JNF would improve indigenous forests, work in afforestation of hilly regions, stop the encroachment of sand dunes and plant windbreakers. Weitz saw plant nurseries and afforestation as a vital source of employment for

220-513: The cities ( Haifa , Jaffa and Acre ); and Jerusalem was divided between Jordan and Israel . Around 30,000 Palestinians remained in Jerusalem in what became the Arab part of it ( East Jerusalem ). In addition, some 30,000 non-Jewish refugees relocated to East Jerusalem, while 5,000 Jewish refugees moved from the Old City to West Jerusalem on the Israeli side. An overwhelming number of

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240-691: The destroyed Palestinian villages. Yosef Weitz was born in Boremel , Volhynia in the Russian Empire in 1890. In 1908, he immigrated to Palestine with his sister, Miriam, and found employment as a watchman and an agricultural laborer in Rehovot . In 1911, he was one of the organizers of the Union of Agricultural Laborers in Eretz Yisrael. Weitz married Ruhama and their eldest son, Ra'anan,

260-634: The economic utility of forests and the importance of the Aleppo pine as the hardiest of local species. As a result, Israel’s forests for its first twenty years were largely monocultures and were later affected by natural pests . Weitz frequently clashed with the nascent conservation movement which objected to the Jewish National Fund's approach to tree planting, such as pine tree plantations on Mount Gilboa which threatened an endemic plant, Iris haynei (also known as Iris Gilboa). Weitz

280-567: The latter's approval. On June 22, 1941 he wrote in his diary: "The land of Israel is not small at all, if only the Arabs were removed, and its frontiers enlarged a little, to the north up to the Litani , and to the east including the Golan Heights ...with the Arabs transferred to northern Syria and Iraq...Today we have no other alternative...We will not live here with Arabs." With regard to

300-515: The masses of new immigrants arriving in the early days of the state. He was guided by the belief that developing a work ethic was imperative for acculturation. In 1966, Yatir Forest in the Negev was planted at Weitz's urging. He "envisioned rolling back the desert with trees, creating a security zone for the people of Israel". Named for the biblical town of Yatir , it is now Israel's largest planted forest. Weitz's forestry strategy emphasized

320-537: The problem of expelled Palestinians endeavouring to return later in 1948, Weitz suggested to Ben-Gurion on September 26 that a policy of relentless harassment ( hatrada ) by every available means was necessary in order to quash any such return. The Ma'ale Yosef Regional Council and Moshav Talmei Yosef are named for Yosef Weitz. Weitz’ great-granddaughter Michal Weits made a documentary film about Yosef Weitz, Blue Box (Israel/Canada/Belgium 2021, 82 minutes). List of towns and villages depopulated during

340-649: Was an advocate of population transfer . As the 1948 Palestine war unfolded, he confided to his diary in April that he had drawn up a list of Arab villages to be cleansed to enable Jewish settlement, and had also drawn up a list of land disputes with Arabs that he thought should be resolved by military means. According to Nur Masalha and Benny Morris an unofficial Transfer Committee was established in May 1948 composed of Weitz, Danin and Sasson . Historian Efraim Karsh however, wrote that although Weitz spoke of establishing

360-811: Was born in 1913. Two years later, in 1915, Yosef Weitz was appointed foreman of the Sejera training farm (now Ilaniya) in the Lower Galilee . Weitz helped to found Yavniel , one of the first pioneer colonies in the Galilee, and later, the Beit Hakerem neighborhood in Jerusalem . His son Yehiam (Hebrew for "long live the nation"), born in Yavne'el in October 1918, was killed in a Palmach operation known as

380-470: Was necessary to force a massive exodus of the indigenous population. Due to Weitz's role in the expulsion of the Palestinians, he became known as the “Architect of Transfer” - with 'transfer' being a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing that would reach its peak in the Nakba of 1948 . He also became known as the "Father of the Forests" for his work in afforestation , which was done largely to cover up

400-619: Was not until 1965 that more than 100 remaining locations – including many of the largest depopulated places – were demolished by the Israel Land Administration . There are more than 120 "village memorial books" documenting the history of the depopulated Palestinian villages. These books are based on accounts given by villagers. Rochelle A. Davis has described the authors as seeking "to pass on information about their villages and their values to coming generations". The towns and villages listed below are arranged according to

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