The 'mapping' of Palestinian villages

Haaretz- In the 1940s, the Haganah collected detailed intelligence information about hundreds of Arab villages and photographed them, in many cases from the ground and also from the air. Only a few dozen of these 'village files' survive in local archives, but their photos constitute a valuable, missing chapter in Palestinian history.

This story begins as a clandestine affair of espionage marked by daring, adventurism, improvisation and imagination as embedded in the official Israeli narrative. In the 1940s, squads of young scouts from the Haganah, the pre-state army and forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces, collected information about the Arab towns and villages in Palestine for intelligence purposes: in preparation for a future conflict and as part of a more general project of creating files of target sites.

The information was usually collected under the guise of a nature lesson aimed at getting to know the country, or for hikes that were common in that period. The scouts systematically built up a database of geographical, topographical and planning information about the villages, which included detailed descriptions of roads, neighborhoods, houses, public buildings, objects, wells, caves, wadis and so forth. Read more