Shaba Farms? The history and geography...

[kentuck]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/744878.html

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Meir Ben-Dov does not really care if the Shaba Farms are handed over to Syria or Lebanon. The Jerusalem archaeologist, a grandson of the founders of Metula, expects that after Israel reaches a territorial arrangement with its neighbors, Lebanon will return the land owned by the farmers of Metula, thereby rectifying an injustice done to them by the British and French.

In a book that is soon to be published, Ben-Dov presents documents that prove that Metula was founded in 1896 on land in the Ayoun Valley that Baron Rothschild bought from Effendi Notzri of Sidon. The land was divided up and sold to the settlers of Metula, and it is owned by them to this day.

In 1923, a joint committee of British and French army officers drew the border between the British Mandate in Palestine and the French Mandate in Syria-Lebanon. The mukhtars of all the surrounding villages were invited to the committee's meeting. The minutes expressly note that the mukhtar of Metula, Meir Lishanski, who was visiting Tiberias that day, was absent from the meeting. The border was drawn such that the lands of the Ayoun Valley and its environs, an area of 4,000 dunams (four square kilometers), were included in the Syrian-Lebanese mandate. When the mukhtar of Metula learned this, he appealed to the committee, and after a brief study of the facts, the committee realized that an injustice had indeed been done to the Jewish farmers. It therefore decided that the land would remain in Jewish hands, and the farmers would be given laissez-passer documents so that they could continue to farm their land.

In World War II, the British built an airfield on part of Metula's land in the Ayoun Valley. They promised to compensate the farmers of Metula for their loss of income, and added that when the war was over, the airfield would be dismantled and the land returned to its owners. But it never happened. After Lebanon won its independence in 1945, the land remained in the hands of the Metula farmers, and they worked them under the same conditions, paying taxes to the British Mandatory government.

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[kentuck]

1. More of the history from the article

This may be an area of negotiation in the next few days?
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In 1951, after the oil pipeline from Saudi Arabia to Sidon was laid by American oil companies, the government of Israel, at the request of the American authorities, ordered the farmers to stop traveling to their land. The government of Lebanon appointed an official whose job it was to lease the lands in the Ayoun Valley to Lebanese farmers. In order to prevent any claims of possession, the rights were transferred to others every three years. In return for their land, the farmers of Metula received 1,675 dunams in the Hula Valley. Ben-Dov and the other heirs have been negotiating with the Israel Lands Administration ever since over the compensation they should receive for the missing 2,250 dunams.

Ben-Dov also has other memories of the north that relate to a border dispute that could arise in the wake of a diplomatic settlement in the region. In his childhood in Metula, Lebanese farmers from the village of Ghajar used to come every week to Metula to sell the fish they caught in the Hatzbani River (then called the Wazani). But during the early days of the Yom Kippur War, when he was fighting on the Syrian front, a group of Ghajar residents suddenly appeared at the Tank Junction carrying a white flag. "They said that they were Syrians and asked why we weren't occupying them."

A master's thesis written by Yigal Kipnis, who lives in the Golan Heights, offers a solution to the riddle. In the French Mandate's population report for 1945, Ghajar does not appear as a Syrian village. The same is true on official French maps and Lebanese maps, as well as Israeli maps from before 1967. The entire village is located inside Lebanese territory. But in the Syrian census carried out in 1960, it appears among the towns of Quneitra County. Geographer Zvi Ilan maintains that the border had been changed following an official agreement between the governments of Lebanon and Syria a short time earlier, against the background of the military confrontation between Syria and Israel.
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