Haaretz
“The memory of what was done in Lubya, like the memory of all the other abominable acts that preceded it, will forever disgrace its destructive perpetrators.”
These scathing words were published in the Labor movement daily Davar 81 years ago. A few weeks earlier, in the summer of 1939, members of the Haganah – the underground, pre-independence army of Mandatory Palestine’s Jews, founded by the movement’s members – had murdered two men and a woman, and injured a young girl and a toddler. All of them were innocent Arabs from the village of Lubya in the Lower Galilee, shot dead at home in the dead of night.
The murders, described as a revenge attack for the killing of a Jew by villagers in Lubya, was carried out by members of the Haganah’s special ops unit. Each man who took part in the mission has a place of honor in the local history books: The most senior was Yigal Allon, who later headed the Palmach (the Haganah’s elite strike force), and became an Israel Defense Forces general and education and foreign minister.
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