The Baha'i Gardens, Haifa (Photo: Erez Michaeli)
"I think that after the contract has already been signed there is no need at this late hour to look for new ways and to postpone the end of the affair and you will do your best to end it so that we can soon be forgotten."
In this trial, the CEO of the Prime Minister expressed anger and frustration and also hinted to the senior officials that it is desirable that they act without further delay.
It turns out that even 68 years ago, the bureaucratic apparatus managed to annoy the executive. Teddy Kolek, CEO of the Prime Minister's Office, did not hide his anger at Delay of land exchange agreement.
This is a land exchange contract between the State of Israel, through KKL-Junk, and families of the Baha'i faith who owned land on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. A file of documents recently published in the state archives sheds additional light on that interesting affair. back and replacing them with lands in Acre.
The beginning of the affair in 1882 when the Bahá'ís began to purchase land in the Kinneret area.
About thirty years earlier, the persecution of the founders of the new religion began in Iran.
Bahá'u'lláh, one of the founders of the religion and his believers, moved to Istanbul and then came to Acre and settled there.
An agricultural farm established by the Bahá'ís in Nokiv (photo: official website, Ariel Zur Ein Gav)
When the Ottoman government allowed them to purchase land, the Bahá'ís bought land in the Acre area and then on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, in Samarra, where Kibbutz Ha'on is located today.
Bahá'u'lláh's messenger in the settlement east of the Sea of Galilee was his brother, Mirza Muhammad Kuli.
Later they bought land in the area of the village of Nokiev, north of Samara, in Umm Joni, near the source of the Jordan from the Sea of Galilee, and in Adesiya, east of Yarmouch, shortly before the river meets the Jordan River.
While in Badasiya almost all the residents were Baha'is who immigrated from Iran, in Benukiev, Samara and Umm Joni, most of the residents were Arabs who were in the status of Aris and worked the land for the Baha'i landowners.
Later it will become clear that the settlement of the Baha'is on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee will have a decisive influence on the shaping of the future borders of the State of Israel;
In the years 1920-1923, Britain and France discussed between them the border line that would pass between the British mandate on the Land of Israel and the French mandate on Syria and Lebanon.
The agreement between the parties is called Newcomb-Paula after its drafters - the British Newcomb and the French Paula.
The basis of the agreement was a multitude of motives, among them several basic principles - villages will not be evicted from their land, from their water sources, from a main road that passes near them or from the town of its district.
According to these principles it was clear that the entire Sea of Galilee and the lands east of the Sea of Galilee would be in the territory of the British Mandate, because the Knight of the British Empire, Sir Abd al-Baha of Haifa, had settlements and lands there.
Abd al-Bahá is the son of the founder of the religion - Bahá'u'lláh, and he is also the propagator of the Bahá'í religion.
It should be noted that another significant motive for determining the border line east of the Sea of Galilee and not in the center was Pinchas Rotenberg's plan to produce electricity in a hydroelectric plant south of the Sea of Galilee.
That plant which the British supported needed a regular supply of water from the lake.
The borders of the Mandatory Land of Israel have significant consequences for the political borders of the State of Israel.
The agricultural estates established by the Bahá'ís changed the landscape east of the Kinneret;
Gottlieb Schumacher, an engineer and archaeologist, a member of the Templar colony in Haifa, conducted several surveys in the Golan Heights at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and was the first researcher to document this region.
In 1913, he described the village of Nokiev in this way: "There are three huts and a vegetable garden 40 meters above the Sea of Galilee and another 4 gardens on the shore. The area north of Wadi Peak belongs to Abbas Effendi al-Babi, who is the head and first of the Babi sect (Bahá'ís). They planted here Orchards of peaches, apples, pomegranates, figs, oranges and lemons, watered by Wadi Peak. They look wonderful, especially against the background of the arid area around the Sea of Galilee. We drank a cup of tea and photographed Bedouin women making butter. The fruits and vegetables grown in the gardens are packed every day in boxes and sent by train From Zemach to Haifa and Damascus. The tomatoes are especially expensive, as they ripen earlier in the Jordan Valley than in other regions."
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Zionist movement acquired from the Baha'is a part of the lands of Umm Joni.
It was Haim Margaliot-Kalvariski who carried out the transaction for YKA, the Jewish settlement company of Baron Hirsch. On this land, Degania, the mother of the groups and kibbutzim, was established in 1910. After the First World War, the rest of the Baha'i lands in Umm Joni were purchased and on these lands were established Beit Zera, Degania B. and Afikim.
The new Baha'i cemetery (photo: official website, Ariel Zur Ein Gav)
In 1934, the "Kedmat Kinneret" company purchased from the Baha'is a part of the Nukaiv lands.
The founder of the company, Dr. Hermann Badet, was a senior jurist and a member of parliament in Germany. He was an observant Jew and a Zionist. When in 1932 laws were passed ordering the confiscation of the property of Jews who came to Germany after 1914 and forbidding the employment of Jews in theaters, he said that "the laws have no value and still have no place A year later, the Nazi Party came to power. The day before the elections, Badet, his wife and their three children fled Germany. On the eve of Passover 1933, they arrived in Tel Aviv, destitute refugees.
In his vision, Badet saw how after his country changed its face and Jews began immigrating from it to Eretz Israel, they would find According to the plan, the members of the middle class will become farmers and live in a settlement where each family has a private farm.
With the help of Jewish capitalists who were captured by his dream, he established the company "Kedmat Kinneret" and together with the company "Kashret Hashav" in 1934 about 12,000 dunams were purchased from the Baha'is in the village of Nokiv.
He dreamed of how from that plot of fertile and abundant water, the vegetables would arrive every day at the train station in Zemach and from there they would be marketed all over the country and even sent to Europe.
But in reality there were no people who followed Badet's vision, what's more, the Nukaiv area was far and isolated from any settlement, without roads and transportation and subject to security threats.
His plan did not materialize, the "Kidmat Kinneret" company went bankrupt and KKL-Junk purchased the land from her hands.
However, the seeds he sowed germinated three years later when the founders of Kibbutz Ein Gav, including immigrants from Germany, came onto the land. The young people, some of them Jewish students who were expelled from institutions The study, got on the ground in July 1937 as one of the "Wall and Tower" settlements. Among the founders was also a young immigrant, 26 years old, named Teddy Kolek.
The partition plan of the United Nations in November 1947 no longer took into account those principles and so it turned out that the Baha'i community was found partly in Acre within the boundaries of the future Arab state and partly in the East of the Sea of Galilee within the boundaries of the future Jewish state.
With the outbreak of the War of Independence, many Baha'is left the Land of Israel.
In the Israeli-Arab conflict, they did not take a position and did not support any side and maintained a neutral position.
The Arab harissas who cultivated the farm lands fled to Syria.
The tomb of Mirza Muhammad Kuli, which was moved under Mount Susita (photo: official website, Ariel Zur Ein Gav)
Kibbutz Ein Gav remained isolated during the fighting and subject to Syrian attacks.
A Baha'i family remained in a strategic location south of the kibbutz.
The people of Ein Gev ordered them to leave the place and evacuate.
The Bahá'ís left and moved to Tiberias, and a sort of rear guard unit was stationed there.
Ein Gev faced an attack by hundreds of Syrian soldiers and repelled it at a heavy cost in blood and the destruction of many buildings in the town.
When the war ended, three demilitarized zones were established in the armistice agreements between Israel and Syria.
One of those areas was east of the Sea of Galilee.
It was clear to the Israeli government that it was necessary to establish facts on the ground as soon as possible, that is, a land continuum from the south of the Sea of Galilee to Ein Gev.
Initially Kibbutz Ma'agan was established in the south of the lake and immediately after that Kibbutz Ha'on was established between Ma'agan and Ein Gev.
For this he had to purchase the lands of Samara and Nokiv which were in the hands of the Bahá'ís.
As part of the agreements between the State of Israel and the Bahá'ís, it was agreed that in exchange for lands east of the Kinneret that would be transferred to the state, the Bahá'ís would receive lands in Acre.
It was also decided that for an interim period they will be leased to them agricultural areas in Tzipori and the Beit Netufa valley that were previously owned by Arabs.
The file of documents published by the State Archives shows that it was an agreement whose implementation was complicated and tedious.
Teddy Kolek, one of the founders of Ein Gav and who knew the Baha'i neighbors of his kibbutz, was now in the position of CEO of the Prime Minister's Office and more than once issues came up that delayed the implementation of the agreement.
From those documents it appears that he was even required for a conflict over the flow of Naaman water near Acre.
The Bahá'ís who were displaced from the east of the Sea of Galilee and established themselves in Acre accepted that the state authorities expanded the Nahal Hanaman during the year 1955. Until then, the flow of water in the stream provided them with what they wanted for the gardens cultivated by the agricultural fields.
In their anger and in order to raise the water level in the stream again, so that it would return to flow into their water channels, the Bahá'ís blocked the Na'aman channel.
And so the Director General of the Prime Minister's Office himself had to intervene and resolve the conflict. It got to the point where even the fishermen who fished in the Naaman estuary complained to him.
In the end the agreement was implemented.
The last evidence of the Baha'i presence in the East of the Sea of Galilee remains in a small cemetery in Kibbutz Ein Gav.
In the 1970s it was agreed between Ein Gav and the representatives of the Bahá'í families that the graves would be moved to a nearby location, under Mount Susita.
With the assistance of the Israel Lands Administrator, the 13 graves were moved in 1985 and a burial ceremony was held according to the rules of the Baha'i faith.
Over the years, several graves of the descendants of Mirza Muhammad Kuli were added, he founded the Baha'i villages on the Sea of Galilee.
The Bahá'í family visiting Kibbutz Ein-Gev (photo: official website, Ariel Zur Ein-Gev)
Last week, the descendants of the families who lived in the area until the middle of the last century were hosted in Ein Gev.
They came to Israel from the United States to participate in a religious conference at the Baha'i World Center in Haifa.
Yoel Ben Yosef and Ariel Zur, members of Ein Gav, gave them a tour of the kibbutz, the grave plot and the place where the family farm was located, where today there is a banana plot.
This area is called Ein Gev to this day "The Persian".
Among the guests who came to Ein Gev were Munir Bhai who grew up on the farm until the age of 9 and the family members of his brother Fouad Bhai, who was born and raised on the farm.
Tzur said that "Monir said that he remembers Teddy Kolek very well. He described him as a 'lovable uncle'."
Ben Yosef's own father was crowned Ein Gev and in close contact with the Bahá'í neighbors.
In the file of documents discussing the implementation of the agreement with them are also several letters he wrote in which he requests that the state fulfill the obligations it gave to the Bahá'ís.
The excited guests said that for them the visit was the closing of a circle of over 70 years and promised that they intend to stay in touch with Ein Gav.
news
News in Israel
Events in Israel
Tags
Bahá'ís
Kinneret
territories
KKL