What saved Kibbutz Tirat Zvi – and especially its children – from General Fawzi al- Qawuqji’s Arab Salvation Army in the months before the declaration of the State of Israel?

Israel’s War of Independence encompassed no fewer than fifty military operations, their names ranging from Jebusite (resulting in the capture of Jerusalem’s Katamon neighborhood and the hill of Nebi Samuel; see “Battle for the Hill,” Segula 28, and www.segulamag.com), Nahshon (which gained access to Jerusalem), and Uvda (in which the Gulf of Eilat was conquered) to the obscure Broom, Dust, and Death to the Invader. But one noteworthy mission was never even acknowledged as an operation. Instead, it’s known simply as the Battle of Tirat Zvi, named for the kibbutz where it took place.

The battle lasted a mere five hours, with only two casualties, one of them fatal. (This despite the fact Tirat Zvi wasn’t evacuated, and had no bomb shelters.) Nevertheless, the incident included both careful reconnaissance, daring action and outright miracles – all hallmarks of a true military operation. Had Tirat Zvi fallen, the entire Beth She’an Valley could have been lost – and with it, perhaps even the war.

Heavy rain washed over the valley that dark night, disabling most of Kibbutz Tirat Zvi’s few guns, and its eighty riflemen were pitted against hundreds of seasoned troops from Qawuqji’s volunteer Arab Salvation Army.

A secret phone conversation between the Arab towns of Jenin and Beisan was intercepted by the Hagana on the evening of February 16, 1948 (6 Adar), alerting Israeli forces to an impending attack on the kibbutz – the Arabs’ first strike at the Beth She’an Valley. So everyone in Tirat Zvi was wide awake and at his post, with field troops and a home guard on call as reinforcements, ready to spring to the small communal village’s aid if necessary.

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Kibbutz Tirat Zvi (Zvi’s Tower) was founded in the summer of 1937. It was one of the “tower and stockade” settlements set up overnight to take advantage of a loophole in Ottoman law, stating that no illegal building could be demolished once its roof has been completed. Established by the Bahad religious pioneer movement, the community was named for proto-Zionist Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and for the two-story, mud-brick structure at the center of the agricultural training farm that preceded the kibbutz.
On June 21, 1942 the temperature on the kibbutz soared to an unprecedented fifty-four degrees Celsius, making Tirat Zvi the hottest location in the Middle East, and possibly in all of Asia.
The children’s house where the bomb failed to explode is still standing, currently serving as a clubhouse for middle-schoolers. The tile roof pierced by the shell was replaced long ago with concrete. But Reuven Or, who works in the kibbutz archive next door, will be happy to reconstruct everything else about the story. He was there. Catch him at (04) 607-8105.