JISH, northern Israel — In plain view of a Hezbollah stronghold, Shadi Khalloul scanned a fig tree for the best fruit to offer his guests.
“Take some if you have a plastic bag,” Khalloul, 48, said on Monday on a hilltop in his village, about 3.5 kilometers (2 miles) from the border with Lebanon.
Khalloul’s disregard for Hezbollah snipers wasn’t due to ignorance. A Jish native, he’s aware of the terrorists’ capabilities — also thanks to his past service as an IDF Paratrooper Brigade officer and his current reserve duty with the IDF Operations Directorate.
Like most of his neighbors, Khalloul has stayed in Jish despite frequent shelling, because he won’t be cowed by the Lebanese terror group.
His defiance is characteristic of Jish and its small but tight-knit community of Aramean Christians: a Catholic ethnoreligious group of just a few thousand people who threw their lot in with the State of Israel. They trace their heritage to the ancient Arameans who lived here 3,000 years ago.
Unlike most of their Jewish neighbors in neighboring towns, Jish’s 3,000-odd residents have largely stayed put throughout the current escalation of hostilities with Hezbollah, which led to the evacuation of some 60,000 people from communities near the border.
Jish is not on the list of evacuated locales because the bulk of its houses are more than 3.5 kilometers from the border. But many of its residents wouldn’t leave anyway, said Nivin Elias, a mother of three. Her home’s line-of-sight to Lebanon means it’s at risk from directly fired anti-tank missiles as well as indirect rocket fire and drone attacks.
Instead of moving in with relatives outside Jish, Elias and her husband dug in deeper.
‘We have a bad experience with temporary evacuations. We’re not doing it anymore’
Following the outbreak of hostilities in October, they built a large, apartment-size underground floor in their home. As Israel, Hezbollah, and Iran appear to be nearing a major escalation of their hostilities, the Eliases are preparing to turn the space into a bunker for their extended family, complete with a 600-liter fridge and en suite bathroom.
Nivin Elias’s parents stayed in their home “because of our history with leaving,” she said.
She was referring to the fate of the residents of Ikrit and Biram, two nearby Aramean Christian villages that Israeli authorities ordered evacuated in 1948, promising locals they could return within weeks. Biram was destroyed by the army and Ikrit was never repopulated despite a protracted legal fight by the evacuees — who settled in Jish.
“We are brethren,” Elias said, referencing Jews and Aramean Christians, “but we have a bad experience with temporary evacuations. We’re not doing it anymore.”
Deeply rooted
Jish is an oasis of vibrancy and normalcy amid a largely deserted area. The axis of communal life here is the church and its daily services. Religiously, the church is Maronite, a local and early stream of Catholicism prevalent in Lebanon and northern Israel. Culturally, though, many of the churchgoers are Arameans, and, uniquely, some prayers in Jish are delivered in Aramaic.
Khalloul is a promoter of Aramean heritage and culture, which he decided to champion after realizing about 25 years ago that the rest of the Christian world believed it extinct. He views Jews and Arameans as “the true indigenous” groups of the Land of Israel, “which are joined by history, ancestry, and culture,” he said. This partnership forms the basis for an “unbreakable bond.”
The community’s day-to-day language is Arabic and the village has a mosque and a sizable Muslim minority. The church runs a summer camp for children and youths who, come evening, hang around town, many of them wearing the church movement’s blue shirts.
The local restaurant, El Layali, reopened last month. Soldiers help keep the lights on but the owners are barely breaking even because of the disappearance of most of the summertime clientele – Jewish families visiting the touristic area of Mount Meron.
Staying in Jish is challenging, Elias and others said. Elias’s eldest son serves as a combat soldier in the Golan Heights, and she fears for his safety daily. Her youngest, Sharbel, likes to film rocket attacks instead of hiding from them, said Elias, who is also an army reservist and heads the civilian defense portfolio in Jish.
The children of Jish used to play at the local soccer field, but it became off-limits after a Hezbollah rocket on July 27 killed 12 children on the soccer field of the Druze village of Majdal Shams, which is so close to Jish that it’s visible in the distance.
Some of Jish’s residents did evacuate, including Amir Makhoul, Nivin’s brother. A mechanic, he’s in the reserves repairing military Hummers while his wife and son are staying in Haifa.
“Leaving Jish was painful. But my boy is 3. We didn’t want him to get emotionally scarred by the sounds of war,” said Amir Makhoul, who visits Jish twice a week since he left.
Karema Haddad, a mother of three who works as a kindergarten teacher, came up with an alternative afternoon activity for her children and their friends: a lemonade stand right outside their front yard.
The children enthusiastically offered passersby icy tamarind juice and homemade popcorn in sandwich bags for two shekels (50 cents).
Like other children in Jish, Haddad’s attend the weekly Aramaic language course taught at the local elementary school by Aram — the Israeli Christian Aramaic Association, a nongovernmental association headed by Khalloul and Elias. The two also head the Kinneret Mechina, an army preparation course for Jewish and Aramean Christian youths.
As with Bedouins and Druze, enlistment to the army is non-compulsory for Arameans — but it’s a popular choice. Many Arameans consider themselves closer culturally, religiously, and ideologically to Jewish Israelis and Judaism than to Arabs and Islam. In 2014, Aram succeeded in including Aramean in the list of state-recognized ethnic minorities, ending a years-long legal battle.
Collateral damage
Several of Jish’s children attend the local regional high school, where most other students are Jews from kibbutzim and moshavim. Some Jish parents enroll their elementary school-age children in Jewish institutions in the kibbutzim, Khaloul noted.
“So when the evacuation of the Galilee happened, it hurt us in multiple ways: It took away places of work as well as educational frameworks,” added Khalloul. He opposes the evacuation as a “great strategic mistake that encourages the enemy. I never thought I’d live to see the north pack up and leave,” he said.
‘Only under a Jewish sovereign state can we even hope to live as free men and women’
The evacuation and the tactical successes of Hamas on October 7, when 3,000 of its terrorists murdered some 1,200 Israelis and abducted 251, shook Khalloul’s confidence in Israel’s long-term viability, he said. But he’s determined to fight for it.
“Only under a Jewish sovereign state can we even hope to live as free men and women. It’s not like we can hedge our bets, or negotiate with the Shiites. They will cut us down. This is survival for us, just as it is for you,” said Khalloul.
The alliance with Israel is full of disappointments, he acknowledged. He noted the fate of Ikrit and Biram in 1948; the Israeli army’s 2000 pullout from southern Lebanon – which he calls the abandonment of its Christian allies there – and the evacuation of the Galilee.
But it does hold promise: Khalloul envisages Israel helping to establish a Christian state or canton in a federalized Lebanon.
“We’re few, but our story, our joint story with the Jews, is far from over,” he said of Maronites and Arameans.
For Elias, October 7 brought back accounts about the atrocities perpetrated in Lebanon in the 1970s against Maronites (those massacres are widely seen as the background to the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982 by Christians against Muslim Palestinians and Shiites in Lebanon).
“It was scary because the same could happen here,” she said of October 7. “But it was also a reminder to the rest of Israel — before it’s too late — of what happens when you let your guard down in this part of the world. I hope we’ve internalized the message.”
She has a message of her own to her exiled Jewish neighbors.
“I know it’s tough here now and if you can’t come back, I understand. But if you can, please do. The only way we stay here is if we actually stay here,” said Elias.
