Tel Ḥay

Tel Ḥay, also spelled Tel Ḥai, orTel Chai, former settlement, now a national memorial, in Upper Galilee, northern Israel, near the Lebanese border. One of the first Jewish settlements in northern Palestine, it was intermittently inhabited from 1905, and permanently settled as a pastoral camp and border outpost in 1918. The name (Hebrew: “Hill of Life”) is an onomatopoetic derivation from the former Arabic name, Talha.

According to the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between Great Britain and France (1916), an expanded Lebanon, including all of eastern Upper Galilee, was to come under French rule after World War I. This satisfied neither the Muslims, who desired an independent Arab Greater Syria, nor the Jews, who preferred British rule. After the war the Muslim Arabs began attacks both on the Christian villages of southern Lebanon and on the isolated Jewish settlements of Upper Galilee. Tel Ḥay and adjacent Kefar Gilʿadi were determined to defend themselves, and Tel Ḥay was reinforced from Jerusalem by members of ha-Shomer, the Jewish workers’ protective organization, under the command of Joseph Trumpeldor, Zionist pioneer and former hero of the tsarist army. On March 1, 1920, the settlement was attacked by a large band of Arabs; six of the defenders, including Trumpeldor, were killed. The resistance of Tel Ḥay not only became legendary throughout Jewish Palestine but also was an important factor in the final determination (December 1920) of the northern boundary of mandated Palestine, which, as finally drawn, gave all of Upper Galilee and a “finger” of territory reaching almost to the sources of the Jordan River to Great Britain, to the disadvantage of France. This territory became part of Israel upon its attainment of independence (1948).

Tel Ḥay was resettled in 1921, and in 1926 was absorbed into the kibbutz of Kefar Gilʿadi. Its eight defenders (including two killed earlier in 1919 and 1920) were buried on an adjoining hill overlooking the Hula Valley; the site is marked by a monumental memorial statue of the Lion of Judah, with Trumpeldor’s last words (“It is good to die for our country”) on its base. The Hebrew date of the 11th of Adar—the anniversary of the fall of Tel Ḥay—is celebrated as “Tel Ḥay Day” in Israel, and pilgrimages are made to the site, particularly by youth groups. The cemetery there, containing the graves of other members of ha-Shomer, and of members of the Israel Defense Forces killed in the Arab-Israeli wars, has become a national pantheon. A youth hostel and a military museum have been established at the site. The nearby town of Qiryat Shemona (Hebrew: “Town of the Eight”), founded 1949, is named for the martyrs of Tel Ḥay.