In the aftermath of the Nahalal bombings, which killed a Jewish colonist and his nine year old son in December 1932, three men from the village of Ṣaffūriyya stood trial in the criminal assize court in Haifa. Testimony from witnesses at the trial revealed the existence of a secret society connected to the village’s branch of the Young Men’s Muslim Association. This secret society, it was alleged, was organized to “defend” the country from Zionist colonization through armed resistance. In the beginning of the 1930s the village of Ṣaffūriyya – about thirty-five kilometers west of Haifa – was at the epicenter of sustained, at times violent conflict with neighboring Jewish colonies over grazing rights and land ownership. By Yehoshua Porath’s count, at the height of the 1936-1939 Revolt, the village supplied more rebel band commanders than any other place in Palestine. A remarkable feat for a village of only a few thousand. This paper is a microhistory of Ṣaffūriyya in those intervening years: 1932-1935. The paper focuses in particular on encounters between villagers and a variety of external forces: new Jewish colonies, the British Mandate authorities, and urban nationalists of different stripes. While episodes like the Nahalal bombings and the subsequent trial of the members of the “secret society” brought the village’s role in armed resistance to national attention, it was hardly the only interaction between the village and the neighbouring settlements. Encounters between villagers and their Jewish neighbours were far more equivocal and ranged from “crimes” like assaults, rock throwing, thefts and vandalism to the more prosaic: meetings, social engagements, weddings, friendships. How do we reconcile these conflicting ideas about the politics and the practice of village life? This paper draws on a variety of sources including police files from the British National Archives and the Israeli State Archives; contemporary newspaper accounts in the English, Hebrew and Arabic press; memoirs and oral accounts of residents of Ṣaffūriyya and neighboring communities, to paint a broad picture of life in the village as it negotiated it’s place in a changing Palestine.