Al-Kafrayn

Al-Kafrayn stood in an open landscape of gentle slopes and shallow wadis, built on a hilltop ringed by wadis separating long sloping hills, at about 250 metres, twenty-nine and a half kilometres from Haifa and about six kilometres north of Wadi Ara. A secondary road ran northwest to the Haifa–Jenin highway on the edge of Marj ibn Amir. Its name means “the two villages”; the Crusaders called it Caforana. Archaeological finds on the site run from the Iron Age to the Islamic period. In the late nineteenth century al-Kafrayn had 200 residents cultivating 30 faddans.

The village was rectangular, its longest side running east to west. Its people were Muslims and built their houses of mud and cement; they kept a mosque and a boys’ elementary school established about 1888, under the Ottomans. There were about ten wells and springs on the village land. The economy rested on cattle-breeding and agriculture, with grain the primary crop: in 1944/45, 9,776 dunums were allotted to cereals and 147 were irrigated or planted in orchards, out of 10,882 dunums in all. The 1931 census counted 657 people in 95 houses, a figure amalgamated with al-Balawina; the 1945 statistics counted 920. The village held a number of ruins that showed its long history — building foundations, columns and tombs.

Zionist forces claimed to have occupied al-Kafrayn on 12 April 1948, and Arab Liberation Army records indicate that Arab forces withdrew from an area just west of the village the following day. The Palmach attack was part of an operation launched after the battle of Mishmar ha-Emeq: when the Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion and the Haganah command rejected the ALA’s offer of a ceasefire in that battle, they also decided to attack and destroy about ten villages near the settlement. Al-Kafrayn was, according to the New York Times, the largest of them, and a Haganah broadcast of 12 April was quoted by the paper as saying it was the fifth village around Mishmar ha-Emeq to be occupied.

Benny Morris reports that the village was partially destroyed during its occupation — some thirty houses were blown up the same day — but that final demolition was postponed for a week, because the Palmach planned to use al-Kafrayn to train units in fighting in built-up areas. On 19 April the Haganah General Staff was informed: “Yesterday company exercises in fighting in built-up areas took place south and east of Mishmar Ha’emek. At the end of the exercises, the village of el Kafrin was blown up completely.” Most of the villagers ended in tent homes around Jenin. An appeal to the Arab Higher Committee from the villages destroyed around Mishmar ha-Emeq — Abu Zurayq, al-Mansi, al-Ghubayya, al-Kafrayn and others — described thousands of poor women and children whose houses had been destroyed, without help and dying of hunger, and asked that forces be sent to restore them to their lands.

No Israeli settlement stands on the village land, but some of it is taken up by a military training camp. The site and the area around it are divided between that camp and a cow pasture. A rubble-filled area has been fenced in and covered with dirt, underbrush and thorns. Almond, olive and fig trees are scattered around the site.

Sources

• al-Kafrayn — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• al-Kafrayn — Zochrot
• Al-Kafrayn — Wikipedia