Al-Khayriyya

Al-Khayriyya stood on flat ground on the central coastal plain, with roads giving it easy access to Jaffa, Lydda, Ramla, and Tel Aviv. Its antiquity reaches back to Sennacherib: the Assyrian king’s record of conquered towns includes Banai Berka, on this site, which the Romans called Beneberak; the Crusaders built a castle here they named Bombrac, and through the Ottoman centuries the village was known as Ibn Baraq. In 1596 it was a village in the nahiya of Ramla with 154 people, taxed on wheat, barley, fruits, sesame, goats, beehives, and vineyards. During the Mandate its residents renamed it al-Khayriyya — ‘the good, the giving’ — to distinguish it from the Jewish colony of Bene Beraq founded six kilometers north in 1924. Its people were predominantly Muslim, with twenty Christians among them; it had two schools, a boys’ school from 1920 with eight dunums of land for agricultural training and a girls’ school from 1945, enrolling 183 boys and 69 girls by 1946. Numerous artesian wells watered its orchards: 3,359 dunums of citrus and bananas in 1944/45. The 1945 survey counted 1,420 people.

The village braced early for the coming war. On 15 December 1947, Filastin reported its people digging defensive trenches and manning outposts at the entrances, in response to the attacks on neighboring Salama and al-Abbasiyya; on 12 February 1948 Zionist forces moved into a village orchard by night and blew up a house. The end came in Operation Hametz, the offensive designed, in the words of its planners, to ‘cleanse the area’ east of Jaffa and encircle the city: on 29 April 1948 the Haganah’s Alexandroni Brigade seized al-Khayriyya along with the cluster of villages around it.

The settlement of Kefar Azar had been established on traditional village land in 1932; Ramat Pinqas (1952) and Ramat Ef’al (1969) followed north of the site, and the site now lies within the suburbs of Giv’atayim. A handful of houses and one of the schools remain: a deserted house with a flat roof among the shrubs, and a two-storey house identified as having belonged to Ahmad al-Tibi, used as a store. Cypress, fig, and orange trees grow between the buildings; part of the village lands later became the great Hiriya landfill, since turned into a park.

Sources

• Al-Khayriyya — Palestine Remembered
• Al-Khayriyya — Zochrot
• Al-Khayriyya — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)