Al-Maghar

Al-Maghar stood on three slightly raised hills in otherwise flat country on the central coastal plain, twelve kilometers from Ramla on a highway running northeast to the city, with the military airfield at Aqir a few kilometers to the east and Wadi al-Maghar bounding it to the south. Its name means cave. The site carried remains of ancient habitation, and one of the three hills held antiquities presumed to date from the Canaanite era. In the early Islamic period it was a seasonal camping ground of the Arab tribe of Lakhm. The Muslim geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi, who died in 1228, placed the village in the Ramla subdistrict and recorded that the jurist Abu al-Hasan Muhammad al-Maghari was born there in the eighth century. In 1596 al-Maghar was a village in the nahiya of Gaza, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 121 people, taxed on wheat, barley, sesame and fruits.

In the late nineteenth century it was built of adobe brick on the south slope of a hill, surrounded by pasture and fig orchards. In the first half of the twentieth century the houses were of mud, cement and stone, laid out in tight clusters spread along Wadi al-Maghar and the tracks that crossed the village. Building increased under the Mandate, onto the two other hills north and south of the original one, and along the road to nearby Yibna. Most of the people were Muslims. The village had a mosque and a number of shops, and the villagers put up about 5,000 Palestinian pounds of their own money to establish an elementary school on twenty-two dunums of land; 190 pupils were enrolled in the mid-1940s.

Groundwater was plentiful and the soil good, and agriculture was the villagers’ chief occupation: rainfed grain, irrigated vegetables and fruit. In 1944/45, 1,772 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 9,075 under cereals, with eighty-six dunums irrigated or in orchards, twenty-two of them in olives. The census of 1931 counted 1,211 people in 255 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,740.

Al-Maghar was attacked on 10 February 1948, according to a communiqué from the Arab militia forces in the Jaffa area under Hasan Salama, quoted in the Palestinian newspaper Filastin; the communiqué said only that a Jewish convoy approached the village firing at villagers on both sides of the road, and gave no casualty figures. The New York Times reported another attack on 29 March 1948, which came to light only when the British police found the wreckage of an armored car blown up during it; the charred bodies of six Jewish soldiers were recovered, and no Arab casualties were reported.

The Haganah’s Giv’ati Brigade entered the village on 15 May 1948, at the beginning of Operation Barak; Zochrot gives the same date and the same brigade. The New York Times reported that Jewish forces moving south had seized the Arab fortress at al-Maghar, which commanded the road to the Negev. Within a month the Jewish National Fund had begun to level the village. Benny Morris records that on 10 June the senior JNF official Yosef Weitz sent two employees to tour the coastal plain and decide which villages should be destroyed and which settled with Jews; one of them reported back that he had arranged for the destruction of al-Maghar to begin the next day. On 14 June Weitz received a progress report, and the following day went to see what was left. “Three tractors are completing its destruction,” he wrote afterwards, adding that he was surprised nothing moved in him at the sight — neither regret nor hatred, since this was the way of the world, and the dwellers of these mud houses had not wanted the Zionists to exist there.

Beyt El’azari, built in 1948, stands on village land. A number of houses still stand, four of them occupied by Jewish families and the rest deserted, and some walls of demolished houses are still upright. Cactuses grow on the site.

Sources

• al-Maghar — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• al-Maghar — Zochrot