Al-Maliha

Al-Maliha stood on a plateau 750 metres up, about five and a half kilometres from Jerusalem, overlooking wide ground on every side but the north, with a newer quarter built on the southeastern slope of the neighbouring hill. A short road linked it to the Jerusalem highway. In 1596 it was Maliha al-Sughra, a village of 286 in the nahiya of Jerusalem, taxed on wheat, barley, olives, fruit, goats and beehives. Mary Rogers passed it in 1855 and described it on the summit of a steep hill with large charcoal kilns on the terraces below; it was then the home of the al-Shaykha family, one of the most influential in the Jerusalem mountains. As the city grew, al-Maliha became one of its suburbs.

The 1931 census counted 1,410 people in 299 houses, a figure that also takes in ‘Ayn Yalu; the 1945 statistics counted 1,940, of whom about ten were Christians, holding 6,828 dunums with 1,013 under cereals and 2,613 irrigated or orchard, 1,370 of those in olives. The plan was rectangular and most of the houses were stone. There was a public elementary school, a medical clinic, a few shops, a village council, and a large mosque named for ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab. Most people farmed and kept livestock; some worked in crafts, trade and services. Rock-cut tombs lay in and around the village and a ruined tower stood near the mosque.

The village emptied in two stages. The Jaffa daily Filastin reported the first attack on 6 March 1948, when a Jewish unit came into the outskirts and clashed with the village’s defenders; no casualties were reported. Morris indicates a first wave of departure in April, in the aftermath of the massacre at Deir Yassin on 9 April, two kilometres away. But al-Maliha was not emptied outright until the middle of July, after the first truce. The New York Times records the Haganah pushing south from Qatamon towards the village on the night of 1–2 May, while the History of the War of Independence places the occupation about ten weeks later, in the operations around Jerusalem run alongside Operation Dani. On the night of 13–14 July a company of the Irgun and two platoons of the Gadna entered al-Maliha and took up positions. An Arab counterattack on 15 July forced the Irgun unit back from its furthest position, and Egyptian irregulars fighting south of Jerusalem alongside Palestinian guerrillas announced in a communiqué that they had taken the village; Irgun reinforcements retook it. By 16 July the Times reported the village in Israeli hands, and a counterattack that day, in which fifteen Irgun men were killed and twenty wounded, failed to recover it. The Irgun said the Haganah had withdrawn from a flanking height and failed to give covering fire; the Haganah denied it. On 22 July the Israeli commander in Jerusalem, David Shaltiel, told the Times that al-Maliha and ‘Ayn Karim had been taken between the truces.

The suburb of Manachat was established on the village site in 1949. Many of the houses are still standing and are lived in by Jewish families, though some on the southern side have been demolished; they are mostly two storeys of limestone with arched windows and doors, some with balconies carried on columns and round arches. The school building is abandoned and its classrooms full of refuse. Some streets are wide and paved and others are alleys broken by limestone steps. The mosque with its tall round minaret still stands at the centre of the village, closed and neglected. The cemetery is on the southern edge, five large tombs standing out among the smaller ones; one grave is open and the bones are visible. Orchards grow on the southern slopes and in the valleys, and the Israeli neighbourhood of Ramat Daniya surrounds the site to the west and north.

Sources

• Al-Maliha — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Al-Maliha — Zochrot
• Malha — English Wikipedia, for the 1945 Village Statistics figure and Morris’s two depopulation dates