Al-Tira

Al-Tira stood on the lower western slopes of Mount Carmel looking out over the coastal plain, seven kilometres south of Haifa and joined by a spur to the coast road. It was the most populous village of the Haifa subdistrict and the second largest in area after Ijzim. The Crusaders called it St Yohan de Tire; in 1596 it had 286 inhabitants paying tax on wheat and barley as well as goats, beehives and vineyards. Nineteenth-century visitors described a village of stone and mud at the foot of the mountain, surrounded by olive groves, with caves marking the hills nearby; its prosperity fell away after the heavy Ottoman conscription of 1872 and later recovered. By the mid-1940s its 5,270 residents — 5,240 Muslims and 30 Christians — lived in clustered stone houses laid out in a cross, with two elementary schools. Springs rose in its lands, and in 1943 al-Tira produced more olives and olive oil than any other village in the subdistrict, working three mechanised presses; so many almond trees grew there that it was nicknamed Tirat al-Lawz, the Tira of the almonds. Of its 45,262 dunums, 16,219 were sown in cereals and 3,543 irrigated or planted in orchards. Five khirbas lay on its land, one of them containing the ruins of the monastery of St Brocardus, inhabited caves and a vaulted tunnel.

The war came early. On 12 December 1947, during the first round of fighting, the Irgun carried out a bombing raid on al-Tira as one of seven attacks across the country that day. The History of the Haganah records thirteen villagers killed; Filastin listed children and elderly people among the dead, and described a party of around twenty men who firebombed a secluded house at the edge of the village, shot at other houses and escaped through the olive groves to a waiting truck. The New York Times confirmed thirteen dead and ten wounded, one house destroyed and others damaged. Smaller attacks followed through the winter.

A major assault came in the early morning of 22 April 1948, in conjunction with the Haganah offensive against Haifa. Attempts to take the village continued after the city fell: Benny Morris records mortar and machine-gun fire at 1.40 a.m. on 25 April, halted when a British unit appeared, resumed the next morning after the British left, and interrupted again when another British unit arrived and arranged a further evacuation; on 5 May some six hundred inhabitants were taken out to Jenin and Nablus. An Alexandroni Brigade attack on 13 May failed for lack of detailed knowledge of the village’s defences, and the failure led to the cancellation of the plan to occupy Qalqilya under Plan Dalet. Al-Tira finally fell on 16 July during the Ten Days between the truces, in an operation that the Haganah’s history singled out as the first in which naval firepower supported land forces: the warship Eilat bombarded the village before the ground units moved in, in the same operation that took Kafr Lam and al-Sarafand. Most of the remaining villagers, who had held out under siege for more than two months, were expelled to the Jenin–Nablus–Tulkarm triangle or interned in prisoner-of-war camps. Many of the refugees eventually reached Jordan, most of them Irbid.

Ha-Hotrim was founded just south of the site in June 1948; Tirat Karmel was built on the village site itself in 1949 and Megadim on its land the same year, followed by Kefar Gallim in 1952 and Beyt Tzvi in 1953. Refugees from al-Tira later founded the village of Wadi al-Ayn nearby, which lasted until the early 1970s, when the residents were evicted and the area taken into Mount Carmel National Park. Some houses still stand on the site, the cemetery is unkempt with broken gravestones, the remains of two shrines are visible, and the village school is used by Israeli pupils, Arab and Jewish.

Sources

• Al-Tira, Haifa — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Al-Tira (Haifa) — Zochrot
• Al-Tira, Haifa — Wikipedia