'Allar

‘Allar stood on the northeastern slope of a mountain range about seventeen and a half kilometres west of Jerusalem, overlooking a tributary of Wadi al-Sarar that ran parallel to the range. A secondary road connected it to the Bayt Jibrin–Bethlehem road, a kilometre to the south. In 1596 it was a village of 204 people in the nahiya of Jerusalem, taxed on wheat, barley, olive trees, molasses, goats and beehives. Edward Robinson saw it in 1838 and placed it on a hill slightly above its sister village, ‘Allar al-Sufla. By 1875 it had about four hundred people. In the late nineteenth century it stood on the slope of a ridge with a well to the south and rock-cut tombs to the north.

The village ran roughly east to west, its stone houses joined by narrow winding streets with small shops along them. Its people were Muslims and kept four maqams in the vicinity; their children were taught in the village elementary school. The 1945 statistics counted 440 people on 12,356 dunums, of which 2,234 were under cereals and 353 irrigated or orchard. They lived on grain, vegetables, olives and grapes, mostly rainfed but some irrigated from the springs around the village, among them ‘Ayn al-Tannur. Several khirbas lay nearby, including Khirbat al-Shaykh Ibrahim, named for a local religious teacher whose tomb had been made a maqam.

Benny Morris records ‘Allar as one of a string of villages taken during Operation Ha-Har, captured on 22 October 1948; Zochrot gives the same date and names Har’el and Etzioni. The people of this region were either expelled or fled under pressure, probably towards Bethlehem and the Hebron hills. Large numbers of refugees stayed encamped in the gullies and caves around their own villages, and were expelled again in Israeli raids over the following months.

Israel established Matta’ on the southern edge of the village site in 1950, and Bar-Giyyora, also founded in 1950, northeast of it; both stand on village lands. Stone rubble, concrete blocks and slabs and steel bars litter the site, along with the remains of terraces and walls. One domed stone structure is still standing: the former school building. On the slopes above, almond and cypress trees and cactus grow along the terraces.

Sources

• ‘Allar — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• ‘Allar — Zochrot, drawn from Walid Khalidi, All That Remains (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)