Amqa

Amqa sat on a slight rise in a valley in the western Galilee, a few kilometers northeast of Acre, surrounded by olive and fig groves. It is identified with Kefar Amiqo, a place named in the Mishnah and Tosefta, and some scholars hear in its name an echo of the biblical Beth Ha-Emek. The Crusaders called it Amca; in 1596 the Ottoman registers counted 215 people, all Muslims, taxed on wheat, barley, olives, cotton, and fruit. In the early eighteenth century its cotton was contracted to the Dutch trader Paul Maashook, and in 1776 Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar used the village as a base to suppress a revolt by a son of Daher al-Umar. Its mosque, still standing, is thought to date from the early nineteenth century, and the Ottomans built a school there in 1887. The 1945 survey counted 1,240 people, all Muslims, on more than 6,000 dunums.

In May 1948, refugees from neighboring villages began seeking shelter in Amqa. The village itself was attacked on 10–11 July by the Sheva’ (Seventh) Brigade and the First Battalion of the Carmeli Brigade, and was captured on 16 July 1948 during Operation Dekel, the Israeli offensive that overran the central Galilee in the ten days between the two truces. The village was largely destroyed; many of its people became internally displaced, finding refuge in nearby Arab towns such as Salim, where UN observers reported groups of Amqa villagers arriving as late as March 1949. In February 1950 the site was declared a closed area.

Only the mosque and the boys’ elementary school survived the destruction, and both were put to use as warehouses; the remaining structures were razed in the late 1950s. In 1949 a group of Yemeni Jewish immigrants established the moshav of Amka on village lands, which gave the depopulated village its Hebrew name.

Sources

• Amqa — Palestine Remembered
• Amqa — Zochrot
• Amqa — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)