Aqir

Aqir stood on the central coastal plain nine kilometers from Ramla, with Wadi al-Nasufiyya running a kilometer to its south and a secondary road linking it to the highway to Ramla and the other towns. It has been identified with the Roman town of Accaron. The Arab geographer al-Maqdisi, who died in 985, described Aqir as a big village with a large mosque whose residents baked a particular kind of bread, and called its people generous. In 1596 it was a village in the nahiya of Ramla, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 161 people, taxed on wheat, barley and fruit and on goats, beehives and vineyards. The American biblical scholar Edward Robinson visited in 1838 and described a sizeable village of sun-dried brick houses, surrounded by fields and orchards.

During the Second World War the British built a military airfield south of the village and a military hospital two kilometers north of it. By then Aqir was laid out on a rectangular plan, its houses of mud, cement and stone built very close together, and toward the end of the Mandate it expanded, particularly north of the secondary road that cut it in two. Its people were predominantly Muslim. There were two mosques and two shrines, and two elementary schools — the boys’ school established in 1921, the girls’ school later; in 1947, 391 boys and forty-six girls were enrolled. Groundwater was plentiful, and in the 1940s a number of artesian wells were drilled on village land to irrigate the citrus groves. The villagers also grew grapes, figs and apricots, and rainfed grain. In 1944/45, 1,300 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 8,968 under cereals, with 914 dunums irrigated or in orchards. The census of 1931 counted 1,691 people in 401 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 2,480.

Aqir was the first village to fall to the Giv’ati Brigade as it carried out its part of Plan Dalet. On 5 May 1948 the brigade moved south from Rehovot and surrounded the village. The Haganah force, which the New York Times estimated at 400 men, demanded that every gun in the village be handed over; Benny Morris writes that when this was done the intelligence officers believed the villagers were holding back, and the brigade took eight villagers hostage against the surrender of the rest of the weapons. Morris records that the brigade then withdrew under British intervention. The New York Times reported that the ordeal lasted six and a half hours and that some 3,000 people fled the village as a result — a figure that probably included refugees from nearby villages. The Haganah units returned the following day and occupied Aqir; most of its people had by then taken refuge in Yibna and al-Maghar. Morris writes that within weeks the thirty-odd villagers who had stayed behind were expelled, and that this provoked a flurry of protests inside Mapam, the Israeli United Workers’ Party. Zochrot dates the occupation to 4 May and names the Giv’ati Brigade.

Baron Edmond de Rothschild had established the settlement of Eqron in 1883, a kilometer south of the village site on land bought by the settlers; it was later renamed Mazkeret Batya. Qiryat Eqron was established on village lands in 1948 and later renamed Kefar Eqron, and Ganne Yochanan, also on village land, was built in 1950. A number of small houses remain, several occupied by Jewish families — one of cement with a gabled roof and rectangular doors and windows, another much like it but flat-roofed. Cypresses, sycamores and cactuses grow on the site, and the surrounding land is farmed by Israelis.

Sources

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