'Artuf

‘Artuf stood on a moderately high plateau about twenty-one and a half kilometres west of Jerusalem, with plains to the south, east and west, on a secondary road running up to the Jerusalem highway. In 1596 it was a village of 110 people in the nahiya of Ramla, taxed on wheat, barley, fruit, goats, beehives and vines. In the late nineteenth century it was a small village on a low hill above a valley, drawing water from a pool in the valley. Most of its houses were stone and mud, a few stone and cement with domed roofs. Its people were Muslims and worshipped in the al-‘Umari mosque; the tomb of a local sage, Shaykh ‘Ali al-Ghimadi, stood on the village outskirts. The Mandate authorities built a fortified police station about a kilometre west of the village and a railway station beyond it. The village had an elementary school. The 1931 census counted 252 people in 58 houses; the 1945 statistics counted 350, on 403 dunums of which 279 were under cereals and 61 irrigated or orchard, 20 of those in olives. About half the village worked the land — fruit and almond trees west of the houses — and the rest worked at the Bab al-Wad railway station.

Southwest of ‘Artuf stood the Zionist settlement of Hartuv, and its history is unusual enough to be worth the record. It was founded in 1883 by the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Amongst the Jews and failed in 1886 when the Jewish settlers there resisted efforts to convert them and left. It was revived in 1895 by Zionist settlers from Bulgaria who were Ottoman citizens, spoke Turkish alongside Bulgarian and Ladino, held deeds to land bought for them by Zionist organisations, and built peaceable relations with their Palestinian neighbours. Unlike most Zionist settlers they were willing to lease parts of their land to Arab cultivators, some of whom lived in ‘Artuf. The settlement never prospered — 75 inhabitants in 1904 — in part because mainstream Zionist organisations objected to what they regarded as its liberal policies towards Arabs; most opposed employing Arab workers on Zionist land, and certainly opposed leasing it to non-Jews. Hartuv was destroyed in the fighting of 1929 and rebuilt by its Sephardic inhabitants, but it did not grow, and had a hundred people in 1948.

‘Artuf was one of three villages punished by the British in late March 1948. After an Arab attack on Hartuv, six hundred British troops moved into ‘Artuf, Ishwa’ and Bayt Mahsir on 23 March. The New York Times correspondent reported that almost all the villagers had been evacuated before the troops came in, but the evacuation was temporary and the people returned soon after.

The village was depopulated in the second phase of Operation Dani, on the night of 17–18 July 1948, by the Fourth Battalion of the Har’el Brigade. Benny Morris records the pattern across these villages: much of the population had left the area earlier, most of the rest fled as the Har’el columns approached and the mortar barrages started, and the handful still present when the Israelis entered were expelled. The Second Platoon of B Company, with mortars and machine guns, first drove out the people of Ishwa’ and ‘Islin, then turned on ‘Artuf, aiming its mortars at the police station to the west and shelling both the station and the village. The night bombardment emptied it. Most of its people walked three miles up the slopes to the southeast, towards Dayr al-Hawa. The first Israeli troops to enter, the day after, were a platoon commanded by Rafael Eytan.

Nacham was established in 1950 on the ruins of ‘Artuf and of Hartuv. One stone house outside the settlement has been extended and is lived in by a Jewish family; in the middle of the settlement a small stone house stands by the site of the former mosque and is used as a warehouse. On the western slopes there is a roofless circular structure that was a lime kiln — a kabbara, where limestone was burned to powder and the powder mixed with water for whitewashing walls. The village cemetery to the west has been levelled and only one or two graves remain on its eastern edge. Part of the British police headquarters is still standing. The rest of the site is scattered stone rubble, with olive, fig and cypress growing over it, mostly in the west and north.

Sources

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