Ayn Hawd

Ayn Hawd lay at the foot of a prominent hill on the western slopes of Mount Carmel, fourteen and a half kilometers south of Haifa, overlooking the coastal plain and the sea. Its people believed the village had been founded by Abu al-Hayja, a commander of Saladin said to have died after the battle of Hittin in 1187. In the Ottoman register of 1596 it counted forty-four souls; by the Mandate years its villagers were selling wheat, carob, and sesame in Haifa and Acre, along with building stone cut from three quarries and the whitewash made from it. The 1945 survey counted 650 people.

The village was attacked together with neighboring Ayn Ghazal on 11 April 1948, and again on 20 May, after Arab snipers allegedly halted traffic on the Tel Aviv–Haifa road; both times the residents stayed put. Ayn Hawd was probably occupied only around 15 July 1948, in the operation against the villages south of Haifa launched during the ‘Ten Days’ between the truces — an assault in which Israeli naval forces bombarded the coastal villages from the sea. Its people likely met the fate of nearby al-Tira: expelled southwards or sent to prisoner-of-war camps, according to Benny Morris.

Ayn Hawd was one of the few villages not demolished. In 1949 the settlement of Nir Etzion was established on its lands, and in 1953–54 the village itself became Ein Hod, an artists’ colony founded around the painter Marcel Janco; the mosque was turned into a restaurant and bar. The villagers who remained inside the country settled on a nearby hillside and built a new village, also named Ayn Hawd, which Israel refused for decades to recognize — denying it water, electricity, and roads, and fencing it in during the 1970s — before granting recognition in the 1990s; its residents built a new mosque to replace the one lost below.

Sources

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