Barrat Qisarya

Barrat Qisarya stood on sandy, flat ground about three kilometres east of the Mediterranean shore and thirty-two kilometres from Haifa, close to the site of the Roman and Byzantine town of Qisarya. Its name meant “outside of Qisarya.” An archaeological survey of the village site found traces of walls, and fragments of glass, marble and pottery in the sand dunes.

Its people were the Arab al-Turkman, a semi-nomadic community that had used the wetlands and the coastal plain east of Caesarea and north towards the Kabara marshes through the late Ottoman period, living a mobile, pastoral life in seasonal encampments rather than permanent villages, and often named alongside the Ghawarna. Some worked as tenants on the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate’s rural estate, Bayyarat al-Khuri. The Ottoman Land Code of 1858 drew urban notables into acquiring large estates in the region and reduced the autonomy of the Turkmen groups; the Ottoman authorities resettled Caesarea with Bosnian Muslim refugees around 1880, followed by Circassians and Arab migrants, and these planned agricultural colonies gradually displaced or absorbed the semi-nomadic Turkmen. The 1944/45 statistics counted 960 Arabs and 160 Jews, and 31,786 dunums of land, of which 20,959 were Arab-owned.

The record of what happened here is thin, and the thinness is itself worth stating. Khalidi’s survey of the village carries no occupation and depopulation section at all. Ilan Pappé writes that Barrat Qisarya was wiped out in February 1948, in an attack so sudden and so fierce that both Israeli and Palestinian historians describe its disappearance as enigmatic; a date of 15 February 1948 is given in some references, and Benny Morris records that in February 1948 the ‘Arab al-Sufsafi and Saidun Bedouin who inhabited the dunes between Qisarya and Pardes left the area. No account naming a unit or describing the attack itself has been published.

Or ‘Aqiva was built on village land in 1951 and is now a town of more than seven thousand people, spreading also onto the lands of the destroyed village of Qisarya; Qesarya was formally registered as a settlement in 1977 nearby. Piles of rubble and stone from the last group of houses lie in one of the squares of Or ‘Aqiva; Pappé records that some of those houses were still standing in the 1970s and were quickly demolished when Palestinian research teams tried to document them. The trunk of a eucalyptus planted in the village is still there. Most of the village families now live in the West Bank, but a few, including the family of the former mukhtar, remained and built new houses about half a kilometre north of the original site. The land around is taken up by the town, by those houses, and by citrus groves.

Sources

• Barrat Qisarya — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Barrat Qisarya — Zochrot
• Barrat Qisarya — Wikipedia