Dayr Rafat

Dayr Rafat stood on the western slope of a moderately high mountain about twenty-six kilometres west of Jerusalem. Dayr is Arabic for monastery, and the village was the site of a large monastery belonging to the Latin Patriarchate; it also had a mosque, named for a Hajj Hasan. In the late nineteenth century it was a small hamlet on a ridge with a spring to the west.

The 1931 census counted 218 people in 69 houses. Of the estimated 430 people living in Dayr Rafat in 1945, a hundred were Christians and the rest Muslims. The village held 13,242 dunums, of which 10,563 were under cereals and 216 irrigated or orchard, 25 of those in olives. Three springs on the site supplied water. Three khirbas around the village held building foundations, grape presses, rock-hewn cisterns, wells, a grindstone and burial grounds.

Dayr Rafat was overrun on 17–18 July 1948, in the second stage of Operation Dani. The History of the War of Independence records that it fell to units of the Har’el Brigade towards the end of the operation, as Israeli forces widened the Jerusalem corridor southwards; Zochrot gives 18 July and the same brigade. Benny Morris reports that most of the people remaining in the area fled as the Har’el columns approached and the mortar barrages began, and that the rest were expelled — but it is not clear from the record what happened at Dayr Rafat in particular, or what became of the people in the monastery beside it.

The village was not destroyed until several weeks after it was taken, during the second truce. Morris, writing about the demolition of villages in that period, records that the army went on destroying abandoned villages piecemeal between 19 July and mid-October, usually for reasons described as military, and names Dayr Rafat as one where most of the village was blown up in September. Giv’at Shemesh was established on village land just west of the site in 1954. The site is covered with large piles of stone rubble and with terraces, some still intact and some broken and mixed into the rubble of the houses. Cactus grows on the northwestern edge. There is a spring on the western edge of the village and a cemetery in the south, one large tomb standing out among the rest, and a large olive grove to the west. The monastery, two kilometres west of the site, has a large statue of the Virgin at the top of its facade and parts of the building are roofed in red tile; it still owns the village lands, and a few tents belonging to members of the Negev tribe of al-Sani’, who rent land from it, stand on the site.

Sources

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