Dayr Tarif

Dayr Tarif stood on uneven ground at the edge of the coastal plain ten kilometers from Ramla and about three kilometers east of Lydda airport. A network of roads gave it easy access to the towns and to the villages around: it lay beside a highway running north to Tulkarm and east of the triangle of highways joining Lydda, al-‘Abbasiyya and Jaffa, and was linked to the main northeast–southwest railway line. The site is identified with the Roman-era Bethariph. In 1596 Dayr Tarif was a village in the nahiya of Ramla, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 270 people, taxed on wheat, barley, sesame and fruit and on goats, beehives and vineyards.

In the late nineteenth century it was a small hamlet at the plain’s edge, trapezoidal in shape and split into an eastern and a western half separated by vacant ground, most of its houses of adobe brick. Building quickened toward the end of the Mandate, particularly in the eastern half. The population was predominantly Muslim. The village had a number of shops, a mosque, and an elementary school founded in 1920 which enrolled 171 pupils in 1947. Farming was both rainfed and irrigated, the irrigation water drawn from a great number of artesian wells drilled on the southern and northwestern sides of the village. In 1944/45, 1,410 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 5,981 under cereals, with 486 dunums irrigated or in orchards. The village itself was built on a mound covering a Roman site, where the remains of earlier buildings and fragments of ancient artifacts have been found. The census of 1931 counted 1,246 people in 291 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,750.

The first recorded attack was reported by the Palestinian newspaper Filastin, which stated that Jewish forces bombed Dayr Tarif from an aircraft on 14 April 1948, wounding five villagers including a two-year-old child.

The village was occupied twice during Operation Dani. Units of the Armored Brigade and an infantry battalion of the Kiryati Brigade took it on 9 July 1948, at the start of the operation, but were forced to withdraw soon after entering by what the Israeli History of the War of Independence calls a powerful counterattack by the Transjordanian Arab Legion. The same source records that two days later, on 11 July, the Ninth Commando Battalion of the Armored Brigade took the positions around Dayr Tarif and pushed its Arab Legion defenders back toward Badras, so that the village was bypassed for a time and probably reoccupied soon afterwards, in preparation for the assault on Lydda and Ramla. Benny Morris records that the villagers were evacuated because of an Israeli attack on 10 July, which agrees with a New York Times report that the village was occupied late in the afternoon of that day as Israeli troops fought off an Arab attempt to retake Wilhelma, a former German Templar colony nearby. Dayr Tarif was finally taken by 13 July, after heavy fighting around it and neighboring Bayt Nabala. Zochrot dates the occupation to 12 July and names the Kiryati Brigade, and records that after the conquest the Palestinian population was expelled, and that the Israeli army sought permission to destroy this village along with more than a dozen others after the commander Zvi Ayalon reported a shortage of manpower to occupy the area.

Israel established Beyt ‘Arif on the ruins of the village in 1949. Kefar Truman lies southwest of the site but not on village land. The site is covered with the debris of the destroyed houses and overgrown with thorns and other wild plants, with a number of old olive and cypress trees scattered across it. The school building serves as a stable. Cotton and citrus are grown by Israelis on the surrounding land.

Sources

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