Deir al-Hawa

Deir al-Hawa crowned a mountaintop 650 meters above sea level, about eighteen kilometers west of Jerusalem, looking out over wide expanses in every direction. Its houses of mud and stone were crowded together along narrow alleys, built partly from stones and columns of an older ruin on the site. The villagers, all of them Muslims, worshipped at a mosque in the western part of the village and kept a shrine for Shaykh Sulayman, a local sage; two wells supplied their water. They planted grain in the valley floors and apples, olives, figs, and almonds on the slopes. The 1945 British survey counted just sixty people, in sixteen houses.

The village fell at the opening of Operation Ha-Har, the Israeli offensive into the Jerusalem hills at the end of the second truce. On the night of 18–19 October 1948 — some accounts give the following night — after taking Dayr Aban two kilometers away, the Fourth Battalion of the Har’el Brigade climbed the three hundred meters up to Deir al-Hawa; the Egyptian troops holding it withdrew under shelling. Benny Morris notes that the operation’s commander, Yigal Allon, likely made it clear that no civilian communities were to remain in the captured area. The hamlet was completely obliterated.

No Israeli settlement was built on village land; Nes Harim, founded in 1950, stands close by to the northeast. The stone rubble of houses lies mixed with ruined terrace walls, part of it bulldozed into a heap beside a later watchtower, and carob, olive, and cactus grow over the slopes. Over the lands of Deir al-Hawa and its neighbors the Jewish National Fund planted the American Independence Park, crossed by the Hubert Humphrey Parkway — a recreational forest where the village once stood.

Sources

• Dayr al-Hawa — Palestine Remembered
• Dayr al-Hawa — Zochrot
• Dayr al-Hawa — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)