Fajja

Fajja stood on relatively flat ground on the central coastal plain fifteen kilometers from Jaffa, on the highway running between Jaffa and Lydda. In the late nineteenth century it was a small village of adobe brick, about a kilometer east of the Zionist settlement of Petah Tikva, which had been founded in 1878; under the Mandate some newer houses were built of concrete. Its whole population was Muslim. It had an elementary school, opened in 1922, with ten girls among its pupils by the mid-1940s. The residents grew crops — grain and vegetables — on the greater part of their land, watered by rainfall and from wells. In 1944/45, 602 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 2,457 under cereals, with fifty-three dunums irrigated or in orchards. Fajja was built over an archaeological site holding fragments of columns, shafts and capitals, the foundations of buildings, and a cistern. The census of 1931 counted 707 people in 165 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,200 Arabs, alongside 370 Jews. (PalQuest’s page gives the school’s mid-1940s enrollment as 781, a figure that cannot be squared with a village of this size; the archive does not repeat it.)

Attacks on Fajja began as early as 20 May 1947, when a Palmach unit entered the village on the pretext of arresting thieves who had murdered two people in Petah Tikva. According to the History of the Haganah, shooting broke out as the unit approached the coffeehouse where the thieves were said to be hiding, two villagers were killed, and explosives experts stormed the coffeehouse under heavy covering fire and set off a charge inside it. The Book of the Palmach reports that the explosion was delayed unnecessarily and that although the coffeehouse was destroyed nobody was hurt in the blast.

The next recorded attack was launched by the Irgun on 17 February 1948, after which some villagers fled, according to Israeli sources. Benny Morris records that Fajja was hit repeatedly by both the Haganah and the Irgun in the early months of the war, and that by May only several dozen residents were left. Haganah intelligence officers met on 9 May and decided that this “bothersome element” should be expelled. The last villagers left on 15 May, according to Israeli military intelligence, under what it called pressure — a whispering operation. Zochrot dates the depopulation to 1 May and attributes it to Haganah units.

By June the Jewish National Fund had set the destruction of Fajja in motion, along with that of other villages. On 14 June Ezra Danin, a senior Haganah intelligence officer and Jewish Agency official, reported to the JNF’s Yosef Weitz on the progress made; two days later Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary that Fajja and two other villages had been destroyed.

The site was occupied in the early 1950s by a transit camp for new immigrants called ‘Ammishav, and has since become an eastern suburb of Petah Tikva. The village has been completely razed except for one house and a pond. Eucalyptus trees and cactuses mark the site. The surrounding land is partly built over and partly cultivated.

Sources

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