Kafr 'Ana

Kafr ‘Ana stood on flat ground on the central coastal plain eleven kilometers from Jaffa, among the villages east of the city. Two roads tied it into the highway network running to Jaffa, Lydda and Ramla, and a branch railway line connected it to the main Lydda–Tulkarm line that passed south of the village. The site may be that of the Canaanite village of Ono, named in the Karnak list of Thutmose III in the fifteenth century BC; some three centuries later it appears to have been a fortified town, mentioned at I Chronicles 8:12, and in the Byzantine period it was known as Onous. In 1596 Kafr ‘Ana was a village in the nahiya of Jerusalem, in the liwa’ of Jerusalem, with 116 people, taxed on wheat, barley, olives and fruits and on goats, beehives and vineyards. In the late nineteenth century it was built of adobe brick and surrounded by palm trees.

The modern village was laid out along the two roads, and as new houses went up it spread westward and northward toward the Jaffa–Lydda road. Its people were entirely Muslim. The boys’ school, founded in 1920, held twenty-two dunums of land and enrolled 270 pupils in 1944; the girls’ school opened in 1945 with fifty-seven. The villagers grew crops and raised poultry and bees. In 1944/45, 2,214 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 11,022 under cereals, with 597 dunums irrigated or in orchards. The village was itself an archaeological site, with another, Khirbat Kafrajun, immediately to its east. The census of 1931 counted 1,824 people in 449 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 2,800 Arabs, alongside 220 Jews.

Kafr ‘Ana was one of the cluster of villages east of Jaffa occupied during the Haganah’s Operation Hametz, the offensive designed to isolate Jaffa and open the city to conquest. It was carried out by units of three Haganah brigades, who began four days after the Irgun Zvai Leumi launched its frontal attack on Jaffa itself. Kafr ‘Ana was probably seized at the same time as neighboring Saqiya, which the Alexandroni Brigade occupied on 29 April 1948; Zochrot dates the occupation to 1 May and attributes it to Haganah units. The village was not destroyed at once. On 13 September 1948 it was one of fourteen villages that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion put before the Israeli cabinet for formal permission to destroy. Benny Morris does not make clear whether permission was granted, but records that the villages were levelled soon afterwards. Later that month Kafr ‘Ana was named as a site for settling new Jewish immigrants.

Yagel was established on village lands in 1950, south of the site, and Newe Efrayim in 1953, on or very near it. Part of the site is now a vacant lot; on other parts olive trees grow among the cypress and eucalyptus planted by the residents of the Israeli settlements. No traces of the old houses can be discerned. Apartment buildings and a small park have been built on the surrounding land.

Sources

• Kafr ‘Ana — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Kafr ‘Ana — Zochrot