Kafr Lam

Kafr Lam lay on the Mediterranean coast twenty-six kilometers south of Haifa. Few villages wore their age so openly: the geographer Yaqut attributes its founding to the Umayyad caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik (r. 724–743), and the fortress at its heart, built like a Roman castrum, was a ribat raised in the late Umayyad or early Abbasid period to guard the coast against the Byzantines. The Crusaders knew village and fort as Cafarlet, a fief of the lord of Caesarea sold to the Hospitallers in 1232 and later held by the Templars. Nineteenth-century travelers found a small village of mud-and-stone houses crowded within the ancient walls; Mary Rogers, visiting in 1856, noted fields of wheat, millet, sesame, and tobacco around it. Its people farmed grain and drew water from five wells on their lands. The 1945 survey counted 340 people, all Muslims, on 6,838 dunums.

The village emptied early in May 1948, but by mid-May some of its people had returned. On 15 May, the first day of the war, troops of the Carmeli Brigade occupied Kafr Lam and neighboring al-Sarafand and briefly garrisoned them; both villages were re-occupied and cleared of their inhabitants by mid-July, in an operation that saw the first use of Israeli naval support fire, two warships directing light-weapons fire at Kafr Lam and al-Sarafand. Demolition followed — until archaeologists protested. On 7 October 1948 the Haifa district headquarters ordered the 123rd Battalion to stop all demolition in Caesarea, Atlit, Kafr Lam, and Tiberias, sites rich in Roman and Crusader remains.

The moshavim of HaBonim and Ein Ayala were established on village lands in 1949. Because of the archaeological interest, much of Kafr Lam was left standing: in 1992 the abandoned Crusader fortress and several houses still stood, one of them — the house of Ahmad Bey Khalil — converted into a school, another serving as an Israeli post office.

Sources

• Kafr Lam — Palestine Remembered
• Kafr Lam — Zochrot
• Kafr Lam — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)