Kasla

Kasla stood on the top of a long mountain running east to west about seventeen kilometres west of Jerusalem, 625 metres up, with deep wadis on the northern and southern sides. It lay just north of a secondary road that crossed the mountain and met a highway to the east on the outskirts of Jerusalem and another to the west, the road between Bayt Jibrin and the Jaffa–Jerusalem highway. The site is identified with the Canaanite Chesalon and was a large village of that name in the Roman period. In 1596 Kasla, or Kisla, was a village of sixty-one people in the nahiya of Ramla, taxed on wheat, barley, sesame, fruit trees, goats and beehives.

In the late nineteenth century it was described as a village on a rugged ridge with a deep valley to the north, with two springs in the valley and another to the east. Its plan was rectangular, most of its houses stone, running east to west along the secondary road with a few more built east of the centre. The people were Muslims and kept a shrine for a Shaykh Ahmad. Water for the household came from several springs around the village. The 1931 census counted 298 people in 72 houses; the 1945 statistics counted 280, a figure lower than the census fourteen years earlier, on 8,004 dunums of which 2,265 were under cereals and 440 irrigated or orchard, 203 of those in olives. Olives, fruit and grain were planted in the lowlands and valley floors, rainfed and irrigated from the springs, and the steep broken slopes were used for grazing. The village was an archaeological site and was ringed by khirbas holding the ruins of walls, cisterns and carved stones.

Like nearby Ishwa’ and several other villages on the side road towards Jerusalem, Kasla was cleared on 16 July 1948 according to the History of the War of Independence; Benny Morris puts the occupation a day later, on 17–18 July, and Zochrot gives 18 July. Morris writes that the villagers in this area had either left earlier, or fled under mortar barrages, or been expelled by the occupying unit, the Har’el Brigade. The village was overrun as part of Operation Dani.

Israel established Ramat Razi’el on village land in 1948, and Kesalon on village land a kilometre south of the site in 1952, on the archaeological site of Khirbat Sar’a. Wild grass covers the whole site and grows through the rubble of the stone houses, which is hard to tell apart from the rubble of the ruined terraces. Almond trees grow on the mountain top and cactus along the southern slopes. Northeast of the village two carob trees stand inside the remains of a vineyard. On the slopes, thick wild grass grows over several terraces that are still standing.

Sources

• Kasla — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Kasla — Zochrot, drawn from Walid Khalidi, All That Remains (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)