Kawkab al-Hawa

Kawkab al-Hawa — the star of the wind — sat on a hill that fell away sharply to the east, three hundred metres above sea level with land only a kilometre away lying a hundred metres below it. It commanded the Jordan river and, to the northeast, Lake Tiberias, and that position gave it its long history. A Roman signal tower may have stood on or near the site, and in the twelfth century the Crusaders raised there one of their strongest castles, Belvoir, overlooking the Jordan valley. Kawkab al-Hawa was fought over repeatedly between Salah al-Din’s armies and the Crusaders; Yaqut al-Hamawi, writing in the early thirteenth century, called it a castle on the hill near Tiberias and said it had fallen into ruin after Salah al-Din’s reign. In the Ottoman survey of 1596 it was a village of about fifty people in the nahiya of Shafa, paying tax on wheat, beans, melons and vineyards.

Because the village was built within the outline of the fortress, it grew slowly. Its inhabitants — about 110 in 1859 — lived inside the walls and cultivated some thirteen faddans outside them, and only in time did houses spread in a ring around the castle and extend north and west. Two springs, Ayn al-Hiluw and Ayn al-Jirani, lay to the south and southeast. The Muslim villagers farmed the land beyond the walls: in 1944/45, 5,839 of their 9,949 dunums were sown in cereals and 170 were irrigated or planted in orchards, and the population stood at 300.

Benny Morris dates the military assault on Kawkab al-Hawa to 16 May 1948, in the wake of the fall of Baysan. Other accounts extend the fighting. The History of the Haganah puts the occupation on 21 May and credits the Third Battalion of the Golani Brigade, describing the hilltop as ideal for artillery firing down into the valley — an advantage that became urgent when Iraqi forces entered the country on 15 May. The Palestinian historian Arif al-Arif records that Iraqi troops actually took and held the village from 15 to 17 May before withdrawing under intensified Israeli attack, and an Associated Press dispatch from Baghdad on 18 May described it as a formidable reinforced concrete position. In September 1948 a kibbutz leader in the area asked the authorities for permission to demolish the village along with three others nearby.

The village has been eliminated. There are no Israeli settlements on its lands, but the Belvoir castle within which it stood was excavated and turned into a tourist attraction, its Crusader buildings restored while the Arab structures around them were removed — a reversal the Israeli writer Meron Benvenisti singled out in his account of how the landscape was rewritten. Fig and olive trees grow over the village site; the slopes above the Baysan valley are grazed and the surrounding land farmed.

Sources

• Kawkab al-Hawa — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Kawkab al-Hawa — Zochrot
• Kawkab al-Hawa — Wikipedia