Kuwaykat

Kuwaykat stood on a slight rise in the eastern part of the plain of Acre, nine kilometres from the city, linked by secondary roads to the Acre–Safad highway. The Crusaders knew it as Coket. Travellers in the late nineteenth century found a stone-built village of some three hundred people at the foot of the hills, cultivating olives; later most of its houses were of adobe, built close together and separated by narrow alleys crossing at right angles. Its people were all Muslims. The village had an elementary school built by the Ottomans in 1887, a mosque, and the shrine of the Druze Shaykh Abu Muhammad al-Qurayshi, and its nearness to Acre gave it access to the city’s schools, doctors and markets. Its lands were reckoned among the most fertile in the subdistrict: of 4,733 dunums, 3,316 were sown in cereals and 1,246 irrigated or planted in orchards, five hundred of them in olives, with grain, olives and watermelons the chief crops alongside livestock and dairying. The 1944/45 population was 1,050.

Kuwaykat was attacked repeatedly and held. Filastin reported an assault by eighty Jewish militiamen on 18–19 January 1948 that was driven back, and another on the night of 6–7 February with the same result. A larger attack came on 11 June, just before the first truce, and was repulsed by the local militia — around sixty men with thirty-five to fifty assorted rifles and one Bren gun. During the truce representatives of the Arab Liberation Army advised the villagers not to evacuate their women and children, on the grounds that it would stiffen the militia.

On 9 July, the day the truce ended, men collaborating with the Zionist forces came to ask the mukhtar to surrender and he refused. That night Operation Dekel opened with a bombardment. One villager remembered being woken by the loudest noise they had ever heard, shells exploding and artillery fire, the whole village in panic, women screaming and children crying, most people fleeing in their pyjamas; the wife of Qassim Ahmad Sa’id ran carrying a pillow in her arms instead of her child. Two people were killed and two wounded by the shelling. The militia fell back to hills east of the village and waited four days for reinforcements that never came. Many villagers fled to Abu Sinan, Kafr Yasif and other villages that later surrendered; those who stayed, mostly the elderly, were expelled to Kafr Yasif. The units that took Kuwaykat were from the Seventh and Carmeli brigades. A company commander of the Twenty-First Battalion, quoted by Benny Morris, said he did not know whether the artillery softening-up had caused casualties, but that the psychological effect had been achieved and the village’s non-combatants had fled before the assault began.

Kibbutz ha-Bonim was established near the site on village lands in January 1949 by immigrants from England, Hungary and the Netherlands, and later renamed Beit HaEmek. Little remains but the deserted cemetery, overgrown with weeds, and rubble from the houses; two gravestones can still be read, one of Hamad Isa al-Hajj and one of Shaykh Salih Iskandar, who died in 1940. The shrine of Shaykh Abu Muhammad al-Qurayshi still stands, its stone pedestal badly cracked. A forest of pine and eucalyptus has been planted over the site.

Sources

• Kuwaykat — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Kuwaykat — Zochrot
• Kuwaykat — Wikipedia