Lifta

Lifta clung to the slopes of a valley five kilometers west of Jerusalem, where the road to Jaffa leaves the hills. An ancient place — identified by some with the biblical Nephtoah — it had two schools, a mosque, a shrine, and a spring whose waters filled a stone pool at the village’s heart. Its people farmed olives and cereals on terraced land; the 1945 British survey counted 2,550 residents.

The end came early. On 28 December 1947, gunmen attacked the village coffee house and killed six people; in the weeks that followed, repeated attacks and threats drove the population out, and by February 1948 Lifta was empty, its inhabitants trucked toward East Jerusalem. They were never allowed back.

Today Lifta is a rarity: dozens of its stone houses still stand, roofless or partly restored, along with the mosque, the spring, and the pool. That survival has made it a battleground of memory — refugee families led by descendants such as Yacoub Odeh, alongside the Israeli organization Zochrot and preservation campaigners, have fought repeated development plans for the site, asking that Lifta be left standing as what it is: a village that was not destroyed, only emptied.

Sources

• Lifta — Palestine Remembered
• Lifta — Zochrot
• Lifta — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Palestine Open Maps