Mi'ar

Mi’ar stood on a rocky hill at the eastern tip of the plain of Acre, at about 275 metres and seventeen and a half kilometres from the city, linked by a secondary road to al-Damun to the northwest. Its archaeology suggests the site goes back to Canaanite times; the Crusaders knew it as Myary. In the 1596 Ottoman tax registers it was a village in the nahiya of Akka, in the liwa’ of Safad, of ten Muslim households, paying tax on wheat, barley and fruit, goats and beehives. The Italian traveller Giovanni Mariti noted in the late eighteenth century that the valleys around al-Damun and Mi’ar were delightful, ornamented with groves and wild shrubs, and that the peasants in the hamlets around enjoyed a most pleasant situation. Victor Guérin visited in 1875 and found 500 Muslims, along with several column shafts, three broken capitals and a number of old cut stones from some ancient building, blocks of ancient appearance set around the threshing floors, cisterns, walls and caves cut in the rock. In 1881 the Survey of Western Palestine described a large village on high, rough, uncultivated ground whose residents, estimated at 1,500 in 1859, cultivated some thirty faddans.

The houses of the modern village were of stone. The Ottomans established a school at Mi’ar in 1888, but it closed in the final years of the Empire. All the people of Mi’ar were Muslims. The 1922 census counted 429, the 1931 census 543 in 109 houses, and the 1945 statistics 770. Of 10,788 dunums, 2,878 were allocated to cereals in 1944/45 and 113 were irrigated or planted in orchards. A number of archaeological artefacts were found within and outside the village perimeter, among them rock carvings, the remains of buildings, fragments of columns, olive presses and cisterns.

The village was punished once before 1948. A number of its residents took part in the Great Revolt of 1936–39, and Mi’ar became a centre of rebel operations in the Galilee — its men firing on British troops passing nearby, damaging roads, cutting electrical cables and laying mines against British vehicles. On 26 October 1938 two British battalions raided Mi’ar and began dynamiting the large houses of the village. It was later rebuilt.

Ilan Pappé records that on 20 June 1948 Israeli troops entered Mi’ar and fired indiscriminately at the residents while they were working in their fields, that the houses were destroyed and that forty people were killed. One witness to the attack was the Palestinian writer Muhammad Ali Taha, then a boy of seventeen. The residents afterwards returned and went on living in the village. In the second stage of Operation Dekel, military units closed in on Mi’ar from the recently occupied areas of Lower Galilee, and the village was entered by units of the Seventh Brigade between 15 and 18 July 1948; Zochrot gives 18 July. Benny Morris’s account implies that the villagers fled either under artillery salvos or under the influence of the occupation of large parts of Lower Galilee, and puts the number who fled at 893; Pappé says they were expelled.

Segev — now Atzmon — was founded east of Mi’ar in 1953, Ya’ad to the northeast in 1975, and Manof in 1980, all on village land. Yuvallim, built in 1982 on land that traditionally belonged to Sakhnin, stands about two kilometres due east of the site. Some truncated stone walls, simple graves, and fig and olive trees remain among the cypresses that now cover the site, which has been turned into recreational and picnic grounds. Many of Mi’ar’s refugees became internally displaced Palestinians resettled in the nearby villages of Kabul, Sha’ab and ‘Arraba, where the neighbourhoods they and their descendants live in are called Mi’ari after the village they came from.

Sources

• Mi’ar — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Mi’ar — Zochrot
• Mi’ar — Wikipedia