Qaqun

Qaqun stood on a hill overlooking its plain, northwest of Tulkarm, with the Tulkarm–Haifa railway passing half a kilometer to the east. Few Palestinian villages carried so much history: the Crusaders fortified it as Quaquo or Caco, within the jurisdiction of Caesarea; the Mamluk sultan Baybars captured it in 1267, rebuilt its fortress, and turned its church into a mosque; under the Mamluks it became a commercial center and a postal station on the Gaza–Damascus road. Al-Qalqashandi, writing before 1418, described a pleasant town with a mosque, a bath, a handsome fort, and wells. In 1596 Qaqun was itself the center of a nahiya in the liwa’ of Nablus, with 127 people. Napoleon’s forces defeated Ottoman troops there in 1799, and in the 1830s Ibrahim Pasha’s Egyptian army destroyed the town for joining the rebellion against Egypt. Rebuilt, it grew around the central tower of the old fort, its stone and mud houses spread over the hill. Its people were Muslims, with a boys’ elementary school under the Mandate; watermelons, cucumbers, olives, citrus, and grain filled its lands — 34,376 dunums of cereals in 1944/45. The 1945 survey counted 1,970 people.

The war reached Qaqun early: an Irgun raid on 6–7 March 1948 failed to penetrate the village, though grenades wounded two women, Filastin reported. On 9 May Haganah intelligence officers agreed to ‘expel or subdue’ Qaqun and other remaining coastal communities, according to records cited by Benny Morris. The blow fell on the night of 4–5 June, when the Alexandroni Brigade’s Third Battalion attacked behind heavy mortar and artillery fire. Iraqi army units held three lines of trenches outside the village and, in the New York Times’ account of ‘one of the bloodiest’ battles to date, fought hand-to-hand for hours before the position was decided in daylight. The official Israeli version claimed an entire Iraqi battalion of 450 men was wiped out, at an initially reported cost of twelve Israeli dead. Qaqun’s own story did not end that night: some inhabitants remained in their homes for more than a year, and in July 1949 Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett noted of Qaqun and other villages that ‘the Arabs learned the lesson; they are not running away,’ as Israel came under international warning not to expel them. The remaining villagers were gone soon after.

Kibbutz ha-Ma’pil had been built on traditional village land in 1945; Gan Yoshiyya, Ometz, and Olesh followed on village lands in 1949, and Channi’el in 1950. What remains of Qaqun is the fortress on its hill, ringed by the stone rubble of houses; a well that belonged to the Abu Hantash family; and the school building, still used as a school by Israelis. Orchards cover the lands around.

Sources

• Qaqun — Palestine Remembered
• Qaqun — Zochrot
• Qaqun — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)