Qula

Qula stood on a limestone hill on the western slope of the Ramallah mountains fourteen and a half kilometers from Ramla, overlooking the coastal plain. The highway running north from Ramla toward Tulkarm passed half a kilometer to its west, and secondary roads connected it to the neighboring villages. The village was built on the site of a Crusader fortress known as Cola or Chola. In 1596 Qula was a village in the nahiya of Ramla, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 380 people, taxed on goats and beehives and on a press used for olives or grapes. In the late nineteenth century it stood on a slope at the edge of the plain, its historical relics dating to medieval times.

Most of the houses were of adobe, scattered along the roads that crossed the village and giving it a star-like shape, though under the Mandate building spread along the highway. The population was predominantly Muslim. At the center of the village were a mosque, a number of small shops and a school founded in 1919, which enrolled 134 pupils in the mid-1940s. The villagers grew grain, vegetables, fruit and olives, depending mostly on rainfall; in 1944/45, 2,842 dunums were allotted to cereals and 105 dunums were irrigated or in orchards, the orchards planted chiefly to the southeast and southwest. The village held ruins from pre-Ottoman times, and four khirbas lay to its east. The census of 1931 counted 697 people in 172 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,010.

Qula changed hands four times before Israeli forces held it. Units of the Armored and Alexandroni brigades took it first after what the Israeli History of the War of Independence calls a heated battle on 10 July 1948; the New York Times correspondent wrote at the time that Qula sat at an important crossroads north of Lydda on the Arab supply lines from Ramallah and Nablus. The Palestinian historian Arif al-Aref records that an armored column and infantry unit of the Arab Legion retook it briefly on 16 July, losing three men, and that Israeli units of the Armored Brigade with two infantry platoons recaptured it in a counterattack that same afternoon. It fell back into Arab hands the following day and was lost again to units of the Alexandroni Brigade. The History of the War of Independence records heavy Israeli losses in the battles over the village; Zochrot dates the final occupation to 18 July and names the Alexandroni Brigade. On 13 September 1948 Qula was one of fourteen villages designated for partial destruction by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

There are no Israeli settlements on village land; Giv’at Koach, established in 1950 two kilometers southwest of the site, stands on the lands of al-Tira. A forest covers much of the village site. The rubble of crumbled houses and terraces lies among the trees, with cactuses and fig, mulberry and eucalyptus growing between them. The only remaining landmark is the school, on the west side of the site. The hilly parts of the surrounding land are used for grazing; the rest is cultivated.

Sources

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