Sarafand al-'Amar

Sarafand al-‘Amar stood on flat ground on the central coastal plain five kilometers from Ramla, on the western side of the Ramla–Jaffa highway. It was also called Sarafand al-Kubra, the larger Sarafand, to distinguish it from Sarafand al-Sughra, its sister village some five kilometers to the southwest. In 1596 Sarafand was a village in the nahiya of Ramla, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 358 people, taxed on wheat, barley, sesame and fruit and on goats, beehives and orchards. The Egyptian Sufi traveler Mustafa al-Dumyati al-Luqaymi, who died in 1764, reported visiting the shrine of Luqman there. In 1838 Edward Robinson passed through and reported two villages of the name, one inhabited and one ruined — which may be how the inhabited one came to be called al-‘Amar, from ‘amara, to build up or populate, and the ruined one Sarafand al-Kharab. By the 1870s the surveyors of the Survey of Western Palestine noticed only one Sarafand, a village of adobe brick on rising ground with a few olive trees scattered around it.

Under the Mandate the epithet took on a further meaning as events transformed both Sarafands. The British built their largest military base in the Middle East near Sarafand al-Kubra, and a prison for Palestinian activists beside it; at about the same time, in the late 1920s, they burned Sarafand al-Sughra and reduced it once more to ruin. Sarafand al-‘Amar was laid out as a rectangle, its houses built of mud. It held the popular shrine of Luqman al-Hakim. Its people were 1,910 Muslims and forty Christians. The boys’ school, founded in 1921, became a full elementary school in 1946–47 with 292 pupils and fourteen dunums of land for agricultural training; the girls’ school was founded in 1947 with fifty. Next to it stood the al-Raja’ — Hope — orphanage, for the children of Palestinians killed in the rebellion against the British of 1936–39, together with a public hospital and an agricultural station. Agriculture was the main livelihood and citrus the main crop: in 1944/45, 3,509 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 4,012 under cereals, with 1,665 dunums irrigated or in orchards. Artesian wells watered the orchards and supplied the drinking water; the rest of the crops were rainfed. Archaeological evidence shows the village existed in the Roman and Byzantine periods. The census of 1931 counted 1,183 people in 265 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,950.

On the morning of 2 January 1948 Arab workers at the British army camp at Sarafand found twelve timed charges set to go off at noon, when they would have been queuing for their weekly wages. The Palestinian newspaper Filastin noted that none of the Jewish workers at the camp had reported for work that day. On 15 April a party of Haganah sappers raided Sarafand; a New York Times report described the attackers penetrating deep into Arab territory and demolishing a three-storey building. The British authorities stated that sixteen people were killed and twelve wounded in the ruins; the attackers claimed the building was used by militia forces under Shaykh Hasan Salama, the Palestinian commander of the Jaffa subdistrict, and that thirty-nine were killed.

As the British army evacuated Palestine in the middle of May, it allowed Arab forces to take over the camp, which covered some 500 acres. The Israeli foreign minister Moshe Shertok was quoted in the New York Times as saying that Jewish institutions had purchased the camp but that it was handed to the Arabs regardless. The History of the War of Independence gives the handover as 14 May and records that the small, semi-regular Arab unit posted there was driven out five days later by a two-pronged attack from the southeast and the north; its defensive position had been prepared only against an attack from the adjacent settlement of Rishon le-Tziyyon to the west, and the outpost fell, in that account, without any casualties. The Associated Press quoted unnamed Zionist sources saying they had made a profit of $2.5 million by capturing it — the sum they had reportedly offered, and never paid, for the former British camp — and that they hoped to use its facilities to house 20,000 new Jewish immigrants.

The village itself was probably occupied during the night of 19–20 May 1948 by the Second Battalion of the Giv’ati Brigade, which places it within Operation Barak, Giv’ati’s May offensive in the Ramla area; Zochrot gives 20 May and the same brigade. The residents probably fled or were evicted at the same time.

Israel established Tzerifin, which included a military camp, on the ruins of the village in 1949, and Nir Tzevi on village land in 1954. Talmey Menashe, founded nearby in 1953, stands on land belonging to the destroyed village of Abu al-Fadl. The site, which holds what may be the largest Israeli army camp as well as an air base, has been designated a military area. No more than six houses remain; most are deserted, one or two occupied by Israelis. The school too is deserted, its front yard overgrown with cactuses. The surrounding land is farmed by Israelis.

Sources

• Sarafand al-‘Amar — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Sarafand al-‘Amar — Zochrot