Umm al-Faraj

Umm al-Faraj stood on a flat spot in the Acre plain at about 30 metres, ten and a half kilometres from Acre, crossed by the highway that ran between Tarshiha, Nahariyya and the city. The Crusaders called it Le Fierge and it belonged to the fief of Casal Imbert; in 1256 John of Ibelin leased al-Zeeb and its dependent villages, Le Fierge among them, to the Teutonic Order, and in 1261 they were sold outright. Al-Maqrizi records that it came under Mamluk rule in 1291, when the sultan al-Ashraf Khalil allocated the village’s income to a waqf in Cairo. Sugar moulds found on the site show that sugar was being made there from the eleventh century, under the Fatimids, and production continued through the Crusader and Mamluk periods and into the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the 1596 Ottoman tax registers it appears as Farja, in the nahiya of Akka in the Safad sanjak, with 24 households and 13 bachelors, all Muslim, paying tax on wheat, barley, summer crops, cotton, goats and beehives, and on a water mill. A marble inscription set into the wall above the gate of the village mosque dates that building to 1254 H — 1838 or 1839.

Victor Guérin visited in May 1875 and described gardens he called delightful, irrigated with water from Nahr al-Mafshukh, and houses built with great care, some with old worked stone set into them; he noted that the site of a demolished church was still to some extent recognisable. In the late nineteenth century the village was built of stone and had 200 people, who planted fig, olive, mulberry and pomegranate. The older houses stood close together in a circle; those built after 1936 were scattered among the orchards. The whole population was Muslim and lived by agriculture. The land was small and almost entirely planted: of 825 dunums, 745 were in citrus and bananas, 42 were irrigated or used for orchards and 18 were allotted to cereals. The 1931 census counted 415 people in 94 houses; the 1945 statistics counted 800.

On 20–21 May 1948 forces of the Carmeli Brigade attacked Umm al-Faraj and a number of other western Galilee villages in the second stage of Operation Ben-Ami. The operational orders issued by the brigade commander named the village specifically and directed his troops to “kill among the men” and to “destroy and burn the villages” — a passage also translated as an order to attack with the aim of conquest, the killing of adult males, destruction and torching. Benny Morris records that the Carmeli forces attacked Umm al-Faraj together with al-Kabri, al-Tall and al-Nahr and then demolished them, and adds that most of the villages in this area were razed by Haganah sappers, either during the operation or later.

Part of the settlement of Ben Ammi was established on village land in 1949. Only the stone mosque remains. It is shut and stands in a state of decay amid tall wild grass. Many trees that may predate the village’s destruction can still be seen. The nearby land is cultivated, and a banana grove belongs to Ben Ammi.

Sources

• Umm al-Faraj — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Umm al-Faraj — Zochrot
• Umm al-Faraj — Wikipedia