Umm Khalid

Umm Khalid stood on a sandstone hill less than two kilometres east of the Mediterranean, with the Tulkarm–Netanya road passing to the south. Flint tools found around the site suggest the ground had been inhabited since prehistoric times, and the village contained the Lombard Castle of Roger, built by the Crusaders and first mentioned in 1135; it remained in continuous use until 1948, was largely destroyed around that year, and was partly excavated in 1985–86. Napoleon’s troops razed Umm Khalid in 1799 on their retreat to Egypt after failing to take Acre. In the nineteenth century it served as a resting place between al-Tantura and Ra’s al-Ayn where Ottoman officials halted and received visitors, and in 1856 M. Rogers described a flourishing village with extensive melon gardens to the west.

The village was rectangular, running north to south, its stone and mud houses crowded together along narrow alleys. At the centre stood a mosque, a boys’ elementary school and four shops selling groceries and cloth. The soil was fertile and the groundwater plentiful, and the economy rested on watermelons, citrus, vegetables and grain, with livestock and dairying alongside; many of the residents had come from other villages of the subdistrict looking for agricultural work. In 1944/45 the population was 970 — 960 Muslims and ten Christians — and of 2,894 dunums, 1,830 were sown in cereals and 47 planted in citrus and bananas, with 882 dunums by then in Jewish ownership. Netanya had been founded roughly a kilometre to the west in 1929, on land bought from the village, and grew steadily around it.

According to an Israeli military intelligence report, Umm Khalid was evacuated on 20 March 1948 out of a general sense of fear. Villagers described what preceded that: Zionist forces allowing no one to enter or leave the village and cutting off its trade, so that after about a month of blockade families began to go. Benny Morris notes that a number of villages in the area emptied in the same way as attacks increased on the villages north of Tel Aviv in the first weeks of the war — a coastal strip heavily settled by Jewish colonies, regarded by the Zionist leadership as the core of the planned Jewish state, and therefore one it was thought desirable to clear of Arab residents before 15 May.

Much of the village land has been swallowed by the suburbs of Netanya; Gan Chefer, founded in 1940, and Nira, founded in 1941, were merged in 1953 into Sha’ar Chefer, which covers part of it. The village site is now a quarter of the city. Some of the houses remain, used as dwellings or as warehouses, and the surrounding land is planted in citrus. In 1997 bulldozers uncovered the village cemetery, which was afterwards marked.

Sources

• Umm Khalid — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Umm Khalid — Zochrot
• Umm Khalid — Wikipedia