Wadi al-Hawarith

Wadi al-Hawarith lay in two parts, north and south, on the plain west of the coastal highway, some sixteen kilometres from Tulkarm; the 1945 Village Statistics counted them separately. The area had been known as the wadi of Iskandaruna until the Haritha tribe settled around it in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and gave it their name; the Haritha traced their descent through the Bani Sunbus to Tayyi and ultimately to a Yemeni tribe that had dispersed to the Hijaz, Iraq, Palestine and Syria in the first century of Islam. The people of Wadi al-Hawarith were a clan of the Bani Sunbus, and they held the land as tenants. Their conviction was that it belonged to them by three and a half centuries of living on it, and that ownership by absentee landlords was an abstraction that at most gave those landlords a share of the crop.

The land — about 30,000 dunums — belonged on paper to the family of Antun Bishara al-Tayyan of Jaffa, who had mortgaged it to a French creditor in Ottoman times. When his thirteen heirs decided to sell, a representative of the Jewish National Fund agreed in November 1928 to buy at auction, and a court-sponsored auction was held on 20 April 1929. The auction price was £P41,000, but the JNF actually paid the heirs close to 136,000 Egyptian pounds; settling the sale through the court preserved the al-Tayyans’ anonymity and bypassed the tenants entirely. In 1929 the tribe’s numbers were put variously at 850 by the Jewish Agency’s settlement department, 1,000 to 1,200 by the British high commissioner, and 1,500 by its own head, and the high commissioner reckoned they cultivated 10,000 to 15,000 dunums and pastured animals on 10,000 more.

On 6 September 1930 the court ordered the tenants off the land. They refused, and fought on every front available to them — appeals through the courts until the High Court found for the JNF in December 1932; attempts to obstruct settlement on the land, where by 1931 the settlers had planted 43,000 saplings that JNF protocols described as soldiers defending the homeland; refusal of the Mandate government’s offers to resettle them elsewhere; temporary refuge in neighbouring villages; and work with the nationalist movement. Their case became the lead story in the Arabic press and a national symbol of Palestinian fears of dispossession. In June 1933 those living inside the planted area were expelled, and the tribal structure they had defended dissolved soon after: some became seasonal labourers, some took government jobs, some moved away. A few hundred stayed in the vicinity and had built twenty-three houses by 1935. In 1944/45 the villagers numbered 1,330 — 850 in the northern section and 480 in the southern — and sowed 950 dunums in cereals; by 1937 Zionist settlers were cultivating nearly 22,000 dunums around them.

What remained ended in March 1948. The village was subjected to a psychological warfare campaign and then attacked by the Haganah, and Benny Morris concludes that the combined pressure led the residents to leave on 15 March, as part of a series of operations designed to clear the coastal plain north of Tel Aviv — which casts doubt on the claim in the History of the Haganah that the evacuation was organised by the Arab leadership. At the end of April and beginning of May the Haganah, helped by local settlements, destroyed the houses of this and neighbouring villages, making return, in Morris’s phrase, all but impossible. Kefar ha-Ro’e was established on village land in 1934 and Ge’uley Teyman in 1947. One family, that of Abu Isa al-Hajibi, remained in Wadi al-Hawarith North and now has ten houses there; four village houses survive on the southern site, one of them occupied by an Israeli family.

Sources

• Wadi al-Hawarith — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Wadi al-Hawarith — Zochrot
• Wadi al-Hawarith — Wikipedia