Wadi Hunayn

Wadi Hunayn stood on flat ground on the central coastal plain nine kilometers from Ramla, on the highway to Ramla, Jaffa and the other towns, with roads running to the villages around and the Lydda–Jaffa railway about a kilometer and a half to its east. Tradition holds that members of the Qada’a tribe settled the place in the early Islamic period and named it after their native Wadi Hunayn in Hadramawt, in Yemen. In modern times the houses, of mud, cement and stone, were scattered across the site without plan; a mosque and several shops stood at the center. The whole population was Muslim.

In the first decade of the twentieth century the citrus industry west of the village expanded and drew workers from the surrounding area, and Palestinians from other parts of the country came to work in the groves and some settled in Wadi Hunayn. Zionist immigrants also arrived and settled at Nes Tziyyona, established in 1883 on land bought from Wadi Hunayn. The influx of agricultural laborers, who worked both in Arab-owned groves and in those of the Nes Tziyyona settlers, added to the village’s population. Through the first four decades of the century leading Zionists criticized the liberal policy of Nes Tziyyona for not excluding non-Jewish labor from Zionist enterprises; the general exclusionary policy would have been difficult to apply there, since the settlement stood across the road from the village. This was the only genuinely mixed locality in Palestine, where Zionist immigrants and Palestinians actually lived close by one another.

All sixty-five of the village’s schoolchildren attended the school at nearby Sarafand al-Kharab in the mid-1940s. The village land was flat and fertile, and citrus was the major crop, the groves irrigated from the many artesian wells drilled around the village; the residents worked in the orchards and sold their produce in the cities. In 1944/45, 1,827 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 134 under cereals, with nineteen dunums irrigated or in orchards. The census of 1931 counted 280 people in fifty-five houses. The 1944/45 survey counted 1,620 Arabs alongside 1,760 Jews — figures the Mandate statistics group together with Nes Tziyyona.

The record of the depopulation is thin. Benny Morris records that the villagers fled on 17 April 1948 under the influence of the capture or evacuation of a neighboring town, but does not identify it, and there were no major Zionist operations in the immediate vicinity at that date; Zochrot gives the same date and names no unit. The nearest threat was some distance to the east, in the Jerusalem corridor, where the Giv’ati Brigade had just concluded Operation Nachshon and where the Deir Yassin massacre had taken place a week and a half earlier. The only other village nearby that may have emptied at the same time is Sarafand al-Kharab, reported to have been evacuated on 20 April for fear of a Zionist attack. If those dates are right, both villages may have been targeted or threatened during the Haganah’s coastal clearing campaign of April and early May, or during the encirclement of Jaffa in the second half of April. PalQuest does not go further than that, and neither does this record.

Nes Tziyyona, on the west side of the Gaza–Jaffa coastal road, expanded until its buildings encroached on village land, and Kefar Aharon, established on village lands in 1948, has been merged into it. The mosque has been converted into a synagogue called Gulat Yisra’el. About ten houses survive. One, which belonged to Shaykh Sulayman al-Faruqi, is now lived in by Jewish families — a two-storey building divided into five units, each with a small front porch. The elaborate gable-roofed house of Ibn Hamid has been turned into a mental hospital. The palatial house of Abu ‘Umar Effendi is used by the Israeli military for purposes that are not stated and cannot be photographed. Castor oil plants and stands of cypress and mulberry grow on the site, and the land around is cultivated.

Sources

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