Acre
عكا
Acre — Akka — is the walled city that broke Napoleon: a Phoenician port, the Crusaders' last capital, and an Ottoman citadel-town whose Old City is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Most of its people were expelled in 1948; among its exiled children was Ghassan Kanafani.
Acre’s harbor has been contested for four thousand years. The city appears in Egyptian texts of the nineteenth century BCE; Canaanites and Phoenicians held it, Alexander the Great took it in 332 BCE, and the Ptolemies renamed it Ptolemais. Arabs conquered it in the seventh century, and in 1104 the Crusaders took it as St. Jean d’Acre, making it the chief port of their kingdom — and, after Jerusalem fell, its last capital. When the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Khalil stormed it in 1291, Crusader rule in the Holy Land ended with it.
The city that visitors walk today is mostly the work of the eighteenth century, when Acre rose again as the seat of the Galilee’s strongmen — Zahir al-Umar, then Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, whose walls and citadel withstood Napoleon’s siege in 1799. Beneath the Ottoman town lies the Crusader city, preserved almost entire under the later streets; above it stand the al-Jazzar Mosque, the Khan al-Umdan caravanserai, the pasha’s bathhouse, and the sea walls where fishermen still mend their nets. UNESCO inscribed the Old City as a World Heritage site in 2001.
In May 1948, days after Jaffa and Haifa, Acre was attacked; Israeli forces occupied it on 17 May. Most of its Arab inhabitants — swollen by refugees who had fled there by boat from Haifa — were driven out or fled; only about three thousand remained. Among the families that left was that of Ghassan Kanafani, born in Acre in 1936, who was twelve when he watched the sea take his city and who grew up in exile to become one of Palestine’s greatest writers.
Today Acre’s Old City remains a largely Palestinian town inside Israel, its market in the vaulted lanes, its hummus kitchens by the harbor, its families holding on against gentrification and neglect. In Palestinian memory Akka is endurance made stone: the walls that stopped Napoleon, the mosque the Butcher built, and the boy it sent away who wrote the homeland back into being.
Sources
Cited works
3- whc.unesco.org(opens in a new tab)https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1042/
- britannica.com — Acre Israel(opens in a new tab)https://www.britannica.com/place/Acre-Israel
- themodernnovel.org — kanafani(opens in a new tab)https://www.themodernnovel.org/asia/arab/palestine/kanafani/