Kafr 'Ana (, also: Kofr Ana) was a

Palestinian Palestinians () are an Arab ethnonational group native to the Levantine region of Palestine. *: "Palestine was part of the first wave of conquest following Muhammad's death in 632 CE; Jerusalem fell to the Caliph Umar in 638. The indigenous p ...

town located east of

Jaffa Jaffa (, ; , ), also called Japho, Joppa or Joppe in English, is an ancient Levantine Sea, Levantine port city which is part of Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel, located in its southern part. The city sits atop a naturally elevated outcrop on ...

, built on the ancient site of Ono. In 1945, the town had an estimated population of 2,800

Arab Arabs (, , ; , , ) are an ethnic group mainly inhabiting the Arab world in West Asia and North Africa. A significant Arab diaspora is present in various parts of the world. Arabs have been in the Fertile Crescent for thousands of years ...

s and 220

Jew Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, religion, and community are highly inte ...

s. The village was captured by the

Haganah Haganah ( , ) was the main Zionist political violence, Zionist paramilitary organization that operated for the Yishuv in the Mandatory Palestine, British Mandate for Palestine. It was founded in 1920 to defend the Yishuv's presence in the reg ...

in April during the 1948 Palestine war. A number of Palestinian villagers were killed and the rest fled or were expelled, whereafter the village was destroyed. Today, the old village site lies within the modern Israeli city of Or Yehuda.

History

Remains from the

Chalcolithic The Chalcolithic ( ) (also called the Copper Age and Eneolithic) was an archaeological period characterized by the increasing use of smelted copper. It followed the Neolithic and preceded the Bronze Age. It occurred at different periods in di ...

Period and forward have been found here.Volynsky and Arbel, 2015,
Or Yehuda
/ref> The

Canaan CanaanThe current scholarly edition of the Septuagint, Greek Old Testament spells the word without any accents, cf. Septuaginta : id est Vetus Testamentum graece iuxta LXX interprets. 2. ed. / recogn. et emendavit Robert Hanhart. Stuttgart : D ...

ites and

Israelites Israelites were a Hebrew language, Hebrew-speaking ethnoreligious group, consisting of tribes that lived in Canaan during the Iron Age. Modern scholarship describes the Israelites as emerging from indigenous Canaanites, Canaanite populations ...

referred to the town as '' Ono'' (), which name continued all throughout the First and

Second Temple period The Second Temple period or post-exilic period in Jewish history denotes the approximately 600 years (516 BCE – 70 CE) during which the Second Temple stood in the city of Jerusalem. It began with the return to Zion and subsequent reconstructio ...

s. In

Aramaic Aramaic (; ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written a ...

, the name means “The village of the

sheep Sheep (: sheep) or domestic sheep (''Ovis aries'') are a domesticated, ruminant mammal typically kept as livestock. Although the term ''sheep'' can apply to other species in the genus '' Ovis'', in everyday usage it almost always refers to d ...

”.

Byzantine period

Jewish classical writings mention the city as being formerly enclosed by a wall. Kafr 'Ana was known as ''Onous'' in the

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of the Roman Empire centred on Constantinople during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Having survived the events that caused the fall of the Western Roman E ...

era,Khalidi, 1992, p. 247 and

ceramic A ceramic is any of the various hard, brittle, heat-resistant, and corrosion-resistant materials made by shaping and then firing an inorganic, nonmetallic material, such as clay, at a high temperature. Common examples are earthenware, porcela ...

s from that era have been found here.Dauphin, 1998, p. 824 Kafr 'Ana actually represents a Byzantine-period expansion of a nearby and much older site –– ''Kafr Juna'', believed to be the ancient Ono.

Ottoman period

During early Ottoman rule in Palestine, the revenues of the village of Kafr 'Ana were in 1552 designated for the new

waqf A (; , plural ), also called a (, plural or ), or ''mortmain'' property, is an Alienation (property law), inalienable charitable financial endowment, endowment under Sharia, Islamic law. It typically involves donating a building, plot ...

of Hasseki Sultan Imaret in Jerusalem, established by Hasseki Hurrem Sultan ( Roxelana), the wife of

Suleiman the Magnificent Suleiman I (; , ; 6 November 14946 September 1566), commonly known as Suleiman the Magnificent in the Western world and as Suleiman the Lawgiver () in his own realm, was the List of sultans of the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman sultan between 1520 a ...

. In 1596, ''Kafr 'Ana'' appeared in the

census A census (from Latin ''censere'', 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating population information about the members of a given Statistical population, population, usually displayed in the form of stati ...

located in the ''

Nahiya A nāḥiyah ( , plural ''nawāḥī'' ), also nahiyeh, nahiya or nahia, is a regional or local type of administrative division that usually consists of a number of villages or sometimes smaller towns. In Tajikistan, it is a second-level divisi ...

'' of Ramla, part of

Gaza Sanjak Gaza Sanjak (), known in Arabic as Bilād Ghazza (the Land of Gaza), was a sanjak of the Damascus Eyalet of the Ottoman Empire centered in Gaza, and spread northwards up to the Yarkon River. In the 16th century it was divided into ''nawahi'' ...

. The population was 11 households, all

Muslim Muslims () are people who adhere to Islam, a Monotheism, monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God ...

. They paid a fixed tax-rate of 25% on agricultural products, including wheat, barley, summer crops, vineyards, fruit trees, sesame, goats and beehives; in addition to occasional revenues, a total of 26,800 akçe. All of the revenue went to a

. In the 18th century, Kafr 'Ana absorbed the population of the village of Subtara, abandoned under nomadic pressures, which was the largest village in the neighbourhood. In 1838, ''Kefr 'Âna'' was noted as a Muslim village in the Lydda District.Robinson and Smith, 1841, vol 3, Appendix 2, p.
121
/ref> French explorer

Victor Guérin Victor Guérin (; 15 September 1821 – 21 September 1890) was a French people, French intellectual, explorer and amateur archaeologist. He published books describing the geography, archeology and history of the areas he explored, which included ...

visited the village in 1863 and found it to have 500 inhabitants. He further noted that "near the village are two shallow basins hollowed in rock, not built up, which receive the winter rains. Several wells are here as well, which permit the gardens to be irrigated. By the side of one of these wells I observed trunks of columns which seemed ancient." An Ottoman village list of about 1870 counted 156 houses and a population of 499, though the population count included only men. In 1882, the PEF's '' Survey of Western Palestine'' described Kafr 'Ana as a village built of

adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

bricks and surrounded by palm trees.

British Mandate period

In the

1922 census of Palestine The 1922 census of Palestine was the first census carried out by the authorities of the British Mandate of Palestine, on 23 October 1922. The reported population was 757,182, including the military and persons of foreign nationality. The divis ...

conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Kufr 'Ana had a population of 1,374 inhabitants, all

s.Barron, 1923, Table VII, Sub-district of Jaffa, p
20
/ref> In the 1931 census the population was found to have increased to 1,824, and was still all Muslims, who lived in a total of 449 houses.Mills, 1932, p
14
The villagers grew crops and raised poultry and bees. In the 1944/45 statistics a total 2,214 dunums were used for growing citrus and bananas, while 11,022 dunums of village land were used for

cereal A cereal is a grass cultivated for its edible grain. Cereals are the world's largest crops, and are therefore staple foods. They include rice, wheat, rye, oats, barley, millet, and maize ( Corn). Edible grains from other plant families, ...

s. 597 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards, while 90 dunams were classified as built-up areas. File:Kafr ‘Ana.jpg, Kafr ‘Ana 1947 from Palmach archive File:Bat Yam 1945.jpg, Kafr 'Ana 1945 1:250,000

1948 war and destruction

The inhabitants and militiamen of Kafr 'Ana fled in the weeks leading up to the

1948 Arab–Israeli War The 1948 Arab–Israeli War, also known as the First Arab–Israeli War, followed the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, civil war in Mandatory Palestine as the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. The civil war becam ...

, during the

's offensive ''Mivtza Hametz'' ( Operation Hametz) 28–30 April 1948. This operation was held against a group of villages east of Jaffa, including Kafr 'Ana. According to the preparatory orders, the objective was for "opening the way or Jewish forcesto Lydda". The initial order made no explicit mention of the prospective treatment of the villagers and the order spoke of "cleansing the area" 'tihur hashetah'' However, the final operational order stated: "Civilian inhabitants of places conquered would be permitted to leave after they are searched for weapons." During the operation, "the inhabitants and militiamen icpanicked and fled with the approach of the Haganah columns or as the rounds began to fall". Historian Saleh Abdel Jawad writes that indiscriminate killings occurred when the village was occupied on 4 May 1948, resulting in the deaths of ten civilians. The village was destroyed shortly after 13 September 1948. On 23 September 1948 Israeli General Avner named Kafr 'Ana as a suitable village for resettlement for new Jewish immigrants (" olim") to Israel. Today, the modern Israeli city of Or Yehuda, established in 1950, exists upon the lands formerly belonging to the villages of Kafr 'Ana, Saqiya and Kheiriya.Khalidi, 1882, p. 248 Misgadana

In 1992 the village site was described: "Part of the site is a vacant lot. On other parts, olive trees grow, along with cypress and eucalyptus trees that have been planted by the residents of the Israeli settlements. No traces of the old houses can be discerned. Apartment buildings and a small park have been built on the surrounding land."

Culture

A woman's ''thob'' (loose fitting robe with sleeves), from Kafr Ana, from the 1930s, is in the

Museum of International Folk Art The Museum of International Folk Art is a state-run institution in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States. It is one of many cultural institutions operated by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. History The museum was founded by Flor ...

(MOIFA) collection at Santa Fe, United States. The dress is of white commercial cotton and the embroidery is multicolored cotton, mainly in red and blue. The ''qabbeh'' (the square chest panel) is not a separate panel, but instead executed directly on the dress. The embroidery on the skirt and sleeves is also done directly on the dress. There is some machine embroidery, but most is by hand. The dress has an uncommon round neckline, which was an innovation and was only used here and in the village of Salama, near Jaffa.Stillman, 1979, p.70

References

Bibliography

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

External links

Palestine Remembered - Kafr 'Ana
*Survey of Western Palestine, Map 13
IAA

Wikimedia commonsKafr 'Ana
Zochrot
Kafr 'Ana
from the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center {{Authority control District of Jaffa Arab villages depopulated prior to the 1948 Arab–Israeli War Canaanite cities Ancient Jewish settlements of Judaea