Al-Birwa
Al-Birwa was a Palestinian Arab village, located east of Acre. In 1945, it had a population of 1,460, of whom the majority were Muslims and a significant minority, Christians. Its total land area consisted of 13,542 dunams. The village was depopulated during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
The settlement at Al-Birwa was started in the Roman era, and reached a peak in the Byzantine era. In the mid-11th century CE Al-Birwa was mentioned by the Persian geographer Nasir Khusraw and it was known to the Crusaders as "Broet". The village came under Mamluk rule in the late 13th century, and in the early 16th century, it was conquered by the Ottomans, who ruled it for four centuries. Travelers' reports from the late 19th century documented that al-Birwa had a mosque, a church and an elementary school for boys.
During British Mandate rule in Palestine, al-Birwa was home to local power brokers, who mediated disputes in neighboring villages. Al-Birwa became a center of rebel operations during the 1936–1939 revolt against British rule. By the 1940s, many of the village's agrarian inhabitants lost their lands due to debt, and shifted to labor jobs in nearby cities, such as Haifa. However, the majority of the residents—men and women—continued to engage in farming, selling their olives, grains and other crops in the markets of Acre. Al-Birwa was captured by the Israelis in early June 1948, after which its local militia recaptured the village. Al-Birwa was then permanently occupied by the Israelis in late June. Afterward, its inhabitants, including future Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, fled to nearby villages or Lebanon. The Jewish communities of Yas'ur and Ahihud were established on al-Birwa's lands in 1949 and 1950, respectively.
Geography
Al-Birwa stood on a rocky hill overlooking the plain of Acre, with an average elevation of 60 meters above sea level. It was situated at the intersection of two highways—one led to Acre and the other towards Haifa. Located 10.5 kilometers east of Acre, the other nearest localities to al-Birwa included al-Damun to the south, and the Arab towns of Jadeidi to the northwest, Julis to the north, Sha'ab to the east, and Majd al-Kurum to the northeast.Al-Birwa's total land area consisted of 13,542 dunams, of which 59 dunams were built-up areas. Cultivable land accounted for 77% of the total land area. Orchards were planted on 1,548 dunams of which 1,500 were used for olive groves, and 8,457 dunams were allotted to grains. The residents of the town sold 536 dunams to Jews, and most of the rest was Arab-owned.
Archaeology
Several excavation has been conducted at the site of al-Birwa after year 2000. Finds included a large building, numerous potsherds from the Late Roman period, a bronze coin from the 1st or 2nd century CE, remains of an ancient olive press, glass vessels such as a wine goblet and bottles dated to the Late Byzantine and Umayyad periods and an underground water reservoir. A few potsherds from the Crusader and Mamluk periods were also found.In 2008, the remains of a large olive oil refinery dating from the Byzantine era was uncovered, together with items belonging to a church. The excavators believed that the olive press could be situated inside a Byzantine monastery.
History
Antiquity
The more ancient site, Tel Birwa, lies about one mile southwest of the Arab village by the same name, and is said to be a mound measuring 600 paces in circumference at the top, and 75 feet high. The mound abounds with Graeco-Roman potsherds, showing that it was occupied down to Roman times when it was abandoned, as no distinctively Arab pottery could be found there. Conder and Kitchener thought that Al-Birwa preserves in its name the more ancient name of Beri, mentioned in the Jerusalem Talmud, seeing that both it and Kabul are mentioned together. According to Josephus, the villages in the immediate vicinity of Kabul were pillaged and burnt during the First Jewish revolt against Rome.Middle Ages
Al-Birwa was mentioned in 1047 CE, during Fatimid rule, when it was visited by the Persian geographer, Nasir Khusraw. He describes it as lying "between Acre and Damun", and reports having visited what he described as the tombs of Simeon and Esau there. The Crusaders wrested control of Palestine from the Fatimids in 1099. They referred to al-Birwa as "Broet". In 1253, John Aleman, the Crusader lord of Caesarea, sold al-Birwa, along with several other villages, to the Knights Hospitaller. Al-Birwa was mentioned as part of the Acre-based Crusaders' domain in the 1283 hudna with the Mamluks under Sultan al-Mansur Qalawun. In the late 13th century, the Mamluks defeated and conquered the last Crusader outposts along Palestine's northern coastline.Ottoman Empire
Al-Birwa came under Ottoman rule in 1517, along with all of Palestine. In 1596, al-Birwa was a small village in the Akka Nahiya, part of the Safad Sanjak. The village paid taxes on wheat, barley, fruit, beehives, and goats. According to Ottoman tax registers, al-Birwa had 121 residents in 1596. A map from Napoleon's invasion of 1799 by French cartographer Pierre Jacotin depicted al-Birwa as "Beroweh", though its location on the map was misplaced.In the late 19th century, al-Birwa grew to be a large village, with a well in its southern area. To the north lay "beautiful olive-groves and fruitful wheatfields," as they were described by one Western traveller to the region in the mid-19th century. American biblical scholar Edward Robinson visited al-Birwa in 1852 and noted that it was one of 18 villages in Palestine with an operating Christian church. By 1859, British Consul Edward T. Rogers recorded that al-Birwa had approximately 900 inhabitants. The French explorer, Victor Guérin, who visited in 1875, described the Christians of Birwa as Greek Orthodox, and noted that they had a "fairly new" church.
A population list from about 1887 showed that al-Birwa had about 755 inhabitant, of whom 650 were Muslims and 105 were Christians. In 1888, the Ottomans built an elementary school for boys.
British Mandate
In 1917, during World War I, British forces drove out the Ottomans from Palestine and in 1920, the British Mandate of Palestine was established. In the 1922 British census, al-Birwa had a population of 807, consisting of 735 Muslims and 72 Christians. The Christians were mostly Orthodox with five Anglicans. By the 1931 census, the population had increased to 996, of which 884 were Muslims and 92 were Christians, living in a total of 224 houses. Cement roofs became widely used in al-Birwa in the 1930s, during a time of significant expansion in the village.A number of al-Birwa's inhabitants participated in the 1936–1939 Arab revolt against British rule and mass Jewish immigration in Palestine. A commander of the revolt for the Nazareth-Tiberias region, Sheikh Yihya Hawash, was from al-Birwa. He was arrested by the British and sentenced to life imprisonment. The British also executed eight residents of al-Birwa who had participated in the revolt. Other rebel commanders and participants in the revolt from al-Birwa included Asad Atallah, Mahmoud al-Joudi, Saleh Mahmoud Me'ari-Abu Sa'ud, Abd al-Hamid Daher Me'ari, Muhammad al-Hajj Ali, Yusef Taha, Fadil Eid, Yousif Mai and Abbas al-Shattawi. A number of women from al-Birwa participated in the revolt by transporting arms, water and food to rebels positioned among the hills in the vicinity. Elderly refugees from al-Birwa interviewed in 2003–2004 recalled that during the revolt, local rebels set off a mine that hit a British military jeep on a road adjacent to al-Birwa in August 1937, prompting the British to launch punitive measures against the village. These included gathering men from al-Birwa and forcing them to cut cactus plants near Acre and then placing the men on top of the cactuses, leaving the women of the village to tend to their wounds.
In the 1945 statistics, al-Birwa's population was 1,460, of which 130 were Christians. Prominent families and landowners in the village included the Saad, Darwish, Abdullah, Kayyal, Sakkas, al-Wakid, al-Joudi, Najm, al-Dabdoub, Khalid, Akawi, Hissian, Hawash and al-Sheikha families. Socio-economic status in the village was largely determined by land ownership. About 140 residents of the village were tenant farmers who worked for the major landowning Moughrabi, al-Zayyat and Adlabi families. According to intelligence gathered by the Haganah, the traditional, local power brokers of the central Galilee were residents of al-Birwa, who "resolved all conflicts in the nearby villages". Haganah intelligence also reported that al-Birwa's inhabitants were "long-lived, the majority reaching an age of over 100 years".
By the 1940s, al-Birwa had three olive oil presses, a mosque, a church, and approximately 300 houses. In addition to the Ottoman-era boys' school, an elementary school for girls was established in 1943. By this time, many of the inhabitants lost all or part of their lands due to debts, and concurrently, men and women from al-Birwa increasingly worked in public projects, such as road construction and the Haifa oil refinery, or in British military installations, to compensate for lost income. However, the main source of income remained agriculture, and the village's principal crops were olives, wheat, barley, corn, sesame, and watermelons. In 1944–45, residents of the village owned a total of 600 cattle, 3,000 goats and 1,000 chickens. Women, particularly young women from smaller landowning families, participated alongside the men of their family in working the land, while many women from landless families drew income as seasonal workers on other village residents' lands. There were general, gender-based divisions of labor, with women collecting well water, raising livestock, curdling milk, transporting goods to markets in Acre and collecting herbs; men typically plowed and sowed seeds, and both men and women picked olives and harvested crops.