Summary
Coastal village in a Carmel river valley, occupied on 16 July 1948 in Operation Policeman and left almost intact because the soldiers who took it recognised its beauty and later turned it into the artists’ colony Ein Hod, in Pappe’s account; one clan family held out nearby and built a new Ayn Hawd that Israel refused to recognise until 2005.
Details
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The main hamulla of Ayn Hawd, the Abu al-Hija, were thought to have special healing powers; the village lay partly hidden in one of the river valleys flowing from Mount Carmel to the sea, fifteen kilometres south of Haifa (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.195).
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It was left intact due to the presence of some Bohemian types in the occupying unit, who decided to leave it as they found it and come back later to settle there and turn it into an artists’ colony; for many years it hosted some of Israel’s best-known artists, musicians and writers, often affiliated with the country’s ‘peace camp’ (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.195).
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Ayn Hawd had been attacked once in May and the five families of the Abu al-Hija clan had repelled the offensive, but on 16 July they succumbed; the original villagers were expelled and the governmental ‘naming committee’ renamed the occupied village Ein Hod (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.196).
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One of the five families found refuge a few miles to the east, was chased into the canyons but held out — the Israeli commander reported that “the operations to cleanse the pockets of resistance of refugees in the Wadi east of the village continue” — and gradually created a new village under the old name of Ayn Hawd (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.196).
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In the 1950s the Abu al-Hija built new cement houses there; the government refused to recognise them as a legal settlement, tried to demolish the new village in 1986 and was halted, and only in 2005 did a Minister of the Interior grant the village semi-recognition (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.196).
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The Jewish artist community’s coffee bar ‘Bonanza’ is located in the original village mosque; Marcel Janko, the artist founder of Jewish Ein Hod, wanted it to become the centre of Dadaism (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.196).
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The Ayn Hawd mosque is used as a bar, Pappe reports in his survey of desecrated holy sites (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.253).
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Sitta’s register lists Ayn Haud at S 279: depopulation date 14-07-48, Exodus Causes C, Arab Population 48 of 754 on 12,605 dunums (The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, PDF p.9).
Related pages
The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Tirat Haifa, Kfar Lam