Photo credits: Amber Levitt except where stated otherwise.
Moshava Ilaniya's claim to fame is that, while Degania Alef is usually recognized as the first collective settlement, that accolade should be held by Ilaniya, albeit the collective only functioned for a year. Founded as Sejera, after the adjacent Arab village al-Shajara (or ash-Shajara), between 1900 and 1902―on land earlier purchased by Baron Edmond James de Rothschild and transferred to the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) in 1899―the colony was the first Jewish settlement in the Lower Galilee. Al-Shajara was itself built on the site of an ancient Jewish settlement from the Talmudic period, which covered hundreds of dunams, and most of the archaeological site is built over today by the military base at Havat Ha'Shomer, the moshava itself, and the ruins of the Arab village.
The ancient settlement was situated adjacent to the intersection of two primary ancient arteries: the south–north via maris from Egypt to Damascus, and the east–west route from the Hauran to the Mediterranean coast at ‘Akko, known in the Ottoman period as darb el-Hawarna.
The IDF’s Centre for Promoting Special Populations (MAKAM) is located in the Havat HaShomer at Ilaniya. It is established to help and care for soldiers who come from populations at risk, such as minorities, immigrants, uneducated youth, and youth with low socioeconomic or criminal backgrounds, and the soldiers often come with social or interpersonal difficulties which can lead to violence, crime and indifference to the situation they are in. The goal of the Centre is to give these young men and women the tools they need to integrate into society.
It was a bright winter's day when I picked up my daughter at 8.45 in the morning from Naftali military base (immediately across the main road from Ilaniya). It was a Wednesday, and the dirst time she had been released so early in the week, so we decided to enjoy the weather and the post-rain greenery and explore the place. Both the Arabic name of the settlement, al-Shajara, and the modern Hebrew name, Ilaniya, mean "the tree", perhaps referring to the large ancient Cypress tree which still grows between the moshava and the site of the Arab village.
When the JCA received the land for the modern Jewish settlement, it purchased additional adjacent lands the same year, and settled a group of residents of Tzfat (Safed) who had immigrated from Kurdistan, together with eight families of Subbotniks―Russian Christians who had converted to Judaism.
Thirty-seven Sobotnik (literally Sabbatarians in Russian) families came to Israel with the First Aliyah. Most of them were from wealthy families, children of Orthodox Provoslavic priests, from the Astrakhan region of Russia. At first they settled in Hadera―and later moved on to Sejera. The Sobotniks (unlike most of their immigrant counterparts) were very good farmers. From Sejera, they disbursed to the various settlements, to teach other settlers good agricultural practices. The Dubrovin family―perhaps the most well known of the Sobotniks―spent time in Sejera, before settling in the upper Galilee.
The first small settlement founded by JCA had two sections: a sharecroppers' colony for more experienced farmers, and a training farm for unskilled workers. The homes of the former were built on either side of the settlement's main street, and many of the old houses remain today. The front yard served for growing crops, while the back yard was reserved for stables and cow sheds, with a perimeter wall behind which were chicken coops. Sejera (like other settlements in the Lower Galilee) was established using a unique system of land tenancy in which loans were given to the settlers to establish themselves and subsist until the first harvest. It was only after a potential tenant had proven his financial independence that he was given the rights to his plot.
The training farm was located slightly higher up the slope, with a yard enclosed by a wall and single rooms for workers. The concept was initiated by the JCA's Chaim Margalioth Kalvarisky, as a way of helping settle the land with professional Jewish farmers. The JCA, based in Paris, took the view that they did not run their projects as charity, but seeded self-sufficiency through the morally and economically sound activity of agriculture. Thus they expected the training farm to be self-sufficient and to generate profit and, when this did not happen, they replaced Kalvarisky in 1901 with the young agronomist, Eliyahu Krause. Since the farm continued losing money, in 1906 the JCA started phasing out the training farm and gradually transferring its land to the sharecroppers.
But in the meantime a socialist commune―led by Manya Wilbushewitch and Israel Shochat, one of the three leaders of HaShomer―was contracted to run the farm autonomously for one year, without administrative interference. Wilbushewitch received the support of Yehoshua Hankin, who again brought in Eliahu Krause to define an administrative plan. The eighteen commune members, young men and women from Sejera and elsewhere in Palestine, aided by a number of sympathisers, managed for the first time to generate a profit and ensure constant employment for all workers of Sejera, while also pioneering full equality for women.
Israel & Manya Shochat (nee Wilbushewitch) [Public domain]
Along with their work in agriculture there were daily educational meetings where they learned Hebrew from the young David Grün, the future prime-minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion. They also learned Arabic from an Arab villager and socialist theory from Manya Wilbushewitch, as well as keeping up-to-date with political developments in the country from Israel Shochat. By taking what was one of the least profitable ranches in the land and making it profitable, Wilbushewitch showed that her ideas for a communal collective were viable, and as the first well-run socialist-Zionist commune in Palestine, Sejera was a precursor of the kibbutz movement and one of the centres of Jewish rural settlement in Palestine at the time. Manya Wilbushewitch and Israel Shochat married in Sejera in 1908.
Less publicly, the group used Sejera for training the newly constituted Bar-Giora Jewish self-defence organisation, whose offshoot, Ha'Shomer, founded in April 1909 to guard settlements of the Yishuv, took over from Circassians and Arabs who had until then guarded the settlement and other nearby Jewish settlements.
However despite this economic success, JCA did not renew the agreement with the socialist commune at the end of the one-year experiment. By 1912-1913, the training farm was closed down, and the JCA reverted to its earlier policy of reallocating the land to the sharecroppers, as well as selling some land to a Jewish plantation company. Nevertheless as a successful training ground for agriculture which brought together some of the leading pioneers of the First and Second Aliyah who would go on to leading roles in pre-state Zionist society, the farm played an essential role in the development of the nascent Zionist society. The original Ha'Shomer Ranch within the settlement is today the Havat Ha'Shomer army base. The base contains various old structures from the settlement, as well as a building formerly a British police fort.
The central administrative building of Havat Ha'Shomer, left: at an unknown date pre-state [Public domain], and right: today [Credit: CC Dr Avishai Teicher Pikiwiki Israel]
Arab al-Shajara and its ancient roots
But this is modern history, and the Arab village was long known to be built upon ancient ruins. The Crusaders knew the village as Seiera, and apparently French cavalry was stationed in the village―shown as Chagara on Pierre Jacotin's campaign map, Carte topographique de l'Egypte―during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1799. By 1812, travellers such as Johann Ludwig Burckhardt and William McClure Thomson were writing about visiting the village. The latter mentions that al-Shajara was one of several villages in the area which was surrounded by gigantic hedges of cactus, which are still evident today.
In 1854 the French orientalist and archaeologist, Louis Félicien De Saulcy―in his Voyage autour de la Mer Morte―described a spring house, which still exists today. The Sejera Spring is accessed down a long, narrow, flight of forty stone steps to an ancient stone spring house that functioned until 1948. The roof of the house itself had a stone dome, now collapsed, with an opening for a pumping device powered by foot pedals. Next to the spring structure is a large Jujube tree.
The steps leading to the Sejera spring (left) and the nearby Jujube tree (right)
De Saulcy also described, to the north of the spring, a Roman temple converted into a Byzantine church, with six columns, a portico entrance and other architectural elements, including Greek inscriptions, as well as a sarcophagus lid.
Victor Guérin writes about his 1875 visit to the village in his 1880 account, Description Géographique Historique et Archéologique de la Palestine, which Conder & Kitchener quote in their Survey of Western Palestine of 1881, saw the same spring house and temple/church:
"Here Guérin discovered the ruins of a rectangular edifice built of cut stones, and oriented from west to east. Its height is 31 feet, and its breadth 18 feet 8 inches. Six monolithic columns decorated the interior, which they divided into two naves. Capitals are lying about on the ground, apparently of Byzantine style. This church was used for a mosque, for the traces of a mihrab are to be seen at the south end. On a fine slab, lying on the ground, are read the Greek letters ΔΟΚΙ, each about four and a half inches high, and on a second slab the letter Δ placed above a I."
This building is no longer visible above ground, but several monumental pedestals are extant in the moshava. Following archaeologist Gideon Foerster's opinion, Zvi Ilan―in his 1991 book, Ancient Synagogues in Israel, suggested that the building was probably originally a synagogue. Just south of the spring a probable beit midrash, with a magnificent mosaic floor, was found. This too is no longer visible.
Gottlieb Schumacher, the American-born archaeologist, found old graves and other antiquities when he explored the area in the 1880s, and Conder & Kitchener describe the village at the time of their visit as comprising "Good stone houses, containing about 150 MosIems; surrounded by arable ground and olives and figs. There are cisterns in the village, and a spring to the south." A cave south of the spring, converted to a house, contains an oil press. Apart from these, other ancient remains that are visible today include part of an underground hideout complex and several Middle Bronze and Roman burial caves, including one with a simple engraved menorah. An excavation conducted next to the spring house in 1996 exposed superimposed archaeological layers from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, as well as the Roman period, showing that the site was in fact settled from pre-historic times.
During 1998–2000, a small archaeological excavation was conducted outside the southern fence of the Havat Ha-Shomer army base. It was initiated and supervised by Ilaniya resident and archaeologist, Dr E Gould, and carried out on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority by a team including pupils from the Yad Sasson elementary school at Kibbutz Lavi. The excavation, located about 200 metres north of the spring, consisted of cleaning the earth out of cavities hewn in a bedrock surface that sloped down slightly from north to south. The exposed installations were part of a winery, and/or possibly an oil press complex, dating to the Byzantine period. They included two large treading floors with collecting vats, and two small treading surfaces with small collecting basins, as well as remains of two adjacent press beds.
In the centre of Ilaniya is a cave containing a mikve and its adjacent feed cistern. For a time it was turned into living quarters by Alexander Zaïd―one of Ha’Shomer’s watchmen. This small cave also served as the settlement's headquarters during the 1948 war. Nearby are the settlement's original water cistern, and a watchtower.
Clockwise from top left: the mikve cave; the watch tower; the water cistern; and inside the cistern.
By the time of the 1922 census of Palestine, conducted by the British Mandate authorities, the population of "Sjajara" (which included both the Arab and Jewish villages) was 543 residents; 391 Muslims, 100 Jews and 52 Christians, where the Christians were all Orthodox.
The State of Israel
The battles of Sejera were a series of battles between the Army for the Liberation of Palestine―led by Fawzi al-Qawuqji―and the Golani brigade, during the War of Independence of 1948. The last battle―which took place over seven consecutive days―ended with the breaking of the al-Qawuqji's army and the capture of Sejera on May 6, 1948, by the 12th Battalion, Golani Brigade, preventing the separation of the Upper Galilee and Tiberias from the center of the country.
After the War of Independence, Sejera changed its name to Ilaniya and by 1949 the settlement had expanded to include the territory of the adjacent and now-empty Arab village. Today around 500 people live in Ilaniya, which remains a farming community at heart, with many of the original buildings from its foundation.
Comments