Tira (, , lit. "Fort";Palmer, 1881, p.194), is an Arab city in the Central District of Israel. Part of the Triangle, a concentration of Arab towns and villages adjacent to the Green Line, Tira is close to Kfar Saba. It is known for its weekly market and Arab cuisine.
Tira is not documented in 16th-century records, but its origins date back earlier. In the 18th century, it was resettled by Bani Sa'b tribesmen from Hajjah and Baqa. Today, its population has diverse origins.Grossman, D. (1986). "Oscillations in the Rural Settlement of Samaria and Judaea in the Ottoman Period". in Shomron studies. Dar, S., Safrai, S., (eds). Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House. p. 373
Located within Israel's fertile bread basket, Tira is surrounded by agricultural fields owned by both Arabs and Jews. Today youth employment prospects are low, which has contributed to the city's high crime rate. In , the city had a population of .
historically called Tirat Bani Sa'b (طيرة بني صعب) and today known as Tirat al-Muthallath ("Tira in the Triangle"), to distinguish it from similar named villages.
History The town of Theraspis (modern Deir 'Asfin) recorded on the 6th-century Madaba Map was located 1 km north of al-Tira..Naveh J. , 1959. Deir ‘Asfin 2-1959 (A. Dayan ed.). In Favissa: Past Archaeological Excavation Reports.
Middle Ages In the 12th century, during the Crusader period, the village of Tira was owned by the Order of St. John and was leased to Robert of Sinjil and his heirs. In the 14th and 15th century, the village was a stop on the road between Gaza and Damascus,Petersen, 2001, p. 307, citing al-Zahri ed. Ravaisse, 199, Hartmann 1910, 689 and a khan (inn) was constructed.Petersen, 2001, p. 307, citing al-Umari ed. Shams al-Din
Grossman concludes that although Tira was occupied during Mamluk times, it was subsequently abandoned, serving as a seasonal or temporary settlement for a long period.
Ottoman Empire Tira is not documented in 16th-century records. In the 18th century, it was resettled by Bani Sa'b tribesmen from Hajjah and Baqa. Oral history claims the first residents dug up ancient masonry from Dier 'Asfin for reuse in the construction of the new village. Deir 'Asfin was still inhabited in the 16th century, but became abandoned sometime before Napoleon's campaign.Marom, Roy (2026). Settled Land: The Arab Countryside in Israel/Palestine (in Hebrew). Ra'anana: Lamda Scholarship, The Open University of Israel Press. p. 20. ISBN 978-965-06-1769-1. Pierre Jacotin called the village "Ertahah" on his map from 1799, possibly mixing it up with the name of Irtah, now part of Tulkarm.Karmon, 1960, p. 170
As the conditions of security on the plains improved in the late Ottoman period, the peasants on the safer hilltop villages who had used the land seasonally began to settle more permanently around the khirbas. Until then, they would pass the winter in the hills and shift down in spring to plough, sow, and reap crops. In Tira's case, the modern population descended from clans hailing from the village of Bāqat al-Ḥaṭab. The Maṣārwa, Arab immigrants from Egypt in Ottoman times, formed a sub-class which in that period lacked a traditional hamula (clan) structure. Because they did not own land, they hired themselves out as agricultural labourers.
In the 1860s, the Ottoman authorities granted the village an agricultural plot of land called Ghabat al-Tira in the forest of Arsur (Ar. Al-Ghaba) in the coastal plain, west of the village.Marom, Roy, "The Contribution of Conder's Tent Work in Palestine for the Understanding of Shifting Geographical, Social and Legal Realities in the Sharon during the Late Ottoman Period", in Gurevich, D. and Kidron, A., eds. (2019), Exploring the Holy Land: 150 Years of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Sheffield, UK, Equinox, pp. 212-231
By 1870, Victor Guérin found a "village of seven hundred inhabitants, with gardens planted with fig trees and pomegranates, separated from each other by hedges of cactus."Guérin, 1875, p. 355 In 1870/1871 (1288 AH), an Ottoman census listed the village in the nahiya (sub-district) of Bani Sa'b.
In 1882, the Palestine Exploration Fund's Survey of Western Palestine described "et-Tîreh" as "a conspicuous village on a knoll in the plain, surrounded by olives, with a well on the west side."Conder and Kitchener, 1882, SWP II, p. 166 It was located just south of the monastery Deir 'Asfin on the survey's Plate XI.
British Mandate Tira's lands were considered the most fertile in all of Palestine.
In the 1922 census of Palestine conducted by the British Mandate authorities, "Tireh" had a population of 1,588 inhabitants; 1,582 MuslimsBarron, 1923, Table IX, Sub-district of Tulkarem, p. 28 and 6 Orthodox Christians,Barron, 1923, table XV, p. 48 increasing in the 1931 census to 2,192; 2,190 Muslims and 2 Christians, in a total of 380 houses.Mills, 1932, p. 58
Of the three village councils established in the area by the Mandatory Authorities in the 1940s, one was in Tira (the other two in Baqa al-Gharbiyye and Tayibe). Prior to 1948, one kibbutz and two moshavs near TiraRamat HaKovesh, Kfar Hess and Herutwere established after Tira owners sold their properties to Jewish communities. In the 1945 statistics, Tira had 3,180 Muslim inhabitants,Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics, 1945, p. 22 who owned a total of 26,803 dunams of land.
In 1945, Tira's village lands had extended over 31,359 dunams, of which 26,803 were Arab, and 3,720 under Jewish ownership.
Israel 1948–1949 During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Alexandroni Brigade was ordered to capture and raze Tira. However, the village was occupied by Iraqi troops and did not come under Israeli control until May 1949, in the framework the Jordan-Israeli Armistice Agreement.
On February 10, 1948 a lorry carrying 12 Arabs returning to Tireh from Tulkarm was ambushed by a large group of Jews. A report in the Scotsman newspaper stated that “The Arabs were forced to march into orange grove alongside the road and mowed down by gunfire.”The Scotsman 11/12/1948 Seven of the group were killed and the remaining five wounded.The Times 11/2/1948
The war had cut off Tira's inhabitants from their fields. After the Armistice, Israel placed the area in the Triangle it had won control of under the administration of its Custodian of Enemy Property, which entailed treating the farmlands of towns like Tira according to its Absentees Property Law. Since the owners had, however, never left the area or abandoned their property, they were defined as present absentees.
A clause in the cease-fire agreement with Jordan stipulated that Israel lay under an obligation to respect the property rights of the citizens in the Triangle. Several attempts over the years to reverse the designation of the property owners, who had become Israeli citizens overnight, as "present absentees" in order to reclaim their land were rebuffed, the Supreme Court of Israel stating that international agreements signed by the Israeli government were not justiciable in Israel's courts.
1950s–1960s Over the years 1953–1954, Israel expropriated a block of 5,232 dunams and, by 1962, of the original total, 8,599 dunams remained for village use. The family-clan structure of its residents has not changed since then. Tira, like all other Arab towns in Israel, was placed under military rule, a system not formally abolished until 1966, and in which considerations of jurisdiction were always decided without local consultation, by talks between the military governor and the Ministry of the Interior. This changed in the 1980s, when each town was allowed to have an Arab representative in such councils.
Though Israel abolished the village councils in Tira, and elsewhere, established by the British, in 1952 Tira was given local council status In the township, municipal elections are regarded as far more important than national elections, since the allocation of municipal jobs, the winners' spoils, depends on who wins control of the council. Politically in these early decades, Tira voted predominantly for Israeli left wing parties.According to Sabri Jiryis, in 1956 the then governor had two members of the Tira local council banished in order to stop them from voting in the elections for a new chairman. He favoured the candidate proposed by General Zionists, the party the governor belonged to, and, once the 2 Arabs were banished, the governor's candidate managed to secure a majority. During the 1965 Knesset elections, Moshe Dayan addressed 3,000 people in the village and stated that the official Israeli policy regarding the integration of its Arab citizens was going too far: integration was "unnecessary" and would not take place.
On the eve of the 1956 Suez Crisis, Tira was one of the border villages subject to a snap curfew. The Border Police officer in charge of Tira, Arye Menashes, asked his commander what to do with the returning villagers who were unaware of the curfew and understood the curt response as meaning that he should kill them. Menashes asked if that applied to women and children, and was told that it did. In the event, unlike at the nearby village of Kfar Qasim where the Border Police murdered 48 people, Menashes decided to disobey the order and allowed the villagers to return to their homes safely.
Al-Ard sports club An attempt in 1957 to set up a sports club in Tira was suppressed by the Shin Bet, who considered such associations subversive. In 1958 the Al-Ard movement was established by Israeli Arabs to press for equality between Israeli Arabs and Jews. The movement dissented from the view held by Arab Knesset representatives who supported continuing military rule over Israel's Arab communities. The movement was banned in a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court, with judge Moshe Landau declaring that it posed a threat to Israeli security. After its dissolution, Israel cracked down on Arab sports clubs, on the supposition that such associations were supported by al-Ard, closing one in Taibeh. The Tira sports club re-opened however in 1961, and came to be regarded as a leader in the region's Amal movement. When it programmed a festive sports day in April 1964, the government response was to place 5 key club members based in Tira and nearby Kafr Qara members under administrative detention, and subject the two villages to a military closure. Those who did attend the events were arrested. Tira's Tariq 'Abd al-Hayy, had himself supported their closure. Tira resisted pressure by government officials to close down its own club's activities until late 1968, when the authorities ordered its closure when the Ministry of Defence declared it illegal on the grounds that one of the members was associated with Fatah. Later, when the Land Day movement arose, al-Hayy, by then mayor of Tira and a member of the Israeli Labor Party, clamped down on this expression of Palestinian nationalism by repressing the inaugural Land Day strike in Tira. Over 100 policemen were deployed to break the strike, with several villagers shot and some 40 wounded.
1970s–1990s: Development and land seizures The narrowing of developmental space has meant that land purchases for ownership in the Triangle were four to five times higher per dunam than the price for 49 year land rents in areas where Jewish villages have been established. The land available for Triangle Arabs has been dwindling through expropriation, pari passu with the growth of their populations. Further slimming took place in the 1980s, when the land under the council's jurisdiction was 12,664 dunams, as portions were reassigned to the Drom HaSharon Regional Council. By 1993, land owned by Tira residents amounted to 11,750 dunams, meaning 0.78 dunams (780 square metres) per person. The Israel Land Authority exercises jurisdiction over 1,000 dunams within this area.