Ar'ara

Pottery sherds from Persian period have been found here.[3]

Burial complexes from the Roman period have been excavated at Ar'ara, revealing clay lamps, glass vessels and beads, commonly used in the 1st to 4th century CE.[4] Rock-cut tombs with niches, and Byzantine period ceramics have been found.[5]

In the Crusader period, the place was known as "Castellum Arearum". In the land allocation made by sultan Baybars in 663 H. (1265-1266 C.E.), Ar'ara was shared between his amirs Ala' al-Din and Sayf al-Din Bayhaq al-Baghdadi.[6]

A few clay fragments from the Mamluk period have been found at the same location as the Roman remains.[4]

Ar'ara, like the rest of Palestine, was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Musmus belonged to the Turabay Emirate (1517-1683), which encompassed also the Jezreel Valley, Haifa, Jenin, Beit She'an Valley, northern Jabal Nablus, Bilad al-Ruha/Ramot Menashe, and the northern part of the Sharon plain.[7][8]

In 1596, Ar'ara appeared in Ottoman tax registers as being in the Nahiya of Sa'ra of the Liwa of Lajjun. It had a population of 8 Muslim households and paid a fixed tax rate of 25% on agricultural products, which included wheat, barley, summer crops, olives, and goats or beehives; a total of 9,000 akçe.[9]

By the eighteenth century, the village remained in the administrative district of Lajjun, but the revenue of the place was farmed for the Mutasarrıf of Jaffa.[10] In 1838, it was noted as a village in the Jenin district.[11]

In the late nineteenth century, the site was described as:

A village of moderate size on high ground, with a spring to the east, a second to the west and a well to the south. There are rock cut tombs near. The population is stated by Consul Rogers (1859) as 400, the cultivation then being 30 feddans.[12]

A population list from about 1887 showed that Ar'arah had about 600 inhabitants; all Muslims.[13]

In the 1922 census of Palestine conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Ar'ara had a population 735, all Muslims.[14] This had increased in the 1931 census to 971, still all Muslims, in 150 houses.[15]

In the 1945 statistics, Ar'ara and Arah had a population of 2,290 Muslims,[16] 1,490 in Ar'ara and 800 in 'Ara,[17] and a privately owned land area of 29,537 dunums,[18] in addition to 5,802 dunams of publicly owned land.[19] Of this, 1,724 dunams were for plantations and irrigable land, 20,560 for cereals,[20] while 33 dunams were built-up (urban) land.[21]

• 
  Ar'ara 1942 1:20,000
• 
  Ar'ara 1945 1:250,000

Ar'ara was transferred from Jordanian to Israeli jurisdiction in 1949 under the Rhodes armistice agreements.[22]

By 1962 the area had been reduced to 7,269 dunums, partly due to expropriations of 8,236 dunums by the Israeli government in 1953–54.[18] One case of expropriation from a private landowner named Younis became a test case before the High Court of Israel in 1953,[23] as the land had been expropriated by the government without notifying the owner.[23] In 1954 the court ruled that the law did not require the owner to be notified and did not provide a right for the owner to contest the expropriation in advance.[23] This ruling and one other effectively ended the possibility of land owners using the courts to contest the seizure of their land.[23] The neighboring village of ʿAra was merged with Ar'ara in 1985.