LIFTA – JERUSALEM DISTRICT

31°47′46″N / 35°11′46″E

1948: Population 2,958; Houses 410 (1931, including the Schneller neighborhood)

Occupation date: Attacked on January 29, 1948; depopulated by early February
Occupying forces: The Stern Gang (also known as Leḥi) reprisals on the outskirts of the village; Haganah and Etzel military activity in the vicinity
Occupying operation: N/A

Post 1948: In February–March 1948 Jews evacuated from front line Yemin Moshe were resettled in empty houses in Lifta. In May of the same year, Lifta was settled with Jews evacuated from ‛Atarōt, which had fallen to the Jordanians,² and later with immigrants from Yemen and Kurdistan. By the 1960s, most of the aforementioned had left. In 1950 Lifta was annexed to the municipality of Jerusalem. The Giv‛at Shaʼūl neighborhood of Jerusalem was extended onto its land, as well as Upper Romema and Sanhedria. In the 1970s the high-tech industrial area of Har Ḥotzvim was built on village land. In 1959 Lifta was classified as a nature reserve. In 1974 the neighborhoods of Ramot Alon, Ramat Eshkōl, and Giv‛at HaMivtar were established across the green line on land from Lifta that had been annexed to the municipality of Jerusalem. In 2006, a plan to build a luxury neighborhood in Lifta, including 268 new housing units and the renovation of existing houses, was approved. Due to financial, bureaucratic, and technical reasons, the plan has not been implemented.³

Today: The mosque, school, and around 55 houses—mostly deserted, with some inhabited by Jewish families—remain on the site. In the intervening years, homeless people, drug addicts, and even a gang of Jewish extremists who planned to bomb the Temple Mount mosques have found refuge in the empty houses of Lifta.

Official Israeli name: Mei Neftoaḥ (the biblical name identified with the place). The Arabic name, Lifta, appears on some contemporary maps of Israel.