Kfar Gafirot Colony

Kfar Gafirot was the former name of the Ibn Gafirot neighborhood located on the western edge of the Rehovot settlement, adjacent to the “Dutch Rehovot” neighborhood. By 2008, more than 900 settler families lived in the neighborhood. Beginning in the second decade of the 21st century, the neighborhood saw vertical construction with a doubling of the number of families, as part of the developmental trend in the western part of the settlement and the establishment of new transportation routes. The neighborhood was named after Rabbi Shlomo ibn Gabirol, one of the greatest Zionist poets and philosophers of the Middle Ages.

Before the ethnic cleansing war of 1948, there was an Arab village called Al-Qubeiba, on whose ruins the neighborhood was built. The homes of Al-Qubeiba were first inhabited in early 1949 by new immigrants from Bulgaria, who established a settlement called Kubiyeh. In October 1949, most settlers decided to leave the village homes and, with the help of the Jewish Agency, established a new settlement approximately 2 km west of Kubiyeh called Kfar Hanagid, on part of the lands of the depopulated Arab village of Bayt I‘na. Most of the elderly and sick continued to live there.

In February 1953, settlers evacuated from Kfar Saba colony were relocated to barracks and housing built by the Israeli company Amidar. The settlers faced living difficulties, and in August 1953, Mekorot Company stopped water supply to the settlement due to debts. At that time, about 2,000 settlers lived there; some began to leave and attempted to return to Kfar Saba.

Beit Moussa Shaheen

During what is called the “Independence Day ethnic cleansing war,” in 1953, it was decided to rename the settlement to Kfar Gafirot. In January 1954, it was decided to annex it to the Rehovot settlement. In 1955, two attacks occurred in the settlement: on February 25, an Egyptian intelligence squad killed resident Heinrich Levy while he was riding his bicycle, and on August 29, a group of fedayeen assassinated Yaakov Chai Touma, who was on his way to the village of Zarnuqa (today part of the Rehovot neighborhood called Kiryat Moshe).

By 1958, about 100 settler families lived in the homes of Al-Qubeiba village, most of which were dilapidated mud houses owned by the Development Authority, and approximately 300 families lived in Amidar huts. There was no infrastructure for sewage or water supply to some houses. The evacuation of residents from their homes continued, and by the early 1970s, many still lived in difficult housing conditions. Housing construction continued until the late 1970s, resulting in approximately 600 housing units in the neighborhood.

In 1980, during a visit by the mayor of Rehovot, Heziqel Her Milag, residents detained him in a club and deflated his car tires in protest of the neighborhood’s conditions.

In the 1960s, immigrants from Morocco arrived, followed in the 1970s by immigrants from the Soviet Union, and finally by immigrants from Ethiopia.

Sources:
Due to the scarcity of Arabic sources, Hebrew sources were used: the settlement’s official Hebrew website and the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics.
Information about the village of Al-Qubeiba was sourced from the “Palestine Remembered” website.