History
The town's area was populated in ancient times, with archaeological ruins dating back to Roman times. The modern town was founded in the 17th century by inhabitants of the nearby village Mes'ha. In 1917, during World War I, Kafr Qasim (together with the rest of the area) was captured from the ruling Ottoman Empire by the British Army and was later placed under the British Mandate of Palestine. Kafr Qasim is known as the village where the Israeli military advances came to a halt in the central part of Palestine during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In 1949, Israel annexed the town in accordance with the armistice agreements, which ended the war.
Kafr Qasim became known because of the massacre that was committed by the Israel border police (MAGAV) on October 29, 1956, during which 49 civilians were shot dead. This massacre remains an open wound between the villagers and rest of the Israeli society. In 1959, the town was granted local council status by the Israeli Interior Ministry.
In recent years, the town became known as the place where Sheikh Abdullah Nimar Darwish started the Islamic Movement. Israeli parliamentarian Sheikh Ibrahim Sarsur, a native of Kafr Qasim, served for a decade on the town council and heads the southern faction of the Islamic Movement of Israel since 1999. In 2008, it was announced that Kafr Qasim could soon become a city.
Read more about this topic: Kafr Qasim
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“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)