Wadi Ara or Nahal Iron (Arabic: وادي عارة, Hebrew: נחל עירון, ואדי עארה), refers to an area within Israel that is mostly populated by Arabs. It is located northwest of the Green Line and is mostly within Israel's Haifa District. Today, Highway 65 runs through the wadi.
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Wadi Ara is a 20 km Wadi in northern Israel, that begins at the meeting point of Samaria, the Plain of Manasseh, and the Sharon Plain. The riverbed begins near Umm al-Fahm, and runs SW on the boundary between the Manasseh hills and the Umm al-Fahm hills. Approximately 1 km west of the Border Patrol intersection on Highway 65, the wadi opens into the Sharon plain, and becomes a tributary of the Hadera Stream, south of Talmei Elazar and north of Tel Zeror.
Wadi Ara is an ancient historical route connecting the Israeli coastal plain with the Jezreel Valley.
In the Late Bronze Age, the Egyptian king, Thutmose III, is known to have used the route, then called Aruna, to surprise his enemies, and take control of Megiddo. According to information from a stela from Armant - the king of Kadesh advanced his army to Megiddo.[1] Thutmose III mustered his own army and departed Egypt, passing through the border fortress of Tjaru (Sile).[2] Thutmose marched his troops through the coastal plain as far as Jamnia, then inland to Yehem, a small city near Megiddo.[2] The ensuing Battle of Megiddo probably was the largest battle in any of Thutmose's seventeen campaigns.[1] A ridge of mountains jutting inland from Mount Carmel stood between Thutmose and Megiddo, and he had three potential routes to take.[1] The northern route and the southern route, both of which went around the mountain, were judged by his council of war to be the safest, but Thutmose, in an act of great bravery (or so he boasts, but such self-praise is normal in Egyptian texts), accused the council of cowardice and took a dangerous route[2] through the Aruna mountain pass, which he alleged was only wide enough for the army to pass "horse after horse and man after man."[2]
Originally captured by Arab League forces (Iraqi) in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, it was ceded to Israel in an apparent exchange for territory south of Hebron in the 1949 Israel-Jordan armistice. In March 1949 as the Iraqi forces withdrew from Palestine and handed over their positions to the smaller Jordanian legion, 3 Israeli brigades moved into positions in Operation Shin-Tav-Shin. Following the operation, Israel renegotiated the cease fire line in the Wadi Ara area of the Northern West Bank in an agreement reached on 23 March 1949 and incorporated into the General Armistice Agreement. It has been estimated that 15 villages were ceded to Israel.[3]
The area has come under political attention as some Israeli politicians such as Avigdor Lieberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party have brought up transferring the area to the sovereignty and administration of the Palestinian Authority for a future Palestinian State. In return the Palestinian Authority would transfer specific large Israeli settlement "blocs" within the West Bank east of the Green Line to the Israel. According to politicians who support this land-swap, Israel would ensure and secure itself as a primarily Jewish state. However many politicians within the Knesset disagree and believe it would only decrease Israel's Arab population by a mere 10%, while most Israeli Arabs object to trading Israeli citizenship for Palestinian citizenship.[4]