Early Roman pottery fragments have been found in an excavation in Dafna.[2] A place called Daphne was mentioned in this vicinity by Josephus.[3]
Edward Robinson, who visited in 1852, identified Daphne with a "low mound of rubbish with cut stones, evidently the remains of a former town" called Difneh that he encountered while riding south from Tel el-Qadi to Mansura.[3] He noted that the land for some distance south was called Ard Difneh.[3]
An Arab settlement was founded sometime between 1858 and 1878.[7] Difnah was listed as a village by the Mandate government in 1924.[8] At the time of the 1931 census, Dafna had 66 occupied houses and a population of 318 Muslims and one Christian.[9] At the beginning of 1939, the village was pillaged by bedouin, causing most of the population to leave.[10] The land was soon purchased by the Jewish National Fund.[10] The JNF was represented in the negotiations by the same man, Kamel Hussein, who had earlier led the raid on Tel-Hai in which Josef Trumpeldor was killed.[10]
The original Jewish settlers were immigrants mostly from Poland and Lithuania.[11]
By the 1944/45 statistics, Dafna had a population of 380 Jews[12] with a total land area of 2,663 dunams, of which Jews owned 2,189 dunams.[13] Of this, a total of 2,385 dunams of land were irrigated or used for plantations, 5 dunums were used for cereals;[14] while 50 dunams were classified as built-up (or Urban) area.[15]
In 1947, it had a population of 600.[11] During early 1947 Palmach Officer Moshe Kelman was ordered by the Haganah High Command to supervise the execution and burial of a Jew accused of collaborating with the British. The execution took place at Kibbutz Dafna.[16][17]
The fictional kibbutz Gan Dafna, its name presumably a nod to the real-life kibbutz Dafna, figures prominently in Leon Uris's book Exodus, as the hometown of the protagonist Ari Ben Caanan.
On 4 February 1997, at approximately 19:00, two "Yasur" Sikorsky CH 53 helicopters carrying 73 soldiers and loaded with ammunition collided in mid-air over She'ar Yashuv. One of the helicopters smashed into an open field near the cemetery of Dafna.[19] It is believed that this accident increased the pressure on the IDF to withdraw its forces from Lebanon, finally done in May 2000.[20]
^ abcE. Robinson; E. Smith; et al. (1856). Later Biblical Researches in Palestine and in the Adjacent Regions — A Journal of Travel in the Year 1852. Boston: Crocker and Brewster. pp. 393–394.
^C. R. Conder and H. H. Kitchener (1881). The Survey of Western Palestine. Vol. I. London: The Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund. p. 118. Later Israeli maps marked Khirbet Dafna at a different place 1km SE of Dafna (Sheet "Dan", 1:20,000, at 2109/2921, Survey of Israel 1956).
^Y. Karmon (1953). "The Settlement of the Northern Huleh Valley since 1838". Israel Exploration Journal. 3 (1): 4–25.
^Official Gazette of the Government of Palestine. Vol. 116. 1 June 1924. p. 687.
^E. Mills, ed. (1932). Census of Palestine 1931. Population of Villages, Towns and Administrative Areas. Jerusalem: Government of Palestine. p. 105.
^ abcArieh L. Avnieri (1984). The Claim of Dispossession; Jewish Land-Settlement and the Arabs, 1878-1948. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books. pp. 195–196.
^ abcJewish National Fund (1949). Jewish Villages in Israel. Jerusalem: Hamadpis Liphshitz Press. p. 29.
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