Part of the Triangle, a concentration of Arab towns and villages adjacent to the Green Line, Tira is close to Kfar Saba.

[7] In the 12th century, during the Crusader period, the village of Tira was owned by the Order of St. John and was leased to Robert of Sinjil and his heirs.

[9] Grossman concludes that although Tira was occupied during Mamluk times, it was subsequently abandoned, serving as a seasonal or temporary settlement for a long period.

[11] As the conditions of security on the plains improved in the late Ottoman period, the peasants on the safer hilltop villages who had used the land seasonally began to settle more permanently around the khirbas.

[12] The Maṣārwa, Arab immigrants from Egypt in Ottoman times, formed a sub-class which in that period lacked a traditional hamula (clan) structure.

[13] In the 1860s, the Ottoman authorities granted the village an agricultural plot of land called Ghabat al-Tira in the forest of Arsur (Ar.

[14][15] By 1870, Victor Guérin found a "village of seven hundred inhabitants, with gardens planted with fig trees and pomegranates, separated from each other by hedges of cactus.

[23] Prior to 1948, one kibbutz and two moshavs near Tira—Ramat HaKovesh, Kfar Hess and Herut—were established after Tira owners sold their properties to Jewish communities.

[a] A clause in the cease-fire agreement with Jordan stipulated that Israel lay under an obligation to respect the property rights of the citizens in the Triangle.

Several attempts over the years to reverse the designation of the property owners, who had become Israeli citizens overnight, as "present absentees" in order to reclaim their land were rebuffed, the Supreme Court of Israel stating that international agreements signed by the Israeli government were not justiciable in Israel's courts.

[d]According to Sabri Jiryis, in 1956 the then governor had two members of the Tira local council banished in order to stop them from voting in the elections for a new chairman.

[35] The Border Police officer in charge of Tira, Arye Menashes, asked his commander what to do with the returning villagers who were unaware of the curfew and understood the curt response as meaning that he should kill them.

[35] An attempt in 1957 to set up a sports club in Tira was suppressed by the Shin Bet, who considered such associations subversive.

After its dissolution, Israel cracked down on Arab sports clubs, on the supposition that such associations were supported by al-Ard, closing one in Taibeh.

[36] Tira resisted pressure by government officials to close down its own club's activities until late 1968, when the authorities ordered its closure when the Ministry of Defence declared it illegal on the grounds that one of the members was associated with Fatah.

[42] Over the following years, 1994–1995, further confiscations took place, when a network of high-tension power lines to service Jewish settlements was built along the predominantly private owned Trans-Israel toll highway, which itself was calculated to cause the confiscation of over 4,000 dunams of private Arab land in the Triangle,[43] and the infrastructure, with its 300 metres leeway moved off the highway and ran through Tira agricultural tracts, leading to further restrictions of land use.

[45] Repeated attempts to reclaim lost land and allow expansion to cope with demographic growth (1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988) were rejected by the Ministry of the Interior.

A small number of Jews also live in Tira, drawn by the cheaper housing costs compared with other nearby Jewish localities, such as Kfar Saba.

[50] In 2012, Tira's leaders complained that the police treated Arabs as second class citizens and did not properly investigate crime.

[52] In 2021, Tira's mayor claimed that the lack of a witness protection program for Arab communities contributed to the fear of providing evidence.

[6] According to Nimer Sultany, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a law professor from Tira, the high crime and poverty rate can be traced back to decades of land confiscation, home demolition, incarceration and discrimination in education and employment in the traditionally agricultural town.