Abu Zurayq

Abu Zurayq lay in the northern foothills of the region known as the bilad al-rawha’, the fragrant country, overlooking the plain of Marj ibn Amir, twenty-four kilometres from Haifa at about a hundred metres. Some of its houses stood on a small hill beside the Haifa–Jenin highway. Its name probably referred to the Abu Zurayq Bedouin, who settled there. Its people were Muslims; their houses, scattered at some distance from one another, were built of stone and either mud or cement, with roofs of concrete or of mud, straw and wood. The village had a mosque and a boys’ elementary school and drew its water from several sources — Wadi Abu Zurayq, a spring, and a well.

The economy rested on agriculture and animal husbandry. Grain was the main crop, with vegetables grown under irrigation; in 1942/43 olive trees occupied 100 dunums, and one dunum was planted with orange trees. In 1944/45, 4,092 dunums were allotted to cereals and 282 were irrigated or planted in orchards, out of 6,493 in all. The 1944/45 population was 550. Beside the village stood a tell dating mainly to the Bronze and Iron Ages with some early Islamic material, and on the terraced ground above it a rich sequence of Palaeolithic stone tools has been found; northwest of Ayn Abu Zurayq are the remains of an isolated Roman farmhouse. The villagers had traditionally kept cordial relations with the nearby kibbutz of HaZore’a, including low-level economic cooperation over agriculture, and Arabic-language versions of a Jewish labour periodical were regularly distributed in the village.

Palmach units gained control of Abu Zurayq on 12 April 1948, having seized it briefly three days earlier. According to the New York Times this happened when the Haganah broke a two-day truce to come out of the settlement of Mishmar ha-Emeq and overrun a cluster of neighbouring villages; the battle over Mishmar ha-Emeq had begun on 4 April. On entering the village the Palmach took fifteen adult males captive along with some 200 women and children, according to Benny Morris. He makes no mention of the fate of the men. The women and children were expelled towards Jenin.

The Palestinian newspaper Filastin gave a fuller account. Its correspondent wrote that as dawn broke on the morning after the occupation, a Haganah unit stationed to the north came across a number of villagers lying face down in the fields; the Zionist forces surrounded these people — old men, women and children — and opened fire, killing two women and four children and taking a group of thirty captive. An Arab force later counterattacked, freed the villagers and took them to safety in Jenin. Eliezer Bauer, a Middle East scholar living at HaZore’a, recorded that the men of Abu Zurayq, who belonged to no militia and had not resisted the Haganah, tried to escape by fleeing into the nearby fields but were intercepted by armed Jewish residents of the surrounding kibbutzim and moshavim; that after a firefight in which many were killed, several survivors surrendered and other unarmed men were taken captive, and the majority of these were killed; and that men found hiding in the village itself were executed and the houses looted before being demolished. Bauer’s account was discussed by the members of HaZore’a’s kibbutz council, where what had happened at Abu Zurayq was condemned.

Morris quotes Israeli sources saying that some of the houses were blown up on the night of the occupation and that the demolition of the village was completed by 15 April. The New York Times confirms it, quoting the British authorities on 16 April to the effect that Haganah engineers had blown up the houses left standing. Filastin states that thirty houses were blown up in the course of the capture, five of them still occupied. Most of those who escaped or were expelled ended in makeshift camps around Jenin, where together with people from the other destroyed villages they complained to the Arab Higher Committee, asked for humanitarian aid and demanded that Arab forces be sent to return them to their lands.

No Israeli settlement stands on the village land; ha-Zore’a, built in 1936, is close by to the north, and Zochrot records an expansion of ha-Zore’a onto village ground. The site is overgrown with cactus and with fig and olive trees. The level land nearby is farmed; the uneven ground in the hills is pasture.

Sources

• Abu Zurayq — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Abu Zurayq — Zochrot
• Abu Zurayq — Wikipedia