'Ajjur

‘Ajjur spread over hilly ground in the western foothills of the Hebron mountains, about 24 kilometres northwest of Hebron at an average elevation of 275 metres, linked by a secondary road to the highway between Bayt Jibrin and the Jaffa–Jerusalem road. Its old architecture — particularly a waqf building at its centre — suggests the village in its modern form dates from the early Fatimid period. In 1596 it was a village of 193 people in the nahiya of Gaza, paying tax on wheat, barley, fruit, goats, beehives and vineyards. The Jerusalem chronicler Mujir al-Din al-Hanbali recorded passing through it on the road from Gaza to Jerusalem.

It was a large place by the standards of the hill country. The 1931 census counted 2,017 people in 566 houses, a figure that also takes in Khirbat al-Sura; the 1945 British village statistics counted 3,730, all but ten of them Muslims, a figure that also takes in Khirbat ‘Ammuriyya. Both khirbas lay inside ‘Ajjur’s land and were probably occupied only for part of the year, by villagers moving their livestock off the planted fields in the rainy season. The village held 58,074 dunums — 25,227 of them under cereals and 2,428 irrigated or planted as orchard. There were two schools: the Abu Hasan private school, running since Ottoman times in the waqf building, and a second opened in 1934. Children from the surrounding villages came to both. There were two mosques, one Fatimid and one recent, four shrines inside the village and four more on its land. Wheat and olives were the crops; goat herding was the second economy, and some men worked as carpenters, tanners and shoemakers. A Friday market was held on a wide site east of the village and drew merchants from towns and villages across Palestine. At least twenty-two archaeological sites lay on ‘Ajjur’s land, apart from the village itself.

The accounts of when ‘Ajjur emptied do not agree, and the disagreement is worth stating. The History of the War of Independence records that the Fourth Battalion of the Giv’ati Brigade occupied the village on 23 October 1948, in operations coordinated with Operation Yoav, and that with its capture the southern and central fronts were joined; Zochrot gives 24 October and the same brigade. But Benny Morris records an earlier military assault on 23–24 July 1948 as the primary cause of the village’s depopulation, with October as secondary. Morris also writes that most of the people of ‘Ajjur and the villages around it fled before the occupation, and that those who stayed were expelled.

Five Israeli settlements were built on ‘Ajjur’s lands: Agur, close to the village site, in 1950; Tirosh to the northwest in 1955; Tzafririm and Giv’at Yesh’ayahu in 1958; Li-‘On to the southeast in 1960. Three village houses survive. Two are deserted and one has been turned into a warehouse; one of the deserted houses is a two-storey stone building with a wide triple-arched porch across its front. Cactus, eucalyptus, almond and carob grow among truncated walls and rubble. The site is fenced and used for grazing, and the land around it has been absorbed by Agur.

Sources

• ‘Ajjur — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• ‘Ajjur — Zochrot
• ‘Ajjur — English Wikipedia, for the 1945 Village Statistics figure and Morris’s two depopulation dates