Al-'Abbasiyya

Al-‘Abbasiyya stood on flat ground on the central coastal plain thirteen kilometers from Jaffa, in the cluster of villages east of the city, with highways running to Jaffa, Lydda and Ramla, the Jaffa–Lydda railway passing immediately south of it and Lydda airport four kilometers further south. Its written record is long. The village is the Yehud of Joshua 19:45, one of the towns held by the tribe of Dan; the Romans knew the place as Iudaea, and after them it was called al-Yahudiyya. In 1596 it was a village in the nahiya of Ramla, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 693 people, taxed on wheat, barley, fruit and sesame and on goats and beehives. The Syrian Sufi traveler Mustafa al-Bakri al-Siddiqi, passing through in the middle of the eighteenth century, recorded that he visited the shrine of al-Nabi Huda there and stayed in the village at a friend’s invitation. In the late nineteenth century it held between 800 and 1,000 people in houses of adobe brick, ringed by palm trees, drawing its water from a nearby pond.

In 1932 the residents renamed the village al-‘Abbasiyya — chiefly in memory of a Shaykh al-‘Abbas buried there, and in allusion to the Abbasid empire. All but twenty of its people were Muslims. It had two mosques: a large one of stone with a minaret twenty-one meters high, originally at the center of the village, and a smaller one to the northwest. The boys’ school, founded in 1919, became a junior high school in 1941 with fourteen teachers and 293 pupils, the largest village school in the Jaffa subdistrict, with twenty-seven dunums attached for agricultural training; the girls’ school opened in 1943 with 101 pupils. The villagers ran a social and cultural club, al-Nadi al-‘Abbasi, which kept a library and a football team, and from 1945 a local council charged with improving services and paving the roads. They lived from agriculture and from plaiting mats out of papyrus brought from the marshes of Lake al-Hula, and during the Second World War began raising Holstein cows. In 1944/45, 3,879 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 12,348 under cereals, with 1,019 dunums irrigated or in orchards, watered from numerous artesian wells. People came from the neighboring villages to the Saturday market, where agricultural produce, animals and textiles were bought and sold. The census of 1931 counted 3,258 people in 772 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 5,650 Arabs, alongside 150 Jews.

The war came to al-‘Abbasiyya a year before the village fell. On 13 December 1947 the Irgun Zvai Leumi attacked it as part of a series of simultaneous raids across the country; the History of the Haganah records that the raiders entered in four vehicles, set off explosive charges beside several houses and left. The New York Times put the dead at seven, with seven more seriously wounded, two of whom — a five-year-old child and a twenty-year-old woman — died later; five further casualties were reported in the following days. The paper reported that the twenty-four attackers were disguised as British soldiers, that they “shot up Yehudiya, blew up a number of houses,” and that one group opened fire on villagers sitting outside a cafe while the rest set time bombs against the houses. The Palestinian newspaper Filastin reported that a booby-trapped car had been left behind in the village and caused some of the casualties, and that British troops reached the scene while the attack was still in progress but did not intervene, encircling the village only partially and leaving the attackers a way out to the north. On 24 February a car belonging to the Jewish Settlement Police drove through the village and a grenade was thrown at passers-by, killing two, according to an official British communiqué quoted by Filastin.

In late April 1948 the Haganah began Operation Hametz, designed to take the villages south and east of Jaffa and so isolate the city; the Irgun had begun a frontal attack on Jaffa itself on 25 April. Four days later the Haganah’s Alexandroni Brigade took control of the region around al-‘Abbasiyya, and the village itself was occupied by the Irgun on 4 May, as part of the general Haganah plan to expel the Palestinian population of the coastal strip between Tel Aviv and Zikhron Ya’aqov. The New York Times reported that the attack began on the night of 3 May and that its first phase was over by six the following morning; the inhabitants were probably expelled then. The Irgun held the village for five weeks, according to the History of the Haganah, and withdrew after an Arab counterattack on the eve of the first truce on 11 June. Fighting continued around it into the truce. The village stayed in Arab hands for about a month, and was retaken on 10 July during Operation Dani by units of the Israeli Home Guard, in an offensive that took half a dozen neighboring villages at once and was coordinated with the attack on Ramla and Lydda; the History of the Haganah says it fell practically without fighting. Zochrot dates the occupation to 10 July and names the Irgun and the Israeli army as the occupying forces.

On 13 September 1948 Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion asked the Israeli cabinet’s permission to destroy the village, in the name of the commander of the Central Front, General Zvi Ayalon, on the grounds that there was not enough manpower to occupy the area fully. Benny Morris describes the request but does not say whether it was carried out in full; ten days later the Israeli Military Government recommended settling Jewish immigrants in the village, which suggests it was not.

Yehud was established on the village site in 1948, Magshimim to the east in 1949, and Ganne Yehuda, Ganne Tiqwa and Savyon in 1951, 1953 and 1954. Ben-Gurion airport also stands on land that belonged to al-‘Abbasiyya. The main mosque and the shrine of al-Nabi Huda survive: the mosque deserted and cracking in several places, the shrine built of stone under a dome. An Israeli coffee shop stands at the entrance of a main street the villagers called Ziqaq al-Raml, Sand Lane. A number of houses remain, occupied by Yehud’s Jewish residents or turned to other uses — one concrete house with a slanted roof and a porch under corrugated metal, another two-storey house with a tiled, tent-shaped roof now a commercial building. The land around the site is only partly built over; the rest is untended and overgrown with pine and Christ’s-thorn.

Sources

• al-‘Abbasiyya — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• al-‘Abbasiyya (Yahudiyya) — Zochrot