Al-Damun

Al-Damun lay eleven and a half kilometers southeast of Acre, on the banks of the Na’amin River, which its people tapped for drinking water and irrigation. It is an old place: Nasir Khusraw, traveling through in 1047, stopped at a cave in Damun venerated as the tomb of the prophet Dhul-Kifl, and the Crusaders knew the village as Damar. In 1596 it counted thirty-three households. The village holds a particular place in Galilee history — its mosque was built in 1722–23 by Ali ibn Salih al-Zaydani, uncle of Daher al-Umar, and its inscriptions preserve the genealogy of the Zayadina, the family that went on to rule the Galilee from Acre. By 1875 the village was prosperous, with some 800 people and two mosques; the Ottomans added a boys’ school in 1886. Its farmers grew grain and olives and were known for their watermelons and cantaloupes, and its artisans plaited mats and baskets from esparto grass. The 1945 survey counted 1,310 people — 1,240 Muslims and 70 Christians — on 20,357 dunums.

The village tried to stay out of the war: in April 1948 the son of its main landowner, Sadiq Karaman, reportedly paid the local Arab Liberation Army garrison £P5,000 to leave, hoping to keep al-Damun out of the fighting. It did not save the village. After the first Israeli successes of Operation Dekel, units of the Sheva’ Brigade moved west and captured al-Damun in the operation’s second stage, on 15–16 July 1948 — the Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref dates its fall earlier, to May, after the capture of Acre. Benny Morris writes that the inhabitants, demoralized by the fall of Acre and then Nazareth, fled under the bombardment that preceded the attack, and that those who remained were expelled; the village was then razed.

Most of al-Damun’s people became internally displaced Palestinians inside Israel, settling in nearby Tamra, Kabul, I’billin, and Shefa-Amr; by one 2008 estimate the village’s refugees and their descendants numbered over 12,600. Khalidi, visiting in 1992, found the site overgrown with thorns, cacti, olive trees, and pines, with scattered stone and concrete rubble, the old structure over the central water source collapsing, and the cemetery still extant. Kibbutz Yas’ur cultivates the village lands, and al-Damun is one of the villages to which annual Marches of Return are held.

Sources

• Al-Damun — Palestine Remembered
• Al-Damun — Zochrot
• Al-Damun — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)