Al-Jura

Al-Jura stood on flat ground less than a kilometer from the shore, twenty kilometers from Gaza and five kilometers west of the city of al-Majdal, ringed by sandy hills. To its south lay the expanse the people called rimal Asqalan, the sands of Ascalon, formed by the slow movement of the coastal dunes. The village was also known as Jurat Asqalan, to distinguish it from the other villages of the same first name, and is thought to have been built on the ruins of an ancient settlement known in Roman times as Jagur. It appears in the Ottoman records of the late sixteenth century as Jawra, or Jawrit al-Hajja, in the nahiya of Gaza in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 253 people. The Syrian Sufi traveler Mustafa al-Bakri al-Siddiqi recorded visiting it in the middle of the eighteenth century before going on to Hamama.

By the late nineteenth century al-Jura was rectangular in plan, its people all Muslims, their houses built of adobe brick and of stone carried in from the ruins of Ascalon. They kept a village mosque with a two-room annex for guests from other places, and a school founded in 1919 that enrolled 206 pupils in the 1940s; the mosque, the school and the marketplace all stood at the center of the village. Because it was on the coast al-Jura was cooler in summer than the country inland, and served as the summer resort of al-Majdal. An annual spring mawsim was held there, and people came from the cities and villages of the Gaza subdistrict to swim, to take part in the sports and the religious festivals, and to shop at the market got up for the occasion.

The economy was diversified. Fishing and bird-hunting were the villagers’ main occupations — al-Jura was one of the main fishing centers in Palestine — and the fish and game were sold in the towns and villages around. Agriculture came next: rainfed and irrigated crops on the village land, with trees bearing citrus, grapes, apricots, apples and almonds, and other ground given to vegetables, onions and grain. In 1944/45, 481 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 2,795 under cereals, with 7,198 dunums irrigated or in orchards. Some villagers worked in handicrafts, making baskets and weaving nets.

The 1922 census counted 1,326 people, all Muslims; the 1931 census counted 1,754 in 396 houses. For 1944/45 Zochrot, following Khalidi, records 2,420 Arabs, which is also the figure this archive’s geodata carries for 1945. PalQuest’s own table for al-Jura gives 420 for 1944/45 with the Arab column left blank; that figure cannot be reconciled with 1,754 in 1931 and appears to be a transcription error, but it is recorded here because it stands in the source.

The village was almost certainly occupied at the same time as al-Majdal, on 4–5 November 1948, at the very end of Operation Yoav; Zochrot dates the occupation to 5 November. Al-Jura was among the first targets bombed in the operation, according to an Egyptian communiqué quoted in the New York Times, and on 15 October United Press International reported from Cairo that Israeli aircraft had bombed the village along with Gaza and al-Majdal. Its people probably fled to the Gaza Strip as a result of the occupation and of the preliminary attacks from the air across the whole coastal area.

The city of Ashkelon was established on village lands in 1948. Only one of the village houses was spared; thorny plants grow on the parts of the site Ashkelon has not built over.

Sources

• al-Jura — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• al-Jura (Gaza) — Zochrot