Al-Lajjun

Al-Lajjun lay on a low rise on the southwestern edge of the Marj Ibn Amir plain, on both banks of Wadi al-Lajjun and a kilometre from the great mound of Tell al-Mutasallim, ancient Megiddo. Its name preserves that of Legio, the camp established there for the Sixth Legion Ferrata after the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt; in the third century the settlement became a city and took the name Maximianopolis. It passed to Arab rule in the seventh century, was taken by the Crusaders and recovered by Salah al-Din in 1187, and appears in the works of Ibn al-Faqih, al-Maqdisi and Yaqut al-Hamawi, who described a pleasant town with abundant fresh water and a mosque the townspeople associated with Abraham. Under the Ottomans it gave its name to the Lajjun sanjak, a district of fifty-five villages long governed by the Turabay family.

The village declined and was for a time deserted — the British consul James Finn saw no village on the site in the mid-nineteenth century — before families from Umm al-Fahm moved down in the late nineteenth century to work its farmland and settled around the springs and the old khan. When German archaeologists excavated Megiddo in 1903, some villagers reused the unearthed stones for their houses. More people arrived from Umm al-Fahm during the Mandate, particularly in the late 1930s under British reprisals against participants in the 1936–39 revolt, and the village grew into three quarters, each held by one or more clans: al-Mahajina al-Tahta and al-Ghubariyya, al-Jabbarin and al-Mahamid, and al-Mahajina al-Fawqa at Khirbat al-Khan. A white stone mosque was built in the eastern quarter in 1943 and a second in the al-Mahamid quarter; a school founded in 1937 had eighty-three pupils by 1944. There were six grain mills powered by the local springs, a health centre, a small market, and a bus company founded by a villager from Umm al-Fahm which by 1937 ran seven buses to Umm al-Fahm, Haifa and neighbouring villages. In 1944/45 the village counted 1,103 people, and the survey recorded 77,242 dunums for al-Lajjun together with Umm al-Fahm and a cluster of adjoining hamlets.

Fighting reached the village early. The New York Times reported that al-Lajjun was attacked in mid-April 1948 in the battles around the settlement of Mishmar ha-Emeq, that twelve people were killed and fifteen wounded, and that twenty-seven buildings in al-Lajjun and nearby villages were blown up by the Haganah. The commander of the Arab Liberation Army, Fawzi al-Qawuqji, reported an assault on the crossroads at al-Lajjun on 13 April which failed, and further attacks on ALA positions there in early May. The village was finally entered at dawn on 30 May 1948 by the Golani Brigade, in the wake of the clearing of the Baysan valley and as a prelude to the unsuccessful Israeli attack on Jenin; Zochrot names the brigade’s Fourth Battalion, the unit whose practice in the Baysan valley had been to expel villagers directly.

Kibbutz Megiddo was built on part of the village lands from 1949. Around eighty per cent of al-Lajjun’s inhabitants went back up to Umm al-Fahm, which was transferred to Israel under the 1949 armistice, so that they live today as citizens of Israel and internally displaced people within sight of their fields. The white stone mosque still stands inside the kibbutz grounds, used as a workshop, along with a village mill, the health centre and a few partly demolished houses. The archaeological remains of the village itself were bulldozed into heaps to clear the fields for planting, without record or excavation.

Sources

• Al-Lajjun — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Al-Lajjun — Zochrot
• Lajjun — Wikipedia