Al-Masmiyya al-Kabira

Al-Masmiyya al-Kabira stood on the southern coastal plain forty-one kilometers from Gaza, bordered on the north by a wadi and set at the junction of the highways running southwest to al-Majdal, northeast to Ramla, and on to the Jerusalem–Jaffa road. The Syrian Sufi traveler Mustafa al-Bakri al-Siddiqi mentioned it on his journey through the region in the middle of the eighteenth century, and at the end of that century the French savant Volney noted that al-Masmiyya produced a great deal of spun cotton. The qualifier al-Kabira — major — was added later to distinguish it from its twin, al-Masmiyya al-Saghira, the minor, founded about a century before 1948.

In the late nineteenth century the village was laid out roughly as a trapezoid with its long side facing west, surrounded by gardens, its houses built of adobe brick or concrete; the newest building extended west and southwest. The population was Muslim. There were two mosques and two schools, a boys’ school built in 1922 and a girls’ school in 1944, with 307 pupils in the one and thirty-nine in the other by the middle of the 1940s, and a village council. Water for the household came from wells. Agriculture carried the economy, with grain and citrus the dominant crops: in 1944/45, 1,005 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 18,082 under cereals, with 597 dunums irrigated or in orchards. The villagers also kept livestock and poultry, and some worked at a nearby British army camp. The village had a petrol station and a clinic, and its Thursday market drew people from the surrounding communities. The census of 1931 counted 1,756 people in 354 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 2,520.

Al-Masmiyya al-Kabira fell during Operation An-Far. The New York Times reported that it had been occupied by 11 July 1948, blocking an Egyptian attempt to break through to al-Latrun from the direction of al-Majdal; Zochrot dates the occupation to 9 July. The Israeli History of the War of Independence describes it differently, as one of the villages taken in clearing operations in the brigade’s rear, to remove what it calls the threat posed by concentrations of Arab civilians behind the front.

Four settlements were established on the village lands: Bene Re’em, originally Kerem Re’em, and Chatzav in 1949; Yinnon in 1952; and Achawa in 1976. Two state-sponsored farms, Mashmi’at Shalom and Chawwat Berurim, were built on village land in the 1950s. Both schools survive. The girls’ school is deserted; the boys’ school has been converted into an Israeli army installation. Several houses stand, some inhabited, others turned into warehouses, and one a shop selling juice — all concrete, with flat roofs and rectangular doors and windows. A date palm grows in the yard of a house that belonged to Tawfiq al-Rabi. An Israeli petrol station stands on the spot where the village’s own station, the property of Hasan Abd al-Aziz and Nimr Muhanna, used to be. The land around is farmed by Israelis.

Sources

• al-Masmiyya al-Kabira — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• al-Masmiyya al-Kabira — Zochrot