Al-Mujaydil

Al-Mujaydil lay on the gently sloping southern side of Wadi al-Mujaydil, directly on the Nazareth–Haifa highway. In 1596 it was a small village of twenty-two people in the nahiya of Tabariyya, paying tax on wheat, barley, fruit trees, goats and beehives; by 1859 travellers estimated eight hundred residents working a hundred faddans, and described a flourishing place built of stone and mud with olive groves to the east and south. The modern village was triangular in plan, its houses of stone and mud, stone and cement, or concrete, clustered tightly together, with springs flowing mainly to the southwest.

In 1945 al-Mujaydil was the third largest village of the Nazareth subdistrict by population, with 1,640 Muslims and 260 Christians. It had two elementary schools, one for boys and one for girls, a Roman Catholic church and a monastery, and a local council that managed its affairs. Grain was the principal crop: of 18,836 dunums, 14,982 were sown in cereals and 1,685 irrigated or planted in orchards, of which 1,600 dunums were olives. Al-Mujaydil was the second largest olive producer in the subdistrict and ran two mechanical presses. Traces of a Roman road nearby suggest the area had been intensively settled since antiquity.

According to the History of the Haganah, al-Mujaydil was occupied by a unit of the Golani Brigade on 14 or 15 July 1948, during the second stage of Operation Dekel, as the Israeli army closed in on Nazareth; the attack from the south misled the city’s defenders into expecting the main assault from that direction, when in fact it came from the northwest out of Shafa Amr. The village was completely emptied of its inhabitants and then razed. About 1,200 refugees from al-Mujaydil had reached Nazareth by the end of July 1948. In 1950, after intervention by the Vatican, the Christian villagers were offered permission to return; they refused to go back without their Muslim neighbours, and Israel then destroyed half the remaining houses and one of the village mosques.

Migdal ha-Emeq was founded on village land in 1952 by Jewish immigrants from Iran, less than a kilometre southwest of the site; Yif’at, established in 1926, lies two kilometres west on ground that had traditionally belonged to the village. Most of the site is now covered by a pine forest laid out as an Israeli park. The monastery and parts of the ruined church are the only buildings still standing, and monks continued to live in the monastery; the foundations of destroyed houses, the walls of the cemetery, wells, and cactus, pomegranate, olive and fig trees mark the rest.

Sources

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