Al-Muzayri'a

Al-Muzayri’a stood on a limestone hill at the end of the Ramallah heights, fifteen kilometers from Ramla, looking out over the coastal plain, with a wadi along its southern edge separating it from the village of Qula. It lay on the eastern side of the highway running from Ramla to Tel Aviv and Jaffa by way of Majdal Yaba, and about a kilometer east of the Ramla–Haifa railway. In 1596 al-Muzayri’a was a village in the nahiya of Jabal Qubal, in the liwa’ of Nablus, with thirty-nine people, taxed on wheat, barley and olives and on goats and beehives. It appears to have been abandoned during the seventeenth century and reoccupied in the eighteenth by the al-Rumayh family, who came originally from Deir Ghassaneh. The journalist and traveler A. Mansell recorded passing through in the 1860s.

The village took a star-like shape as its houses, mostly of adobe, were built along the roads that connected it to the places around. Its people were predominantly Muslim and a mosque stood at the center. A boys’ school founded in 1919 became a full elementary school in 1945, took children from the neighboring villages, and enrolled 207 pupils in the mid-1940s, with a plot of thirty-five dunums attached to it; a girls’ school opened in 1945 with seventy-eight. A Roman mausoleum near the village, still standing, had long ago been converted into a mosque dedicated to al-Nabi Yahya, the prophet John.

Early in the twentieth century some of the residents made cloaks and horse saddles, but those crafts gradually died out. Agriculture remained the principal occupation, the main crops rainfed grain and irrigated tree fruit: in 1944/45, 953 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 5,895 under cereals, with thirty-five dunums irrigated or in orchards. Besides the mausoleum there were a number of khirbas near the village; about a kilometer to the northeast lay Khirbat Zikhrin, a Roman and Byzantine site occupied again in the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, where excavation has continued since 1982. The census of 1931 counted 780 people in 186 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,160.

Al-Muzayri’a was almost certainly occupied during Operation Dani. The Egyptian writer Muhammad Abd al-Mun’im states that it was captured on 12 July 1948, while the operation was in progress, as Israeli forces launched a three-pronged attack on Ramla, and that the unit attacking Ramla from the north took al-Muzayri’a and nearby Qula before reaching the town. The Israeli History of the War of Independence has the cluster of villages south of al-Muzayri’a — Qula, Rantiyya and Wilhelma — captured two days earlier, on 10 July. Zochrot dates the occupation of al-Muzayri’a to 16 July.

Nechalim was founded on the northwestern part of the village land in 1949, and Mazor on its western side the same year. The site is largely forested. A few houses remain; most have been reduced to rubble. Cactuses and stone terraces are visible on the ground.

Sources

• al-Muzayri’a — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• al-Muzayri’a — Zochrot