Al-Nabi Rubin

Al-Nabi Rubin stood on the south bank of the Rubin river fourteen and a half kilometers from Ramla and three kilometers from the Mediterranean. Its significance for Palestinians lay in the shrine of al-Nabi Rubin and the annual mawsim held there. In the Judaic tradition Rubin, or Reuben, was the firstborn son of Jacob and Leah; Palestinian Muslims commonly honored such Old Testament prophets with shrines, as they did the prophet Moses south of Jericho. The shrine at Rubin is thought to have been built where a Canaanite temple once stood, and the mawsim itself to have been pagan in origin.

The mawsim ran from July through September and was one of the two great pilgrimage seasons for Old Testament prophets in Palestine, the other being that of al-Nabi Musa. People came from Jaffa, Lydda, Ramla and the villages of the region. They sang religious songs and popular ones, danced the dabka, held dhikr sessions led by Sufis, watched horse races and magic shows, and listened to preachers and to zajjals, the popular poets. They camped in tents, were served at makeshift cafés and restaurants, and shopped at booths set up for the occasion.

The village itself was inhabited by members of the Abu Sawayrih tribe, descendants of the al-Maliha Bedouin of Sinai. Its land, most of it under sand dunes, was the second largest holding in the subdistrict after Yibna’s, and was designated an Islamic waqf. The houses were scattered across the site with no discernible center, some of them built inside the fruit orchards; shops and a cinema stood near the shrine. Wells and springs supplied the water. The population was predominantly Muslim, and a boys’ elementary school was established in 1946, with fifty-six pupils in the mid-1940s.

The villagers lived from agriculture and animal husbandry, and from catering to the visitors during the mawsim. They grew mainly grain, then citrus and other fruit, figs and grapes among them. In 1944/45, 683 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 4,357 under cereals, with 184 dunums irrigated or in orchards. Eucalyptus and chinaberry grew along the river bank and over large parts of the village land. On the far southwestern edge stood Manarat Rubin, the lighthouse of Reuben, built over the ruins of the old port of Yibna, the Iamnitarum Portus of Roman times; excavation there has found a squarish beaten-earth rampart 800 meters on a side dating to the second millennium BC. The 1944/45 survey counted 1,420 people.

Circumstantial evidence places the occupation in the second stage of Operation Barak. Benny Morris reports that the villagers were expelled on 1 June 1948, three days before the people of nearby Yibna were forced from their homes, and that the expulsions were in keeping with the practice of the Giv’ati Brigade under its commander Shim’on Avidan and with the Haganah’s Plan Dalet. Zochrot gives the same date and names the Giv’ati Brigade.

Kibbutz Palmachim was established in 1949 on the coastal lands of the village, south of the mouth of the Rubin river, and Gan Soreq in 1950, three and a half kilometers west of the shrine, on village land. The shrine of al-Nabi Rubin stands among shrubs and wild vegetation, with a minaret at one end pierced by three lancet-arched entrances. A number of minor shrines built of large stones also remain, and near the shrine stands a deserted free-standing cement structure of a single box-shaped room.

Sources

• al-Nabi Rubin — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• al-Nabi Rubin (Ramla) — Zochrot