Al-Qubab

Al-Qubab was built on several dome-shaped hills on the central coastal plain ten kilometers from Ramla, on the north side of the Ramla–Jerusalem highway. Its name, “the domes,” most likely came from those hills. It stood in the intermediate zone between the plain to the west and the mountains to the east, and belonged to the group of villages known as the ‘irqiyyat, the small hills. The Jerusalem chronicler Mujir al-Din al-Hanbali, who died around 1522, recorded al-Qubab as a village within the jurisdiction of Ramla in 1493. In the late nineteenth century it was built of adobe brick on rising, rocky ground, surrounded by cactus hedges and olive trees; later houses of mud and stone were built close together.

All the residents were Muslims. An elementary school was established in 1921 and enrolled more than 233 pupils by 1947/48. The village had a mosque and a marketplace with a number of small shops, and drew its water from wells and springs nearby. The people lived from agriculture and animal husbandry, growing grain, vegetables and fruit; in 1944/45, 12,295 dunums were allotted to cereals and 238 dunums were irrigated or in orchards. Beside the village lay Khirbat Yarda, with the foundations of buildings, a wine press, a cemetery and fragments of pottery. The census of 1931 counted 1,502 people in 382 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,980.

The accounts of the occupation do not agree. A New York Times correspondent wrote that Haganah forces captured al-Qubab on 15 May 1948, the day the British Mandate ended, in an effort to reopen the highway to Jerusalem, taking Bayt Dajan on another stretch of the Jaffa–Jerusalem road at the same time; the attack also coincided with Operation Barak, which took nearby Abu Shusha the same day. Benny Morris gives the same date. The Israeli History of the War of Independence puts the occupation at least two weeks later, in early June, by the Yiftach Brigade, in an attempt to draw off Arab forces during one of the battles for al-Latrun, and this agrees with an Associated Press report of 7 June that Israeli troops had taken the village. Zochrot dates the occupation to 6 June and names the Giv’ati Brigade and the Palmach. The divergence suggests that the Israeli hold on al-Qubab was unsteady in the first fortnight. By the following month it was firm: on 11 July the New York Times reported that people fleeing the attacks on Lydda and Ramla had to travel by camel trails toward Ramallah, because the Israelis had blocked the main road at al-Qubab.

On 13 September 1948 Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion asked a special Israeli committee for permission to destroy fourteen villages, al-Qubab among them, in the name of the commander of the Central Front, General Zvi Ayalon.

Gezer was built on what was traditionally village land in 1945; Zionist immigrants from Czechoslovakia established Mishmar Ayyalon on the ruins of al-Qubab in 1949, and Kefar Bin-Nun was added on village land in 1952. The part of the site north of the kibbutz is under woods. The school is the only landmark that remains, but a number of stone houses with rectangular doors and windows still stand — one rectangular, with two doors, one high window and two very small ones; another angular, with a tall tree in the yard before it; one used for storing agricultural tools, with four front entrances and a high window; another now a shop, with a stairway up to a front porch enclosed in wire grillwork. Some are used as Israeli residences. Eucalyptus and carob, cactuses and foxtail grow on the site, and the land around is planted with almond and olive trees.

Sources

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