Al-Qubayba

Al-Qubayba stood on an alluvial rise on the coastal plain ten and a half kilometers from Ramla, joined by a spur road to the coastal highway to its west, which carried it to Gaza, Ramla and the other towns. In the late nineteenth century it was described as a village of adobe brick on high ground, with gardens nearby enclosed by cactus hedges. Under the Mandate the houses were built of adobe brick or stone and clustered close together, though those put up on the eve of the war stood further apart. The village had a modest marketplace, a mosque and an elementary school. The school was established in 1929 and held an annex of twelve dunums where the pupils were taught the basics of agronomy; about 344 were enrolled in 1945–46. The population was entirely Muslim, and by 1945 some nine hundred nomads had settled near the village.

Agriculture was the villagers’ main occupation: fruit, above all citrus, along with vegetables and grain. In 1944/45, 4,639 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 2,972 under cereals, with 1,143 dunums irrigated or in orchards; the water for irrigation came from artesian wells and from the Rubin river. The census of 1931 counted 799 people in 160 houses. For 1944/45, PalQuest and Khalidi record 1,720 — the figure of the Mandate village statistics — while the Wikidata record used for this archive’s coordinates carries 2,597 for 1945, citing Mu’jam buldan Filastin; the difference may be the settled nomads, who are counted separately in the Mandate survey, but the sources are not reconciled and the archive does not reconcile them here.

The date of the occupation is disputed. The Associated Press quoted an announcement from Israeli military headquarters that al-Qubayba had been taken on 19 May 1948; Benny Morris puts it about a week later, on 27 May, by the Giv’ati Brigade during Operation Barak. Zochrot follows the later date and names the Giv’ati Brigade. The New York Times reported that the village had been occupied along with Zarnuqa in a four-hour battle. At the same time the Irgun Zvai Leumi was attempting to storm Ramla, about ten kilometers to the northeast.

Morris records that the destruction of al-Qubayba became an issue in Israeli cabinet meetings that June: on 20 June the Minister of Minority Affairs, Bechor Shitrit, raised this village specifically. Part of the objection was financial. Yitzchaq Gvirtz, director of the Absentee Property Department in the Office of the Custodian of Abandoned Property, had written to Shitrit that he was ready to accept that the Arabs should not return to these villages, and then set out his concern that wanton destruction left no room to salvage doors, frames, tiles and other building material. Ben-Gurion agreed at the time to look into the matter; the outcome of that inquiry is not recorded.

Ge’alya was established on the village site in 1948, and Kefar Gevirol was built on the site as well, probably at the same time, as a rural housing lot; Kefar ha-Nagid, built in 1949, stands nearby on land that belonged to Yibna. The walls and rubble of collapsed houses are mixed in among the buildings of the Israeli settlements, and a former pool is used as a rubbish dump. Some houses remain — one of masonry, of modest size, occupied by Jewish residents, its roof beams protruding slightly from the outer walls; another now a restaurant. Part of the school still stands, a long building with rectangular door and windows. Cactus hedges, sycamores and palms grow along the southern edge of the site.

Sources

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