Al-Sindiyana

Al-Sindiyana stood on high ground twenty-nine kilometers south of Haifa, taking its name, as Victor Guérin noted in 1863, from sendian, the evergreen oak that abounded on the hills flanking it. A Samaritan stone inscription found built into a modern house there — twelve lines quoting the Shema and naming the town of Geva — may date to the early centuries of Islamic rule. On 16 March 1799, during his advance on Acre, Napoleon fought a battle just north of the village. The Survey of Western Palestine described it in 1882 as a village of moderate size with a spring below it and a cave, where the tunnel of the Caesarea aqueduct was said to have been broken into by women digging for clay. Its boys’ elementary school had 200 pupils by 1942–43, and the village drew on several wells and springs. The 1945 survey counted 1,250 people, all Muslims, on 15,172 dunums, most of it sown with cereals.

The village was depopulated on 12 May 1948, three days before the end of the British Mandate, as Haganah forces secured the coastal plain south of Haifa in the final weeks of the civil war. Like the neighboring villages of the Carmel coast corridor, its people fled or were driven out as the front passed over them; unlike Ijzim and Jaba’, which held out until July, al-Sindiyana emptied before the state was declared.

Walid Khalidi, visiting in 1992, found the site fenced in with barbed wire: scattered piles of stones, the debris of destroyed houses, visible among thorns, cactuses, and fig, olive, and palm trees, with the surrounding lands used as grazing area. Photographs from recent years show the rubble of the school and the village well still traceable in the undergrowth.

Sources

• Al-Sindiyana — Palestine Remembered
• Al-Sindiyana — Zochrot
• Al-Sindiyana — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)