Al-Zeeb

Al-Zeeb sat on a dome-shaped hill on the Mediterranean coast thirteen and a half kilometers north of Acre, east of the coastal highway and railway. Few villages stood on deeper ground: beneath it lay the Canaanite town of Akzib, a walled place by the tenth century B.C., taken by the Assyrians in 701 B.C.; the Romans called it Ecdippa and the Crusaders Casal Imbert, and the geographer Ibn Jubayr noted it on his travels between Acre and Tyre. The Ottoman register of 1596 counted 875 people. By the Mandate years it was a compact stone village with a mosque, a clinic, and an elementary school founded under the Ottomans in 1882; its people fished — an average of sixteen metric tons a year between 1927 and 1945 — and grew fruit, olives, and grain, pressing their olives in four mills. The 1945 survey counted 1,910 people, including the hamlet of Manawat, on 12,607 dunums.

On 13–14 May 1948, in the very last days of the Mandate, the Carmeli Brigade swept into the northwest corner of Palestine in Operation Ben-Ami, and al-Zeeb was one of its main targets. The Haganah’s own history records that ‘the inhabitants fled at the appearance of the Jewish forces’; Benny Morris gives a harder account — that the Haganah ‘had a long account’ with the village, a known center of resistance, and that most of its people fled under a mortar barrage. The village fell on 14 May, one day before the State of Israel was declared.

In January 1949 a kibbutz was founded beside the site on village lands — first named Beit ha-Arava, soon renamed Gesher haZiv — and the settlement of Sa’ar had been established just to the south in 1948. But much of al-Zeeb was left standing: its stone mosque, domed and fronted by a great decorative arch with two monumental side arches, has been restored as a tourist attraction, and the house of the mukhtar, Husayn Ataya, serves as a museum displaying village tombstones and artifacts. The site, within the Achziv recreation area, is one of the most visible of the depopulated villages.

Sources

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