Barbara

Barbara lay on the eastern edge of the coastal sand dunes that run parallel to the Mediterranean, just west of the coastal highway and the railway line, with secondary roads linking it to neighboring villages. A village of the same name appears to have stood here in Roman times, and the geographer Mujir al-Din al-Hanbali recorded it as the hometown of al-Shaykh Yusuf al-Barbarawi, a local sage who died in 1323. In 1596 Barbara was a village in the nahiya of Gaza with 402 people. Its old mosque at the village center was established in the reign of the Ottoman sultan Murad III (1574–1596) and contained al-Barbarawi’s tomb; an elementary school founded in 1921 had 252 pupils in 1947. Sand encroachment from the dunes long threatened the village until its people stabilized them in the 1940s by building and planting. Grapes were the chief crop — considered some of the best in Palestine and sold up and down the coast — alongside figs, almonds, olives, oranges, and grain; the village was also known for al-mazawid, long rugs woven by its women. In 1944/45 some 9,613 dunums were sown with cereals. The 1945 survey counted 2,410 people, all Muslims.

The village saw skirmishes from the war’s early weeks. In the first half of January 1948 a passing Jewish bus opened fire on villagers, and on 12 January the empty school was sprayed with gunfire, Filastin reported. On 10 April, as villagers ploughed their fields, they were fired on from a nearby Jewish settlement; the village militia returned fire and a two-hour battle followed, after which, the villagers said, the attackers withdrew carrying their dead and wounded. The end came late in the year: Barbara was captured on 4–5 November 1948, toward the close of Operation Yoav and soon after the fall of al-Majdal, its people expelled or fleeing under fire.

Two settlements were built on village lands: Mavqi’im, established on 12 January 1949 just south of the village — with the stated purpose, according to Walid Khalidi’s account, of preventing the villagers’ return — and Talmey Yafe in 1950; Ge’a, also from 1950, stands close by on the lands of neighboring al-Jiyya. Of Barbara there remain crumbled walls and house debris overgrown with thorns, old eucalyptus and sycamore trees and cactuses, and some clearly identifiable streets; one part of the site serves as a junkyard, and the surrounding lands are planted with corn.

Sources

• Barbara — Palestine Remembered
• Barbara — Zochrot
• Barbara — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)