Bashshit

Bashshit stood on the central coastal plain sixteen and a half kilometers from Ramla, with Wadi Bashshit, a tributary of Wadi al-Sarar, running half a kilometer to its east. In the Crusader period the village was known as Basit. It is named by at least two early Arab geographers: Yaqut al-Hamawi, who died in 1228, reported in his Mu’jam that it lay close to Ramla, and Ibn al-Imad al-Hanbali, who died in 1678, recorded in his Shadharat that the grammarian and chronicler Jamal al-Bashshiti, who died in 1417, came from the village. In the late nineteenth century Bashshit was built of adobe brick with cultivated gardens nearby, and a three-domed shrine stood above it.

The modern village was rectangular, running east to west, and its people were predominantly Muslim. Its elementary school was established in 1921 and enrolled 148 pupils by the mid-1940s. A mosque stood at the center of the village, which had a number of artesian wells. The people lived from agriculture and animal husbandry. Grain was the chief crop, but they also kept fruit trees in the orchards bordering the village on the west and northeast. In 1944/45 sixty-six dunums were given to citrus and bananas and 17,558 to cereals, with 651 dunums irrigated or in orchards, sixty-seven of them in olives. The village held archaeological debris and the remains of an altar, and nearby lay the site of al-Nabi Arafat, with pillars, cisterns and pottery. The census of 1931 counted 1,125 people in 333 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,620.

The Giv’ati Brigade occupied Bashshit on 12 or 13 May 1948, in an effort to extend its area of control, just before the end of the British Mandate. The Associated Press reported that the Haganah claimed to have captured three villages in the area on 12 May, and the Haganah statement described Bashshit as a strong Arab center. Benny Morris dates the occupation a day later and holds that the residents evacuated before the attack. The History of the Haganah confirms the general picture without a definite date, but attributes the offensive — probably wrongly, PalQuest notes — to the Alexandroni Brigade. Zochrot dates the occupation to 11 May and names the Giv’ati Brigade.

Seven Israeli settlements stand on village land: Newe Mivtach, Meshar, Kefar Mordekhay and Misgav Dov, all founded in 1950; Kannot, founded in 1952; and Shedema and Aseret, founded in 1954. Three houses and a pool remain. Two of the houses are deserted and one is occupied by an Israeli family — one of the deserted ones box-shaped with a flat roof and a rectangular door in a stone frame, the occupied one a two-storey concrete building with a flat roof. Cactuses, sycamores and eucalyptus grow on the site, and the surrounding land is farmed by Israelis.

Sources

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