Bayt Mahsir

Bayt Mahsir stood on the upper slope of a mountain 588 metres above sea level, about 26 kilometres west of Jerusalem, looking down over the coastal plain — and over the ascent at Bab al-Wad, where the Jaffa–Jerusalem highway leaves the plain and starts to climb. Secondary roads tied it to that highway and to its neighbours, especially to Saris. Its population in 1875 was about 450. The 1922 census recorded 1,367 people, all Muslims; the 1931 census 1,920 in 445 houses; the 1945 village statistics 2,400, on 16,268 dunums of which 6,225 were under cereals and 1,348 irrigated or planted as orchard.

The village was trapezoidal, its stone and adobe houses clustered in four quarters, with a main street running east to west through the centre and the shops, public buildings and mosque built along both sides of it. Its people took pride in the fact that the mosque’s last imam, Shaykh Khalil As’ad, was a graduate of al-Azhar in Cairo. They kept two maqams besides the mosque. There were three schools — an elementary school in the west of the village, a secondary school in the east, and a girls’ school housed in what had been the village infirmary. The villagers farmed grain, fruit, olives and grapes on rainfed land, drew water from a spring to the northeast, and had an olive press and flour mills. Woodland covered a wide area nearby.

Bayt Mahsir was a target of Operation Nachshon in early April 1948 but was not taken then. It fell during Operation Makkabi, the Haganah’s follow-on attempt to widen the corridor to Jerusalem and take the Latrun salient, to the newly formed Har’el Brigade of the Palmach. The History of the Haganah records that the village was attacked for three nights and not taken until the morning of 11 May. The New York Times reported a thirty-six-hour battle involving two Palmach commando battalions: after probing attacks on 9 May, the Sixth Palmach Battalion — some four to five hundred men — seized the strong points around the village late that night, and the Arab forces withdrew and counterattacked for two days. The village was defended by the Qadisiyya Battalion of the Arab Liberation Army, and Fawzi al-Qawuqji’s cables track the same days from the other side: on 9 May he reported repelling an attack aimed at opening the Jerusalem road; on 10 May the officer commanding at Bayt Mahsir, Lt. Col. Mahdi Salih, signalled that the situation was critical; on 12 May Qawuqji told the High Command that Israeli forces had entered the village, and claimed it was recovered the same day by bombardment and frontal attack. The recovery did not hold. Morris records that Bayt Mahsir was captured and then systematically levelled.

The settlement built on the site is Beyt Me’ir, and its founding date is disputed in the sources. Israel Galili had told the Jewish National Fund in mid-April 1948, before the village fell, that a settlement here mattered for security; a JNF plan of August proposed one on the village’s ruins. Morris records it as established on 27 September 1948 under the name Lehagshama, while other accounts date Beyt Me’ir to February 1950 and give Lehagshama as the original name of Shoresh, built on the lands of Saris. Mesillat Tziyyon was founded northwest of the site in 1950. Several village houses were spared and now stand among the settlement’s buildings — two of them large, almost identical limestone houses, each with a high arched doorway flanked by narrow arched windows, rising above the cabins around them. The remains of a flour mill, a flywheeled machine set over a stone base, are still there. On the mountain top at the eastern edge of the site is a wild wood of old trees, and among them the tomb of al-‘Ajami and other graves. There is house rubble on the western side, terrace rubble in the orchards, the mouths of caves once lived in, and several abandoned wells. The woodland on the village’s outskirts has been made a Jewish National Fund reserve.

Sources

• Bayt Mahsir — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Bayt Mahsir — Zochrot
• Bayt Mahsir — English Wikipedia, for the 1922, 1931 and 1945 census figures