Bayt Nabala

Bayt Nabala stood on a rocky hill sloping down to the southwest, overlooking the plain around Lydda and lying east of the Lydda airport, ten kilometres from Ramla. A highway to Ramla, Jaffa and the coastal cities ran to its west, and a secondary railway track linked it to the Rafah–Haifa line. In 1596 it was a village of 297 people in the nahiya of Ramla, paying tax on wheat, barley, olives and fruit as well as on goats, beehives and a press for olives or grapes. In the late nineteenth century it was a moderate-sized village at the edge of the plain, and during the Mandate the British set up a military camp nearby.

The village was laid out on a rectangular grid, its side streets running parallel to two main streets meeting at the centre, where a mosque, a number of shops and the elementary school stood. The school was founded in 1921 and had about 230 pupils by 1946–47. Most of the inhabitants were Muslims, and they built in mud and stone. They farmed grain — wheat above all — with olives, grapes, citrus and figs; agriculture was mainly rainfed but the citrus groves were watered from artesian wells. Of 15,051 dunums, 10,197 were sown in cereals, 1,733 irrigated or planted in orchards, and 226 in citrus and bananas. The population rose from 1,324 in 1922 to 1,758 in 1931 and 2,310 in 1944/45.

Bayt Nabala was named in the operational orders for Operation Dani: Israeli forces were to attack it, where the Arab Legion had stationed a second-line company of some 120 to 150 men, after the capture of Lydda and Ramla. On 13 July 1948 the people of Lydda were expelled from their city, and many were driven by Israeli soldiers towards Bayt Nabala, which was still in Arab hands. The New York Times reported Israeli commandos storming the outskirts on 11 July, Arab Legion armoured cars retaking the village on 12 July to establish shelling positions — too late to relieve Lydda — and a stiff fight on 13 July in which Israeli tanks and armoured cars took the village; a day later it was described as no man’s land but no longer a threat to Lydda or Ramla. It had certainly fallen before the second truce came into force on 18 July. Benny Morris holds that the residents had been evacuated on the orders of the Arab Legion two months earlier, on 13 May; Walid Khalidi notes that this cannot be confirmed. On 13 September 1948 Prime Minister Ben-Gurion made a formal request to the Ministerial Committee on Abandoned Property for the village’s destruction, and it was destroyed.

Kefar Truman, named for the American president, was established west of the site in 1949, and Beyt Nechemya to its south in 1950, both on village lands. The site is overgrown with grass, thorny bushes and cypress and fig trees, and on its fringes are the remains of quarries and crumbled houses, with sections of house walls still standing; the surrounding land is farmed from the settlements. The refugees of Bayt Nabala scattered across the hills to the east — to Deir Ammar, the city of Ramallah, Bayt Tillow, Rantis and the Jalazone camp north of Ramallah.

Sources

• Bayt Nabala — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Bayt Nabala — Zochrot
• Bayt Nabala — Wikipedia