Bayt Nuba

Bayt Nuba stood in the Latrun salient on the road from the coastal plain up to Jerusalem, between Imwas and Yalu. In the 1944/45 survey Bayt Nuba and the adjoining Ajanjul counted 1,240 people, all Muslims, holding 11,401 dunums; by the Jordanian census of 1961 the population had risen to 1,350. Charles Clermont-Ganneau recorded a medieval church at the village in 1873, which has not been located since. Unlike its neighbours in the Ramla subdistrict, Bayt Nuba was not depopulated in 1948: the armistice left the salient in Jordanian hands, and the village lived on for nineteen more years inside the West Bank, a few kilometres from the line.

The Israeli army captured the Latrun area in the first hours of the June 1967 war. That night, military broadcasts ordered the inhabitants of Bayt Nuba, Yalu and Imwas to leave their homes, and some 12,000 people walked out of the three villages in the space of a few hours. When the fighting ended, the built-up area of Bayt Nuba was destroyed in military-engineered explosions; former residents watched from the surrounding hills as their houses came down. The demolitions were among the few acts of the war to be protested inside Israel at the time — the writer Amos Kenan, then a reservist serving in the Latrun sector, wrote a report on 10 June 1967 describing what he had seen and sent it to the Knesset member Uri Avnery, who passed it to other members and ministers, and it reached the prime minister, Levi Eshkol. A month later the newsletter of nearby Kibbutz Nachashon carried a debate among its members about what to do with the property their neighbours had left behind, the crops standing ready for harvest and the fields now empty; pages of the newsletter were censored by the members themselves, who feared that others would read it as taking over the land.

The land was not returned. The Israeli settlement of Mevo Horon was established on the village’s lands in 1970, and the area of the three villages was planted over as Canada Park. Some refugees rented houses in nearby Bayt Hajjar so as to keep farming what land they could reach outside the closed military zone; many others left altogether, for Jordan, the Gulf and South America, as the loss of their fields and the violence of the expulsion made staying impossible.

Sources

• Bayt Nuba — Zochrot
• “This was where all the humanism ended”: Kibbutz Nachashon after the destruction of the Latrun villages — Akevot Institute
• Bayt Nuba — Wikipedia