Beit Dajan

Beit Dajan stood on a sandy hill on the central coastal plain, nine kilometers southwest of Jaffa, at the intersection of the Jaffa–al-Ramla highway with the coastal highway south to Gaza. Its name is ancient: the Old Testament knows it as Beth Dagon, after the Philistine god, and the Assyrians called it Bit Daganna. In 1596 it was a village in the nahiya of Ramla with 633 people. By the Mandate it was a substantial place: two elementary schools — a boys’ school founded in 1920 with 353 pupils in 1945 and a girls’ school with 102 girls that year — served a population that the 1945 survey counted at 3,840. Its wealth was in its groves: in 1944/45 some 3,195 dunums of village land were planted with citrus and bananas, against 676 dunums of cereals, watered from wells on the sandy plain.

The war reached it early and often. From January 1948, Palmach units stationed in the Jewish National Fund building just south of the Jaffa–Jerusalem highway raided the village, destroying a house in one foray. On 19 February a British convoy that stopped to arrest a man carrying a rifle clashed with the villagers; the New York Times reported two villagers and one British soldier killed. The largest blow of that winter came at dawn on 26 February, when Jewish forces with mortars, machine guns, and grenades killed three villagers and wounded four and blew up a house, according to Arif al-Arif. Beit Dajan itself was probably not occupied until the end of April, when it fell to the Alexandroni Brigade in the course of Operation Hametz — the assault on Salama, Yazur, and the other villages east of Jaffa designed to isolate the city and ensure it would fall ‘like a ripe plum.’

Four settlements were founded on village lands: Beyt Dagan, established at the site six months after the conquest and taking the village’s name; Mishmar ha-Shiv’a in 1949; Chemed in 1950; and Gannot in 1953. A number of village houses remain — some deserted, some occupied by Jewish families or used as stores, offices, and warehouses; one concrete house has been converted into the Eli Cohen synagogue. Cactuses and cypress, fig, and date palms grow between them, and the land around is cultivated.

Sources

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