Dayr Aban

Dayr Aban sat on a large hill on the western slope of a mountain about 21 kilometres west of Jerusalem, with broad wadis to the north and south. The highway linking Bayt Jibrin to the Jaffa–Jerusalem road passed some three kilometres to the west and was the village’s main connection to the towns. The site has been identified with Roman Abenezer; later it fell under the administration of Bayt Jibrin. In 1596 it was a village of 127 people in the nahiya of Jerusalem, taxed on wheat, barley, olives, vines, fruit, goats and beehives. By the late nineteenth century it was a large village on the lower slope of a high ridge, bordered by olives on three sides.

The plan was circular and centred on the meeting of five roads, one of them the main road to Bayt Jibrin. Most houses were stone and mud with roofs of wood, straw and adobe; a few were limestone and domed. The al-‘Umari mosque stood at the centre with the elementary school beside it. The 1931 census counted 1,534 people in 321 houses; the 1945 statistics counted 2,100, of whom about ten were Christians and the rest Muslims, on 22,734 dunums with 14,925 under cereals and 1,580 irrigated or orchard. Some villagers farmed and others worked in trade and services. Olives covered much of the land, vines were kept on the higher ground, and grain and corn grew on the flat. Until the 1940s the village drew on rainfed wells; later a pipeline brought water from ‘Ayn Marjalayn, five kilometres east.

The war reached Dayr Aban early. On 17 January 1948 it was surrounded by an armed Jewish force, part of a punitive expedition against three villages — Zakariyya, Bayt Nattif and Dayr Aban — during the fighting around the Kfar Etzion settlements; the New York Times reported that it lasted at least twenty-four hours and that Arab sources put the attacking force at a hundred men or more. On 20 March there was a day-long exchange of fire between the village and the settlement of Hartuv. No casualty figures were given for either.

Dayr Aban was the first village occupied in Operation Ha-Har, the Israeli push into the Jerusalem hills at the end of the second truce. The Haganah account says the hill above the village was taken with relative ease after Egyptian forces were surprised and shelled with artillery and mortars, and that the village itself fell the following night, 19–20 October 1948; Zochrot gives 20 October, and the units as Har’el and Etzioni. Its people were most likely displaced eastward, to Bethlehem or into the Hebron hills. Israel established Tzor’a northwest of the site late in 1948, and Machseya, Beyt Shemesh and Yish’i to the west in 1950 — all four on village land. On the site itself almond, cypress and eucalyptus grow among the cactus, with carob along the terraces nearby. Several of the wells are still there; the mouths of some have been boarded over.

Sources

• Dayr Aban — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Dayr Aban — Zochrot
• Dayr Aban — English Wikipedia, for the 1945 Village Statistics figure and Morris’s date of depopulation