Dayr al-Dubban

Dayr al-Dubban stood on a sloping hill at the end of the western foothills of the Hebron mountains, 225 metres up and about 26 kilometres from Hebron. Secondary roads ran from it to ‘Ajjur, to the northeast, and Tall al-Safi, to the northwest, and from those on to the highways linking Hebron, Ramla, Gaza and Jerusalem. The name is probably a colloquial form of al-dhubban, “the flies”. In 1596 it was a village of 396 people in the nahiya of Jerusalem, taxed on wheat, barley, olives, vines, fruit trees, goats and beehives. The American biblical scholar Edward Robinson recorded passing near it early in the nineteenth century on his way to examine caverns nearby.

The people were Muslims. Rainfed farming came first and livestock second. They took two grain crops a year, one in summer and one in winter, and by custom divided the land into an eastern and a western half, planting one and leaving the other fallow. The ground immediately around the village was gradually planted with figs, grapes and vegetables. The 1931 census counted 543 people in 112 houses; the 1945 statistics counted 730, on 7,784 dunums of which 5,358 were under cereals. The village was built over an archaeological site of building foundations, mosaic floors, burial places and rock-hewn presses, and there were five more such sites within two square kilometres of it.

During Operation Yoav, while other Israeli forces pushed south towards Gaza and the Negev, the Giv’ati Brigade moved north and east towards Hebron. Dayr al-Dubban fell in that northward push on 23–24 October 1948, according to Benny Morris; Zochrot gives 24 October and the same brigade. A few days before, on 21 October, an Israeli military spokesman told the New York Times that the army did not intend to capture the Egyptian strongholds in the area, but that in the operations to cut the roads some places had been so weakened that taking them seemed obvious. Morris records that most of the villagers in the Hebron area had fled before Israeli troops arrived, and that some were also expelled.

The settlement of Luzit, settled by Moroccan Jews, was established northeast of the village site in 1955. The site is overgrown with thorn, foxtail and khubbayza — mallow — with a few cactuses and olive trees among it. The village’s old roads are still easy to make out. There are the remains of stone terraces and a cave. Israeli farmers grow onions, other vegetables and fruit on the land adjoining.

Sources

• Dayr al-Dubban — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Dayr al-Dubban — Zochrot, drawn from Walid Khalidi, All That Remains (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)