Dayr Ayyub

Dayr Ayyub stood on slopes facing southwest, overlooking the Ramla–Jerusalem highway and linked to it by a secondary road; on the village’s northwestern side was a plot the inhabitants believed held the tomb of the prophet Ayyub — the biblical Job. In 1596 it was a village in the nahiya of Ramla with ninety-four people, taxed on wheat, barley, fruits, goats, beehives, and vineyards. In the late nineteenth century it was a small hamlet of stone and mud houses on the hillside, mostly Muslim, growing along the roads to neighboring localities. Its people financed and built their own school in 1947, paying the teacher’s salary themselves; fifty-one children enrolled. Rainfed farming was their living — grain, grapes, figs, pomegranates, and vegetables, with 2,769 dunums of cereals in 1944/45. The 1945 survey counted 320 people.

Its position above the road to Jerusalem made it a target long before it fell. On 21 December 1947 twenty-five men raided the village and bombed three houses, in what the New York Times called ‘another reprisal attack by Jews’; six weeks later, on 7 February 1948, British troops themselves demolished two houses, saying they had been used to fire on Jewish convoys. In the battles for the Latrun salient the village was taken and retaken: the History of the Haganah records that Dayr Ayyub was occupied three times — first on 16 May 1948 by the Palmach’s Har’el Brigade during Operation Makkabi, then reoccupied at the end of May by Giv’ati and Seventh Brigade units in Operation Ben-Nun, entering ‘without resistance’ only to withdraw immediately under fire. Benny Morris records simply that the village was depopulated by military assault. Another attempt may have come during the fourth attack on Latrun on the night of 8–9 June; through the second truce it stayed unoccupied, and Arab Legion sources reported a further Israeli attempt on 15 August, which they said was repulsed. When the fighting ended, the empty village lay close to the 1949 armistice lines.

No Israeli settlement was built on the village lands; Mevo Choron, founded in 1970, stands nearby to the north. The eastern segment of Canada Park — planted over the ruins of Imwas, Yalo, and Bayt Nuba, destroyed in 1967 — lies across the site of Dayr Ayyub as well. Debris of houses and walls connected to iron rafters litters the site; on the hill opposite, the village cemetery keeps a tombstone inscribed to al-Hajj Muhammad Ulayyan Taha, who died in April 1936. Cypress, eucalyptus, carob, and fig trees dominate the slopes.

Sources

• Dayr Ayyub — Palestine Remembered
• Dayr Ayyub — Zochrot
• Dayr Ayyub — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)