Huj

Huj stood in hilly country on the northern edge of the Negev fifteen kilometers from Gaza, dominated by two hills to its east and west, at the meeting of several secondary roads running to Gaza, to Bir al-Sabi’ and to the other towns. It has been identified with the ancient village of Oga, which appears on the Madaba map of the late sixth century; the jim that ends the Arabic name may have been pronounced as a g in antiquity, which would make Huj an Arabized form of that older name.

The modern village was established in the early nineteenth century under Mustafa Bey, governor of Gaza and Jaffa from 1818 to 1820, who offered the land free of charge and built a police station to make the area safe and encourage people from Gaza to move there. Edward Robinson visited in 1838 and noted houses built of mud and a population of between 200 and 300. By the late nineteenth century the village was rectangular in plan and built of adobe brick. Huj was close to the fighting between Ottoman and British forces in 1917. In the years that followed it expanded first eastward and then westward, keeping the agricultural land east and northeast of the village proper. Its Arab population was Muslim; some 230 Jews lived within the administrative unit called Huj but in their own settlement, not in the village.

Groundwater was plentiful. A well 200 feet deep inside the village supplied the domestic water, and there were other wells in the beds of the surrounding wadis. The villagers grew grain, fruit — grapes, figs and apricots — and almonds. In 1944/45, 16,236 dunums were allotted to cereals and ninety-three dunums were irrigated or in orchards. The census of 1931 counted 618 people in 118 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 810 Arabs.

During one of its pushes northward the Negev Brigade ordered the people of Huj to leave their homes on 31 May 1948; Zochrot gives the same date and names the Negev Brigade of the Palmach. Benny Morris states that the villagers were expelled westward and their houses then looted and blown up. Many Zionist officials considered the village friendly, but the prevailing view, according to Morris, was that it was unreliable on the front line with the Egyptian army. In September the exiled villagers appealed to Israel to be allowed home, on the grounds that the truce was holding. A couple of Israeli officials argued their case and were overruled by the military authorities on grounds of security or precedent; the Minister of Minority Affairs, Bechor Shitrit, had recommended that they be allowed back, though not to their village but to a place deeper inside Israeli-held territory.

Dorot, established in 1941 on what had traditionally been village land, took over more of it after 1948. Only one dilapidated building remains, a concrete structure with rectangular doors and windows and a flat roof; what it was used for is not clear, and it now serves as a farm storehouse. The remnants of a watering trough can still be made out. Sycamores and cactuses grow on the eastern and western edges of the site, where an Israeli sheep farm has been established.

Sources

• Huj — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Huj — Zochrot