Ishwa'

Ishwa’ stood on a large low hill on the southeastern slope of a mountain about twenty and a half kilometres west of Jerusalem, with wadis to the east and south. It lay on the highway linking Bayt Jibrin to the Jaffa–Jerusalem road, with secondary roads to the villages nearby. The site is thought to be that of the Canaanite Eshta’ol, known by that name in the Roman period, when it fell within the district of Eleutheropolis — Bayt Jibrin — though Dayr Abu al-Qabus, half a kilometre north, has also been proposed for it. In the sixteenth century the settlement seems to have shifted half a kilometre northwest to the site of ‘Islin; when ‘Islin went out of use in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, Ishwa’ was probably repopulated, and by 1875 it had about 450 people.

The village was star-shaped, its mostly stone houses running out along the roads to its neighbours, with newer building to the south and northwest towards ‘Islin. The people were Muslims and their mosque was named Ishwa’, after the prophet Joshua. There were a few small shops and an elementary school. Drinking water came from ‘Ayn Ishwa’ to the north and from smaller springs and wells. The 1931 census counted 468 people in 126 houses; the 1945 statistics counted 620, on 5,522 dunums of which 1,911 were under cereals and 473 irrigated or orchard. Farming was rainfed: grain, olives, vines and fruit.

The war came to Ishwa’ in March 1948. A skirmish was fought on the village outskirts on 18 March; Jewish sources later told the New York Times that a Haganah armoured car had become stuck in the mud outside the village and that 250 Arab militiamen attacked it and killed its crew of eight. The following week Palestinian militia under the command of ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni attacked the neighbouring settlement of Hartuv. British forces intervened on 22 March and ended the firefight by firing four twenty-five-pound high-explosive shells and sixteen smoke shells into Ishwa’; the Times correspondent wrote that the residents and the Arab forces based in the village were evacuated. The next day some six hundred British troops entered Ishwa’, ‘Artuf and Bayt Mahsir, and a Times dispatch reported that almost all the villagers had already left before the assault. What happened afterwards is not recorded, though the Haganah’s account of the July occupation implies that people had returned, if only briefly.

According to the History of the War of Independence, the village was cleared by the Fourth Battalion of the Har’el Brigade on 16 July 1948 — which in practice means that anyone left after the mortar barrages was expelled by the troops who entered. Zochrot dates the occupation to 18 July. A string of other villages in the area met the same fate in the same days, in a manoeuvre Benny Morris describes as aimed at widening the Jewish-held corridor to Jerusalem, under the umbrella of Operation Dani. Israel established Eshta’ol in 1949 on land belonging to Ishwa’ and to ‘Islin. The village site has been levelled and grassed. On the southern edge of the cemetery is a cave holding the large grindstone of a flour mill. Olive and carob grow on the site among trees planted more recently. At the western edge there is a soccer field, and the walls and fallen roofs of destroyed houses can be seen at its edge.

Sources

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