Jimzu

Jimzu stood on ground only slightly higher than the land around it, six and a half kilometers from Ramla, with a secondary road running to Lydda and another to the neighboring village of Khirbat al-Duhayriyya. It has been identified with the Judean town of Gimzo named at II Chronicles 28:18; the only record of the place in Roman times comes from Talmudic sources. In 1596 Jimzu was a village in the nahiya of Ramla, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 154 people, taxed on wheat, barley and fruit and on goats and beehives. Edward Robinson visited in 1838 and described it as rather large, and a description from the late nineteenth century has it built of adobe brick on the side of a low hill, surrounded by cactus hedges and olive trees.

The village houses were of mud and stone. Its people were predominantly Muslim and kept a mosque. An elementary school was established in 1920 and enrolled 175 pupils by the mid-1940s. Most villagers worked in agriculture and animal husbandry, growing chiefly grain and fruit: in 1944/45, seventy-seven dunums were under citrus and bananas and 5,577 under cereals, with 1,605 dunums irrigated or in orchards, of which 1,400 were in olives. Material evidence of the village’s early history was abundant on the site. The census of 1931 counted 1,081 people in 268 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,510.

Several sources report that the Yiftach Brigade occupied Jimzu on 10 July 1948, as part of Operation Dani; Zochrot gives the same date and names Yiftach of the Palmach. The Egyptian writer Muhammad Abd al-Mun’im states that the Israeli infantry units which entered Lydda on 11 July came from the direction of Jimzu. The New York Times described the occupation of this and a handful of other nearby villages as an enveloping action to take Ramla. Many villages in the area were depopulated during the operation, but what happened at Jimzu is not clear from the record, and PalQuest says so. Two months later, on 13 September, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion named Jimzu as one of fourteen villages earmarked for partial destruction; Benny Morris does not say whether that order was carried out.

Gimzo was established on village land in 1950. All that remains of the houses are stones strewn over the site and some crumbled walls. The site is overgrown with shrubs and thorny plants, and Christ’s-thorn trees, foxtail, cactuses and some abandoned olive trees grow on the village land.

Sources

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