Jusayr

Jusayr stood on flat land on the southern coastal plain thirty-five kilometers from Gaza, between two bridges that crossed Wadi al-Jira. In 1596 it was a village in the nahiya of Gaza, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 330 people, taxed on wheat, barley and fruits and on goats, beehives and vineyards. In the late nineteenth century it lay on flat ground, laid out along a northwest–southeast axis. The village elders reported that Jusayr had served as a stopping place for pilgrims travelling to Mecca.

Its people were Muslims. The village had its own mosque and an elementary school founded in 1937, whose enrollment reached seventy-four in the mid-1940s, but for most services it relied on al-Faluja, four kilometers to the southeast. A well thirty-two meters deep supplied the domestic water. Some villagers wove rugs and carpets; the majority worked in agriculture. Grain was the most important crop, though they also grew fruit, and orchards bordered Jusayr on its northeast and southeast sides. In 1944/45, 11,852 dunums were allotted to cereals. The census of 1931 counted 839 people in 246 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,180.

The accounts of the occupation differ by a month. According to Israeli sources the village was taken in the later stages of an operation launched by the Giv’ati Brigade in the second week of July 1948. As the first truce ended, the Giv’ati commander Shim’on Avidan issued orders to break through the Egyptian lines, in order to link up with the Negev, and to expel the civilians from the ground occupied. His forces did not make the link, but they took an arc of territory south of Ramla and parallel to the coast, driving more than 20,000 people from their villages. Jusayr was among the southernmost villages taken, probably not completely occupied until 17–18 July. The Israeli army later claimed that with the start of the operation and the occupation of Tall al-Safi morale was undermined across the whole area and the villagers fled as the Giv’ati units approached.

Two Egyptian sources put the occupation a month earlier, during the first truce. One of them, Gamal Abdel Nasser, recalled in his memoirs that under cover of the truce the enemy hoped to seize dominating sites so as to begin operations from advantageous positions when it ended, and wrote of this and of attacks on a handful of other villages — Ibdis, Asluj and Julis — that there was no indication the Egyptian High Command was aware of what was really going on. Zochrot dates the occupation of Jusayr to 11 June 1948, which agrees with the Egyptian account.

Two settlements have been established on village lands, Menucha in 1953 and Wardon in 1968; both also occupy land that belonged to neighboring Summil. One concrete, flat-roofed house still stands in the middle of a peach orchard, its front face carrying two rectangular windows and a rectangular entrance between them. The debris of houses is visible among tall grasses and weeds. A rubbish dump now sits on the site, along with buildings belonging to an Israeli settlement, and the land around is cultivated.

Sources

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