Majdal Yaba

Majdal Yaba stood on the western slopes of the Nablus mountains eighteen and a half kilometers from Ramla, directly on the eastern side of the route of the Via Maris, the great north–south road of ancient Palestine, and east of the modern highway that ran north from Lydda before branching west to Tel Aviv and Jaffa and north to Tulkarm; the Lydda–Tulkarm railway passed about two kilometers to its west. The place has carried many names. The Romans called it Aphekou Pyrgos, the tower of Aphec; the Crusaders knew it as Casal Mirable and made it an important administrative center until it fell to Muslim hands in 1187. Salah al-Din used it as a base for raids against the Crusaders on the coast and camped near the castle in 1192, and the castle was later destroyed to keep the Crusaders from using it again. Yaqut al-Hamawi, who died in 1228, called the village Majdal Yafa — a name that may refer to Jaffa, which he described as nearby — and recorded that it had a formidable fort. In 1596 Majdal Yaba was a village in the nahiya of Jabal Qubal, in the liwa’ of Nablus, with forty-four people, taxed on wheat and barley and on goats and beehives.

In the nineteenth century it was called Majdal al-Sadiq, after one of its chiefs, al-Sadiq, head of the Rayyan family — a branch of the Bani Ghazi tribe who had come from Transjordan in the seventeenth century. In the 1850s the Rayyan controlled twenty-two villages in the western half of the subdistrict of Bilad al-Jamma’in and kept a fortress and manor at Majdal Yaba. In the middle of that decade they were drawn into war against local rivals and defeated, and by 1860 had lost all their influence in the region; Majdal Yaba remained their home village but was no longer a seat of power. Edward Robinson recorded a large house for the shaykh al-Sadiq in 1852, and another traveler noted the same a decade later; later in the century visitors saw the remains of a church.

The village was laid out roughly as a parallelogram, its houses of mud and straw or of cement and stone built very close together and separated only by narrow alleys. Each hara, or neighborhood, was inhabited by a single hamula and had its own diwan for receiving guests and holding public meetings. The people were predominantly Muslim. The village had a mosque built in 1935, a clinic, and a school founded in 1888 under Ottoman rule and reopened in 1920, with 147 pupils in the mid-1940s. Agriculture was the mainstay: rainfed wheat, corn, barley and sesame, and vegetables and fruit — citrus above all — irrigated from artesian wells. In 1944/45, 2,443 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 13,085 under cereals, with 110 dunums irrigated or in orchards. The chief antiquities in the village were the Crusader fortress of Mirabel and Tall Ra’s al-‘Ayn, excavated and found to hold artifacts from the fourth millennium BC, surmounted by an Ottoman fortress, Bina Bashi, built in 1571. The census of 1931 counted 966 people in 227 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,520.

On the day Ramla was captured, some of the Israeli units in Operation Dani were sent north to secure the operation’s northern flank. On 12 July 1948 the Second Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade occupied Majdal Yaba, taking the village from the Iraqi forces defending it; Zochrot dates the occupation to 13 July and names the same brigade. The site of Ra’s al-‘Ayn, deserted since the 1920s, was taken the following morning in the same maneuver, and the New York Times reported that the position of the Iraqi troops in Majdal Yaba, surrounded by Israeli forces, was hopeless. The Israeli History of the War of Independence records that the occupation of the two villages gave control of the hills north of the operational zone and also the springs of the Yarkon — the ‘Awja river — which had supplied Jerusalem with water in the past, and notes that Iraqi forces in the sector later tried to retake the village and were driven back with heavy losses.

‘Enat, built in 1922, stands on what was traditionally village land, as does Ro’sh ha-‘Ayin, built in 1950 a kilometer northwest of the site; Giv’at ha-Shelosha was moved onto village land in 1953. Kibbutz Nachshonim, established in 1949 to the south, is not on village land. The site is covered with the rubble of the destroyed houses, fig trees and cactuses. The fortress still crowns it — thick stone walls, a long central building joined to smaller ones at both ends, abandoned and crumbling in parts. Beside it stands the tomb of al-Sadiq, after whom the village was named, with a narrow, relatively high entrance and a dome on a stone pedestal cracking in several places. Part of the village cemetery remains, and one of the graves is covered by a box-like superstructure.

Sources

• Majdal Yaba — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Majdal Yaba / al-Sadiq — Zochrot