Miska

Miska stood on a slightly raised sandy hill on the coastal plain, along the north bank of a wadi and fifteen kilometres southwest of Tulkarm. Secondary roads connected it to the Tulkarm road and the coastal highway. PalQuest treats a link between the village and an Arab tribe called Miska as possible rather than certain; it also distinguishes the village from another place of the same name recorded elsewhere in the Nablus district in 1596. By the late nineteenth century, olive trees grew to Miska’s north and south, with fig and palm trees dispersed around a compact settlement.

The village was divided into four sections by two streets meeting at its centre. Its Palestinian residents were Muslim and maintained a mosque and an elementary boys’ school. The 1944/45 statistics require care: PalQuest records 880 Arab residents of Miska and 180 Jewish residents in Sde Warburg, whose figures were included in the same accounting unit, for a combined total of 1,060. Of the unit’s 8,076 dunums, 4,924 were Arab-owned, 2,976 Jewish-owned and 176 public. Palestinian cultivation included 1,115 dunums of citrus and bananas, 3,245 dunums of cereals, and 304 irrigated dunums or orchards; wells also supported vegetables and watermelons.

PalQuest and Palestine Remembered place the occupation on 20–21 April 1948. Their account says Haganah officers had ordered the villagers to leave on 15 April, that the order was not obeyed, and that Alexandroni Brigade units then attacked and forcibly expelled the inhabitants. The operation followed a Haganah command decision to clear Palestinian communities from the coastal area between Tel Aviv and Zikhron Ya’aqov before 15 May. Demolition began in early June through the Jewish National Fund despite opposition within Mapam; by 16 June, David Ben-Gurion’s diary recorded that Miska’s destruction was under way.

PalQuest’s account of the 1992 site survey recorded citrus groves and cactuses around the village site, the two-room school being used by orchard watchmen, the mosque being used for agricultural storage, and concrete remains around the village well. That description no longer carries forward unchanged: Zochrot’s 2009 booklet records that bulldozers hired by the Israel Lands Administration demolished the two school buildings in July 2006 and that trees were planted after the rubble was removed. The sources also organize later settlement geography differently. PalQuest places Sde Warburg and Mishmeret on village land and Ramat ha-Kovesh outside it; Zochrot’s village summary lists Sde Warburg as the pre-1948 settlement on Miska’s land and no post-1948 settlement, while Palestine Remembered’s statistical panel instead names Ein ha-Horesh, Giv’at Hayyim and Ahituv. Without a shared boundary record resolving those lists, the archive leaves each attribution visible.

Sources

• Miska — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Miska — Palestine Remembered
• Miska — Zochrot
• Remembering Miska — Zochrot