Najd

Najd stood on an elevated spot on the southern coastal plain, about fourteen kilometers northeast of Gaza, overlooking the farmland around it; its name means ‘elevated ground’ in Arabic. In 1596 it was a village in the nahiya of Gaza with 215 people, taxed on wheat, barley, fruit, goats, beehives, and vineyards. Edward Robinson, traveling through in 1838, noted the village south of a wadi and watched its people winnowing barley, tossing it into the wind with wooden forks. In the late nineteenth century it was a small village with a well and a pond; as its population grew under the Mandate it expanded northwestward. Its people were Muslims, and its children attended school in Simsim, two kilometers to the northeast. Grain and fruit trees surrounded it on all sides, the orchards concentrated where well water could reach them; in 1944/45 some 11,916 dunums were sown with cereals. South of the village lay Khirbat Najd, with the rough stone foundations, vaults, and cisterns of an older settlement. The 1945 survey counted 620 people.

The end came just before the state was declared. On 13 May 1948 the villagers of Najd were expelled, along with the people of neighboring Simsim, by the Palmach’s Negev Brigade, according to Benny Morris — part of the small pushes north and east that the brigade made in coordination with the Giv’ati Brigade’s Operation Barak in the first half of May.

Two settlements were established on village lands: Sderot, founded in 1951 to the south of the site and later grown into a town, and Or ha-Ner, founded in 1957 to the northeast. The site itself is fenced in, overgrown with cactuses and Christ’s-thorn and sycamore trees, with the crumbled walls of unidentified buildings and an old irrigation canal still visible; the surrounding lands are cultivated.

Sources

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