Sabbarin

Sabbarin sat on the banks of Wadi al-Tin, which cut through the village from north to south, twenty-eight kilometres from Haifa at about a hundred metres. Secondary roads linked it to the Haifa–Jenin highway and to the coastal highway. The Crusaders called it Sabbarim. In the late nineteenth century it was a stone-and-mud village on a slope, described as large, with an estimated 600 people cultivating 55 faddans; Victor Guérin, visiting in 1870, noted that they grew sesame and that the well, Bir Sabbarin, was well built. A large masonry shaft to the west of the village has been identified as the head of the Caesarea high-level Roman aqueduct, drawing water from the springs near Sabbarin.

By the Mandate it was a substantial village. The 1922 census counted 845 people, the 1931 census 1,108 in 256 houses, and the 1945 statistics 1,700 — 1,670 Muslims and 30 Christians — holding 25,307 dunums. There was a boys’ elementary school, and numerous wadis and springs supplied water. The villagers lived by agriculture and animal husbandry, growing grain, vegetables and olives: 12,773 dunums were allotted to cereals in 1944/45 and 45 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards. Published archaeological surveys have provided minimal evidence of the antiquity of the site.

Sabbarin was captured on 12 May 1948. It was defended by a local militia and possibly by the Arab Liberation Army, and the attacking force was the Irgun. The accounts of what happened differ, and both are on the record. Ilan Pappé writes that the Irgun completed the attack on the remaining villages of Marj ibn Amir — Sabbarin, al-Sindiyana, Bureika, Khubbayza and Umm al-Shawf — while British Mandate troops were still in the country; that some villagers fled under heavy mortar fire while others who raised white flags were immediately exiled; and that at Sabbarin, where the attackers met armed resistance, seven young Palestinian men found carrying arms were executed on the spot. Benny Morris records instead that the Irgun met resistance and that most of the villagers fled after twenty of them were killed in a firefight, with an Irgun armoured car firing on the villagers as they ran. The historian Saleh Abdel Jawad describes a massacre committed in the village on 12–14 May. The two accounts converge on what followed: more than a hundred people who had not fled, among them the elderly, women and children, were held behind barbed wire for a few days and then expelled to Umm al-Fahm, which was not yet in Israeli hands. Others who had left earlier ended in refugee camps around Jenin. PalQuest’s entry for Sabbarin, unusually, carries no occupation section at all.

Kibbutz Ramot Menashe was established northeast of the site in 1948, and Ammiqam a kilometre to the south in 1950, both on village land. The site is large and strewn with the stone debris of the houses, overgrown with wild thorns interspersed with cactus and with pine, fig, olive and mulberry trees. Some of the surrounding land is used by Israelis as pasture and for growing fruit trees. Sabbarin is among the villages for which commemorative Marches of Return have been held.

Sources

• Sabbarin — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Sabbarin — Zochrot
• Sabbarin — Wikipedia