Saris

Saris stood on a high plateau running north to south about fifteen kilometres west of Jerusalem, dropping steeply on its northern edge where it overlooked the Jaffa–Jerusalem highway. It saw wide country on every side, and from its western edge Ramla and Lydda were visible with the naked eye. In 1596 it was a village of 292 people in the nahiya of Jerusalem, taxed on wheat, barley, olives, fruit, carob, goats, beehives and vines. In the late nineteenth century it sat on the top of a hill with olives below it.

The village was arc-shaped, following the contours of the site. Most houses were stone. Its people were Muslims; there was a mosque in the centre and a few shops, and water came from springs and wells. The 1931 census counted 470 people in 114 houses; the 1945 statistics counted 560, on 10,699 dunums of which 3,677 were cereals and 366 irrigated or orchard. Forests around the site were part of what visitors remarked on.

Saris was destroyed at the end of Operation Nachshon, the Haganah offensive launched in April 1948 to open the road to Jerusalem. The History of the Haganah dates the attack to 13 April; other sources put it a few days later, on 16 April; Benny Morris gives 16–17 April. The Palestinian historian ‘Arif al-‘Arif records that 35 houses were demolished. The New York Times put the number at 25, together with the mosque and the school, and reported that 7 Arabs were killed by a Haganah force of 500 that attacked in the early morning with mortars and small arms and then withdrew; a Haganah statement quoted by the paper said the battalion spent about five hours in the village, blew up 25 buildings and burned others, and conceded that some of the casualties may have been women while maintaining that the residents had been evacuated at the start of the attack. Morris quotes an official British dispatch from later that month which implied that the people of Saris fled under the influence of the massacre at Deir Yassin on 9 April. The village was not held firmly after the April attack and remained on the front line: in May the Arab Liberation Army recorded an assault on nearby Bayt Mahsir on 9 May that failed at Saris.

The plan to settle the site preceded its fall. On 13 April, days before the attack, the Haganah chief Israel Galili wrote to the Jewish National Fund official Yosef Weitz asking that a settlement be established at Saris as soon as possible, describing this and seven other sites as important to security. A JNF plan of 20 August called for a settlement on the site, and Shoresh was inaugurated later that year, a kilometre southwest; Sho’eva was established half a kilometre northeast in 1950. Both stand on village land. The site is covered in stone rubble with iron bars protruding from collapsed roofs. There are many open wells and several caves with arched roofs, an abandoned almond grove on the eastern side, and the remains of an artificial pool halfway down the slope. The cemetery lies southwest of the site among trees; it holds several large tombs, one of them inside a small roofless enclosure with an almond tree growing at its centre.

Sources

• Saris — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Saris — Zochrot
• Saris, Jerusalem — English Wikipedia, for the 1945 Village Statistics figure and Morris’s date of depopulation