Simsim

Simsim stood on flat ground on the coastal plain northeast of Gaza, ringed by hills with Wadi Simsim running along its southern edge, between the coastal highway and the parallel Gaza–Julis road. The Crusaders knew it as Semsem; in 1596 it was a village in the nahiya of Gaza with 110 people, taxed on wheat, barley, fruit trees, goats, and beehives. In the late nineteenth century it was surrounded by gardens, with a well, a pool, and an olive grove to the north. It was the hometown of al-Shaykh Sulayman Abd al-Qadir (Abu Ali), one of the leaders of the 1936 revolt against British rule. The village had a circular plan, its narrow streets radiating from a center that held the mosque and a school founded in 1934 — shared in 1947 with the children of neighboring Najd, with about 150 pupils in the mid-1940s. Its people were Muslims, its houses adobe brick. Grain, vegetables, and fruit filled its lands: in 1944/45 some 12,086 dunums were sown with cereals and 240 with citrus and bananas, irrigated from wells 35 to 40 meters deep. The 1945 survey counted 1,360 people, including 70 Jews.

The end came with the fall of its neighbor. Just before 15 May 1948 — in the wake of the occupation of Burayr on 12–13 May, according to Israeli historian Benny Morris — the Palmach’s Negev Brigade captured Simsim in one of its northward thrusts and expelled its inhabitants. A New York Times report placing the village’s capture two months later, during the fighting between the truces, is contradicted by other accounts and is generally discounted.

The settlement of Gevar’am had been established in 1942 on land that traditionally belonged to the village; Or ha-Ner was built in 1957 less than a kilometer south of the site, on the lands of Najd. The village itself has been obliterated: it can be recognized only by the cypress and sycamore trees that remain, and a pile of stones that may be the debris of a building. The site is fenced in and serves as pasture, its surrounding lands cultivated.

Sources

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