Sirin

Sirin stood on flat ground sloping gently to the southwest, bounded by Wadi al-Ruduh to the northwest and Wadi al-Bayadir to the southeast, seventeen kilometres north of Baysan. A secondary road carried it to the highway running north to Samakh and south to Baysan. The Crusaders knew it as Losserin and in 1168 it was sold by one Simon Chevron to the Hospitallers. The Ottoman survey of 1596 recorded it in the nahiya of Jenin, in the liwa of Lajjun, paying tax on wheat and barley as well as on goats and beehives. The English traveller Buckingham, passing early in the nineteenth century, described thirty or forty houses with half a dozen Bedouin tents beside them; later in the century a hundred residents worked thirty-five faddans behind hedges of prickly pear.

Of the 810 people counted in 1944/45, 620 were Muslims and 190 Christians. The village had one elementary school, for boys. Agriculture carried the economy: of its 28,445 dunums, 14,854 were sown in cereals and 413 irrigated or planted in orchards, 109 of them in olives. The past lay close to the surface — a Greek inscription was found in the house of Zayd al-Shihada, and the Byzantine remains included a mosaic pavement and a vaulted spring with a fragment of cornice.

Units of the Golani Brigade occupied Sirin on 12 May 1948, most likely as a consequence of the fall of Baysan the same day; Awlam, Hadatha and Ma’dhar were taken in the same push. The History of the Haganah recorded only that the inhabitants fled in fear of the Jews and that Jewish lower Galilee had emptied of Arabs. Benny Morris offers a different version, holding that the people of all four villages had been ordered out the previous month, on 6 April, by the Arab Higher Committee — an account Walid Khalidi judged less plausible. Ilan Pappé writes that the village was occupied on 12 May, its population expelled and its mosque, church and monastery destroyed.

No Israeli settlement was built on the lands of Sirin. The cemetery survives, and one house, which serves as a store for straw; stone rubble and clumps of cactus mark the rest of the site, and the spring at its centre is covered by a stone structure. The site is used as a cattle yard, and some of the surrounding land is planted in cotton. A Crusader tower still stands nearby.

Sources

• Sirin — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Sirin — Zochrot
• Sirin, Baysan — Wikipedia