Suba

Suba occupied the summit of a conical hill rising 769 meters above the Jerusalem hills, about seven kilometers west of the city, commanding the road down to Tel Aviv. The village was built among the remains of Belmont, a Crusader castle taken by Saladin, and its people — 620 in the 1945 British survey, all Muslims — grew grain and tended orchards and springs on the slopes below.

Because of its position over the highway, Suba saw fighting from the first months of the war. Irregulars of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood stationed in the village joined attacks on Jewish traffic on the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road, and the Haganah attacked it several times; an assault on 3 April, pressed even with air support, was beaten back. The end came in the summer: on the night of 12–13 July 1948, during Operation Danny, Palmach units conquered Suba. Most of its people had fled under the shelling, and those who remained were expelled.

In October 1948, Palmach veterans founded a kibbutz — later named Tzova — on village lands a kilometer to the south. Today the hilltop is Tel Tzova, a national park ringed by the kibbutz’s fields, where the stone shells of village houses stand mixed with the walls of Belmont Castle above the highway. Two books by writers from the village, published in Amman and in the West Bank, have carried Suba’s memory into exile.

Sources

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