Suruh

Suruh stood on a rocky hill at about 525 metres, twenty-eight and a half kilometres from Acre, overlooking Tarbikha and facing al-Nabi Rubin. Like al-Nabi Rubin it was a satellite of Tarbikha, a kilometre away, whose facilities and services it used and whose school its children attended.

Victor Guérin, visiting in 1875, described what he called Khurbet Seroueh: ruins covering the summit of the hill, with the remains of a very ancient square tower fourteen paces on each side at the highest point, its lower courses of very large blocks roughly squared and laid without cement, its interior filled with similar blocks piled in confusion among which terebinths and pomegranates had taken root. Near the tower a few old houses gave shelter to four families of Metawileh; on the lintel of one door a square cross inscribed in a circle could still be traced, and the terraces of another house were carried on arched arcades of good cut stone, Roman or at least Byzantine. He also recorded the remains of numerous destroyed houses, a dozen cisterns cut in the rock, a column lying on the ground and the fragment of a sarcophagus. In 1881 the Survey of Western Palestine found a small village of about ninety Muslims on a ridge, with olives and arable land around it and three rock-cut cisterns.

The villagers’ houses were of stone, and they lived by farming and raising livestock, cultivating grain, olives, grapes and tobacco among other crops. The 1945 statistics counted Suruh together with Tarbikha and al-Nabi Rubin: 1,000 Muslims between the three villages, holding 18,563 dunums, of which 3,200 were allotted to cereals and 619 were irrigated or planted in orchards. Suruh and al-Nabi Rubin were predominantly Sunni hamlets attached to a largely Shia village. Two khirbas near Suruh held ancient artefacts — crumbled walls, cisterns and rock-hewn tombs.

Suruh was one of the first communities to be expelled during the army’s campaign to clear the northern border with Lebanon. In the second week of November 1948, as the main battles of the war were winding down, Israeli forces swept through several of these villages. Benny Morris’s account does not make clear whether the villagers of Suruh were forced across the border into Lebanon, as most of their neighbours were, or trucked to another place inside Israeli-held territory, as the rest were; most of the people of Suruh and the neighbouring hamlets ended in Lebanon. For weeks after the clearing campaign was completed the army returned to raid these villages periodically, to make sure that nobody had gone home. Morris does not say what eventually became of the village or its inhabitants.

Shomera was established on part of the village site in 1949, Even Menachem very close to it in 1960, Kefar Rosenwald in 1967 and Shetula in 1969, all on village land. Only rubble, trees, cactus, shrubs and weeds are visible. Most of the site is used for grazing.

Sources

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