Umm az-Zinat

Umm az-Zinat stood on a rocky cliff on the southeastern section of Mount Carmel at about 325 metres, twenty and a half kilometres from Haifa, overlooking the bilad al-rawha’. A secondary road linked it to the coastal highway and to the Haifa–Jenin road. Its name means “source of adornments.” The English consul Rogers put the population at 350 in 1859; Victor Guérin found 450 in 1870, with gardens fenced by cactus and a guest house that also served as a mosque; the Survey of Western Palestine in 1882 called it a good-sized village on a saddle, built principally of stone, with a well to the south, and noted that it seemed an ancient site for its many well-cut rock tombs. A boys’ elementary school was founded there by the Ottomans in about 1888.

By the Mandate it was among the ten largest villages in the Haifa subdistrict in both population and land area. The 1922 census counted 787 people, the 1931 census 1,029 in 209 houses, and the 1945 statistics 1,470 — 1,450 Muslims and 20 Christians — holding 22,156 dunums. The village was shaped, in Khalidi’s description, like a tennis racquet, with a handle extending northeast, its masonry houses clustered together. Water for domestic use came from several wells. The villagers lived by agriculture and animal husbandry, growing grain, vegetables and fruit, and by 1943 they had planted about 1,834 dunums of olive trees — the largest unbroken expanse of olives in the subdistrict — which they pressed at four manual olive presses. In 1944/45, 9,879 dunums were allotted to cereals and 1,742 were irrigated or planted in orchards. There were traces of earlier settlement in the village itself: building foundations, rock-cut tombs, and a stone sarcophagus in the eastern part. A kilometre to the south lay Khirbat al-Haramis, the ruins of an ancient and undated village.

In the early days of the war a Zionist unit of ten militiamen dressed in British army uniforms — a tactic commonly used to get into Arab villages — raided Umm az-Zinat. The Palestinian newspaper Filastin reported the raid on the night of 19–20 January and said it was driven back, mentioning no casualties. In early May it was reported that the women and children of the village had been evacuated. One villager recalled that a day before the fall of Umm az-Zinat three men from the settlement of Ein HaEmek came into the village and warned them that Haganah forces were preparing to enter, their aim being to frighten the villagers into flight; some were afraid and fled, and some stayed and waited for their fate.

The village was captured on 15 May 1948 by the Fourth Battalion of the Golani Brigade, according to the official History of the War of Independence, and those who had remained were expelled. It stood on what the Haganah considered its alternate supply route to Haifa, the coastal road being blocked by a cluster of Palestinian villages — the Little Triangle — until the end of July. The New York Times quoted Haganah sources on 15 May as saying they had taken several Arab villages on the slopes of Mount Carmel and near Afula. In August 1948 Israeli troops returned to Umm az-Zinat with orders to kill any males and expel any females they found there; at least two Palestinian men were killed and a number of women expelled.

Elyaqim was established on the southern side of the village site in 1949. The houses have been reduced to rubble scattered over the site, which is overgrown with thorns, bushes, cactus, and pomegranate and fig trees, with a small forest on part of it. The village cemetery is still visible. Part of the surrounding land is used by Israeli farmers as cattle pasture and planted with fruit and olive trees. Umm az-Zinat has been the destination of repeated Processions of Return.

Sources

• Umm al-Zinat — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Umm al-Zinat — Zochrot
• Umm az-Zinat — Wikipedia