Yalo

Yalo (also transliterated Yalu) climbed the foothills of the Latrun salient, thirteen kilometers southeast of Ramla, overlooking the Ayalon valley and the ancient road from Jaffa to Jerusalem. Its houses of stone and mud brick sat among olive groves, figs, and grain fields; the 1945 British survey counted 1,220 residents, all Muslims, and a Jordanian census in 1961 found the village had grown to about 1,650. After the 1948 war the salient fell on the Jordanian side of the armistice line, and Yalo spent nineteen years in the West Bank.

In the first days of June 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israeli forces seized Latrun; the residents of Yalo, together with those of neighboring Imwas and Bayt Nuba, were ordered out and walked east toward Ramallah. In the weeks that followed, the three villages were bulldozed — an operation ordered, by most accounts, by chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin. A plea in the Knesset that same month to let Yalo’s people return was denied.

The villagers scattered to Ramallah and its refugee camps, among them Qaddura and al-Am’ari. Their lands were folded into Canada Park, a recreation forest established in the early 1970s with donations raised by the Jewish National Fund of Canada — much of it, as Zochrot and former residents point out, across the 1949 armistice line. Terraces, olive trees, and broken stone survive between the picnic groves, and former residents still return with tour groups to name what the park’s signs do not.

Sources

• Yalu — Palestine Remembered
• Yalu — Zochrot
• Yalo — Wikipedia