Yibna

Yibna stood on the coastal plain about seven and a half kilometers from the sea, a central node in the road and rail network of southern Palestine, with a station on the Gaza–Lydda railway and the Gaza–Jaffa highway passing through. Few villages can match its written record: it is the Bible’s Jabneel and apparently a Philistine town; the Hasmoneans and then the Romans held it — the Romans knew it as Jamnia — and after the sack of Jerusalem in 70 AD the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious council, was transferred here. The Arabs conquered it under Amr ibn al-As; al-Maqdisi wrote in 985 that it had ‘a gem of a mosque,’ and Yaqut recorded the tomb of a companion of the Prophet whose identity was disputed. The Crusaders fought battles here between 1105 and 1123 and built a castle in 1141; after Hittin it returned to Muslim hands. In 1596 Yibna was a village in the nahiya of Gaza with 710 people. The American missionary William Thomson in 1834 counted some 3,000 residents and noted that an inscription on its mosque dated it to 1386. The modern town had four main streets, a boys’ school founded in 1921 (445 pupils in 1941–42) and a girls’ school from 1943, many springs and wells, and citrus as its chief crop — 6,468 dunums of citrus and bananas in 1944/45. The 1945 survey counted 5,420 people, predominantly Muslims.

In the first week of June 1948 Yibna became a bone of contention between the Egyptian army advancing up the coast and Israeli forces pushing south. Benny Morris dates its occupation to 4 June, in the second stage of Operation Barak: after mortaring and a brief fight, the units entered ‘and found the village deserted save for some old Arab men and women,’ who were sent packing, according to the military sources he quotes. The History of the War of Independence puts it a night later and differently — the villagers, ‘struck with fear’ at the Israeli troop concentrations, abandoned the town on the night of 4–5 June, which ‘fell into our hands without fighting.’ A United Press dispatch described Israeli artillery hammering the hilltop town behind mine-detector teams while, at sunrise, ‘civilians could be seen fleeing from the town toward the coast.’ An Egyptian attack reported on 5 June failed to retake it.

Settlements had begun on Yibna’s lands before its fall — Yavne in 1941 and Beyt Rabban in 1946 — and many more followed: a new Yavne, Kefar ha-Nagid, and Beyt Gamli’el in 1949, Ben Zakkay in 1950, Kefar Aviv in 1951, and Tzofiyya in 1955. A railway still crosses the village. Of Yibna itself, the dilapidated mosque and its minaret remain, together with a shrine; at least two surviving houses are used by Jewish families and one by an Arab family, and a well with a circular mouth stands disused nearby.

Sources

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