Zarnuqa

Zarnuqa stood on flat land on the central coastal plain ten kilometers from Ramla, joined by a secondary road to the highway that ran there. In the late nineteenth century it was a village of adobe brick with gardens and cactus hedges around it. All its people were Muslims. It was laid out in a trapezoid with the long side facing west, and building went on quickly in the last years of the Mandate on the strength of the economic boom. Zarnuqa had a clinic and a boys’ primary school founded in 1924, which became a full elementary school in 1942 and enrolled 252 pupils by the mid-1940s; it taught agronomy, including poultry-raising and bee-keeping, on a six-dunum annex. A girls’ elementary school was established in 1943 with sixty-five pupils.

Agriculture, and above all citrus, was the pillar of the village economy. Fruit trees ringed Zarnuqa on every side, irrigated from wells, and stood thickest in the north and northwest where the wells had been bored. In 1944/45, 2,070 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 2,266 under cereals, with 1,189 dunums irrigated or in orchards. A weekly market on Saturdays served merchants from Jaffa, Lydda and Ramla. The census of 1931 counted 1,952 people in 414 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 2,380 Arabs, alongside 240 Jews — figures the Mandate statistics group together with the neighboring colony of Gibbeton.

Israeli troops of the Giv’ati Brigade occupied what Benny Morris calls the semi-abandoned village on 27 May 1948, during Operation Barak; Zochrot gives the same date and the same brigade. What happened there was set down in a letter to ‘Al ha-Mishmar, the newspaper of the left-wing Israeli party Mapam, by a writer who had been briefed by a soldier who took part. The soldier described one of the men opening a door and firing a Sten gun in a single burst at an old man, an old woman and a child; the rest of the villagers were taken out of their houses and made to stand in the sun all day, in thirst and hunger, until forty rifles were surrendered. The villagers said they had no weapons, and in the end, in the letter’s words, “they were expelled from the village towards Yibna.” The New York Times, quoting Israeli sources, reported at the time that Zarnuqa and al-Qubayba had been occupied in a four-hour battle. Morris writes that the village had traditionally been friendly to the Yishuv, and that troops and farmers from the neighboring settlements nonetheless ransacked its houses after the occupation. Zarnuqa was destroyed outright that June.

In August the nearby Kvutzat Schiller applied to the Jewish settlement authorities for the lands of Zarnuqa to be transferred into its hands in perpetuity as a supplement to its land allocation. Morris does not say whether the request was granted, but records that by 27 May 1949 new immigrants had been settled on the site of the destroyed village. A settlement called Zarnoqa was established there in late 1948 and is now a neighborhood on the edge of Rehovot, which was founded in 1890. Gan Shelomo, established in 1927, later spread onto village land, as did Gibton, built in 1933, and Giv’at Brenner, built in 1928, both now merging into the suburbs of Rehovot. The site is dominated by the houses of those settlements; mulberry trees and cactuses grow there. The few village houses that remain are either occupied by Jewish residents or fenced off and used for storage — one of the fenced houses is of concrete, with a wide roofed porch carried on two columns. The land around is farmed by the settlements.

Sources

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