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Arab Abukishk, with its
eighteen thousand donums (one donum equals 1000 sq. meters)
landscape, was
considered before 1948 the largest village in the coastal city of
Jafa
district Arabs were the
proprietors of 1715 donums, Jews owned 901 donums and 448
donums were state-owned
land. (Palestine Index Gazetteer prepared by Land
Registry
Office of
Palestine Government, 1945, Census of Palestine, 1931, and
Village
Statistics 1945).
2487 donums of the village spacious land were allotted for citrus
and
banana, 14018 donums for
wheat and 226 irrigated donums for orchards. Besides
husbandry, the
well-to-do residents raised cattle.
1900 Arabs comprised
Abukishk’s population in 1944/1945, an indication that at least
2000 citizens fled their
homes in 1948. Arab Abukishk, was located, in the middle
Palestinian coast, two
kilometers west of Palestine’s major river, Al-Ouja, known also as
Yarkoon, and linked with
Jafa-Haifa main coastal road along with half dozen of adjacent
Arab villages.
In 1925, an elementary
mixed school was built in Abukishk, when schooling was
unaffordable luxury in
major cities in the region. Official figures show that 108 pupils,
among them nine girls,
registered in the school in mid forties.
In Abukishk, the
residents used to live in stone-built houses large enough to
accommodate
all members of each
family together, a tradition that characterized Palestinians’ norm
of
living before the
Diaspora but was shattered in the aftermath of 1948 war due to
their
dispersal. When the land
was lost, every one went on his own depending on the refugee
camp assigned to him or
the nearest Arab country to his or her then-gone homeland.
Zionist gangs shortly
before the end of the British Mandate captured Arab Abukishk in May
15, 1948. The Israeli
historian Benny Morris, author of The Birth of the Palestine
Refugee
Problem 1947-1949,
indicates, “The evacuation of the area, north of Tel Aviv, was
undertaken by the Irgun
Gang”. Irgun and Stern Gang, notorious for the massacre
they
committed April 9, 1948,
in Deir Yassin, abducted five local leaders from nearby villages,
shelled regularly the
civilian population with heavy artillery as an act of intimidation
which
triggered the evacuation
of Abukishk and other villages in the area, north of Tel Aviv.
Arab Abukishk
spearheaded, in 1921, one of the earliest clashes with Zionists by
attacking,
alongside Arab
volunteers from the middle coast, Petah Tekva, the first Zionist
colony
established in Palestine
in 1878. The attack was organized in the wake of Jafa uprising
against Zionist
colonization of Palestine under guidance and protection of the
British
Mandate’s authorities.
The uprising of Jafa inflicted heavy casualties among the Zionist
colonizers of Jafa and
its environs including Petah Tekva. As a result, all Arab villages
bordering Tel Aviv were
the first to be depopulated in 1948, especially after Jafa’s
surrender to the new
invaders.
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