An old church, one of the last remaining structures of Ma’alul (معلول), a Palestinian village that was ethnically cleansed and destroyed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba.
The village, with a history dating back to at least the 12th century, was captured by Zionist militants on 15 July 1948 during Operation Dekels. The villagers were forced to leave and their homes were destroyed.
Located six kilometers west of the city of Nazareth, many of Ma’alul’s inhabitants took refuge in Nazareth and the neighbouring town of Yafa an-Naseriyye.
Despite having never left the territory that came to form part of Israel, the majority of the villagers of Maalul, and other Palestinian villages like Andor and Al-Mujidal, were declared “absentees”, allowing the confiscation of their land by the new Israeli state. In 1949 an Israeli military base was built on the village lands.
Today, much of the former village’s lands are owned by the JNF. All that remains of its former structures are two churches, a mosque and a Roman era mausoleum, known locally as Qasr al-Dayr (“Castle of the monastery”).
The mosque and two churches still stand, and are used intermittently as cow sheds by the residents of a nearby settlement, Kibbutz Kefar ha-Choresh.
Cactus, olive trees, and fig trees also grow on the remains of the village, which is strewn with piles of stones. The village also contains a few tombs in the Muslim cemetery across from the mosque as well as the remains of a few houses.
In 2011, descendants of the Palestinians who used to live in Ma’alul renovated the church and began holding annual prayers followed by small vigils in memory of their ancestors.
Just before the Nakba, in the 1945 statistics, the population of Ma’alul was 690 Palestinians: 490 Muslims and 200 Christians, according to an official land and population survey.
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Photo by @ibrahim.abuammar
Categories: Arab World, Asia, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Zionism