This post was published in 2000.

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. (PalestineIndex Gazetteerprepared 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.

Bibliography:

–The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem 1947-1949 by Benny Morris

– All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 by Dr.Khalidi, Walid

–Village Statistics of 1945: A Classification of Land and Area ownership in Palestine by Hadawi, Sami