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Template:Infobox former Arab villages in Palestine

Balad al-Sheikh (traditional transliteration) or Balad ash-Shaykh (most recent form of transliteration; Template:Lang-ar) was a Palestinian Arab village located just north of Mount Carmel, 7 kilometers (4.3 mi) southeast of Haifa. Currently the town's land is located within the jurisdiction of the Israeli city, Nesher.

History

Ottoman era

The town is named after Sheikh Abdullah as-Sahli, a renowned Sufi, who was granted the taxes collected from the village by Sultan Salim II. The village contains a maqam ("shrine") dedicated to him. His grave is located in the Balad al-Sheikh cemetery on Mount Carmel.

In 1816, British traveller James Silk Buckingham passed by "Belled-el-Sheikh". In 1875, the village was estimated at having a population of 500, and with olive, palm trees and springs near it.

British Mandate era

In the 1922 census of Palestine, conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Balad al Shaikh had a population of 406; 405 Muslims and 1 Christian, where the one Christian was a Melkite. This had increasing in the 1931 census to 747 Muslims, including Bedouin tribes that lived nearby, in a total of 247 houses.

The Jezreel Valley railway line passed about 0.5 kilometers (0.31 mi) east of the village. The Balad al-Sheikh Railway Station, also known as Shumariyyah (Şumariye in Turkish) and after 1948 as Tel Hanan, was built in 1904 as the second station in the original line. In 1913, the Ottomans built an extension of the valley line to Acre, with this station serving as terminus. When the Haganah attacked Balad al-Sheikh on the night of December 31, 1947 – January 1, 1948, Hanan Zelinger of the Haganah was killed in the operation. A Jewish village, Tel Hanan (now part of the town of Nesher), was built there in his name.

The village was the source of attacks on Jews in 1929 when its residents attacked the local cement factory and burned down a women's farm. In 1934, a new cemetery for Muslim residents of Haifa, was established near the village and in 1935 Izz ad-Din al-Qassam was buried there, making the area a source of tension between Jews and Arabs. The grave was vandalized in 1999.

According to the British Population Survey - Village Statistics, 1945, the town had a total land area of 9,849 Turkish dunams, although only 5,844 dunams were privately owned by Arabs; most of the remainder was public property. In 1945, the town had a population of 4,120 Arab inhabitants making it one of the larger localities in the area. Of the land, Arabs used 386 dunams for plantations and irrigable land, 4,410 for cereals, while 221 dunams were built-up (urban) land.

1948 Arab–Israeli War

On December 10, 1947 a patrol of Jewish Settlement Police that was escorting Jewish buses on the road, fired on a number of Arabs that blocked the road near the village. Several families left the village.

Following the attacks, the Jewish transportation stopped for a while to travel through the village. The transportation from Haifa to Nesher, Yagur and Jezreel Valley travelled through Check Post junction, Krayot, Kfar Hasidim and Yagur.

On December 30, 1947, a grenade attack by Irgun killed 6 Arab civilians in front of the Haifa Oil Refinery, after which the Arab crowd went in and killed 39 Jewish refinery workers. During the night of the following day, Haganah troops entered the town disguised as Arabs and killed 14 residents, 10 of whom were women and children. In an alternative description by controversial Israeli historian Aryeh Yitzhaki, the attack was carried out by a combination of Palmach and Haganah forces who entered the town and fought mostly inside the houses. Because of this, most of the sixty residents that were killed were non-combatants (note that Yitzhaki speaks of 60, while Miller mentions 14; altogether figures vary between 14 and 70 - see Balad al-Shaykh massacre). In this action, three members of the Haganah were also killed. Following the attack, on January 7, 1948, part of the residents of the village left and were replaced by Arab volunteers who came from Haifa to defend the village.

In early April 1948, a unit of the Arab Legion that had garrisoned the village left the area. This led the villagers to abandon the houses in the southeastern part of the village, near the Legion camp and move to the village center.

On April 22, after the Battle of Haifa, the vast majority of Haifa's non-Jewish citizens abandoned it. At the same time, many of Balad ash-Sheikh's residents left the village, including women and children.

On April 24, 1948, the Carmeli Brigade a unit of the Haganah surrounded the village, asking the residents to hand over all their weapons. They handed them 22 old and useless rifles and asked for ceasefire. The Haganah replied that they should hand over all their weapons. The residents did not reply, instead they asked the British Army for help. On April 25, at 05:00 AM, the Haganah fired several shells from three-inch mortars. Many adults male fled and left the women and children behind. A British army unit that came at 06:00 reported that there was almost no return fire from the village. The British advised the villagers to leave the village and they did it with British escort.

Most of the fleeing or exiled residents of Balad ash-Sheikh are internally displaced Palestinians and presently reside in various Arab neighborhoods in Haifa or Acre.

Walid Khalidi, a prominent Palestinian historian, described the town in 1992:

Many of the Arab houses and shops are still standing and are occupied by the settlement's inhabitants. The cemetery is visible and is in a state of neglect.

See also

• List of villages depopulated during the Arab-Israeli conflict

References

1. Haifa District: Balad al-Shaykh Town Statistics and Facts
2. ^ Khalidi, 1992, p. 152.
3. Buckingham, 1821, p.114. Ref. from Petersen, 2002, p. 109.
4. Conder and Kitchener, 1881, SWP I, p. 281. Quoted in Khalidi, 1992, p. 152.
5. Barron, 1923, Table XI, Sub-district of Haifa, p. 33
6. Barron, 1923, Table XVI, p. 49
7. Mills, 1932, p. 88.
8. Tzadok Eshel, The Cement and his Manufacturers, The Portland Cement Company "Nesher", 1976 p. 68
9. Aharon Kaminker, Neighborhood in the shadow of Chimney smoke, 1978, pp 93-97
10. Cite error: The named reference Hadawi47 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
11. Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics. Village Statistics, April, 1945. Quoted in Hadawi, 1970, p. 89
12. Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics. Village Statistics, April, 1945. Quoted in Hadawi, 1970, p. 139
13. The Palestine Post, Legionnaire shoots Jews, December, 10, 1947
14. Zev Vilnay, Ariel – Ariel – Entziklopediya Lidiyat HaAretz (10 volumes) (1976–82), p 927
15. Research Guide to the Israel-Palestinian conflict: Balad esh-Sheikh Robin C. Miller cites Wilson, Cordon and Search, pp. 158 and Walid Khalidi in his book All That Remains, pp.151-154.
16. Research Guide to the Israel-Palestinian conflict: Balad esh-Sheikh Robin C. Miller cites Arieh Yitzhaqi in the April 14, 1972, issue of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, translated in "From the Hebrew Press," Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 1, no. 4 (summer 1972), p. 144. Also quoted by Sami Hadawi, Bitter Harvest, pp. 88.
17. Yoav Gelber, Independence Versus Nakbah: The Arab–Israeli War of 1948, forthcoming, Zmora-Bitan, 2004, p. 139
18. Morris, 2004, pp. 207-208
19. Morris, 2004, p. 207
20. Morris, 2004, p. 208
21. Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, Yale University Press, 2008
22. Khalidi, 1992, p.154

Bibliography

• Barron, J. B., ed. (1923). Palestine: Report and General Abstracts of the Census of 1922 (PDF). Government of Palestine.
• Conder, Claude Reignier; Kitchener, Herbert H. (1881). The Survey of Western Palestine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Archaeology. Vol. 1. London: Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund.
• Buckingham, James Silk (1821). Travels in Palestine Through the Countries of Bashan and Gilead, East of the River Jordan, Including a Visit to the Cities of Geraza and Gamala in the Decapolis.
• Hadawi, Sami (1970). Village Statistics of 1945: A Classification of Land and Area ownership in Palestine. Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center.
• Khalidi, Walid (1992). All That Remains. Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies. ISBN 0-88728-224-5.
• Mills, E., ed. (1932). Census of Palestine 1931. Population of Villages, Towns and Administrative Areas (PDF). Jerusalem: Government of Palestine.
• Morris, Benny (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-00967-6.
• Mülinen, Egbert Friedrich von 1908, Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Karmels "Separateabdruck aus der Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palëstina-Vereins Band XXX (1907) Seite 117-207 und Band XXXI (1908) Seite 1-258." Beled esch-schech: p.175 ff.
• Palmer, E. H. (1881). The Survey of Western Palestine: Arabic and English Name Lists Collected During the Survey by Lieutenants Conder and Kitchener, R. E. Transliterated and Explained by E.H. Palmer. Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund.
• Petersen, Andrew (2001). A Gazetteer of Buildings in Muslim Palestine (British Academy Monographs in Archaeology). Vol. 1. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-727011-0. p. 108-109

External links

• Welcome to Balad-al-Shaykh
• Survey of Western Palestine, Map 5: IAA, Wikimedia commons
• Balad al-Shaykh, from the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center

v t e Palestinian Arab towns and villages depopulated during the 1948 Palestinian exodus by subdistrict
Acre	Amqa Arab al-Samniyya al-Bassa al-Birwa al-Damun Dayr al-Qassi al-Ghabisiyya Iqrit Iribbin Jiddin al-Kabri Kafr 'Inan Kuwaykat al-Manshiyya al-Mansura Mi'ar al-Nabi Rubin al-Nahr al-Ruways Suhmata al-Sumayriyya Suruh al-Tall Tarbikha Umm al-Faraj az-Zeeb
Beisan	Arab al-'Arida Arab al-Bawati Arab al-Safa al-Ashrafiyya al-Bira Beisan Danna Farwana al-Fatur al-Ghazzawiyya al-Hamidiyya al-Hamra Jabbul Kafra Kawkab al-Hawa al-Khunayzir Masil al-Jizl al-Murassas Qumya al-Sakhina al-Samiriyya Sirin Tall al-Shawk al-Taqa al-Tira Umm 'Ajra Umm Sabuna Yubla Zab'a al-Zawiya
Beersheba	al-Imara al-Jammama al-Khalasa Auja al-Hafir
Gaza	Arab Suqrir Barbara Barqa al-Batani al-Gharbi al-Batani al-Sharqi Bayt 'Affa Bayt Daras Bayt Jirja Bayt Tima Bil'in Burayr Dayr Sunayd Dimra al-Faluja Hamama Hatta Hiribya Huj Hulayqat Ibdis Iraq al-Manshiyya Iraq Suwaydan Isdud al-Jaladiyya al-Jiyya Julis al-Jura Jusayr Karatiyya Kawfakha Kawkaba al-Khisas al-Masmiyya al-Kabira al-Masmiyya al-Saghira al-Muharraqa Najd Ni'ilya Qastina al-Sawafir al-Gharbiyya al-Sawafir al-Shamaliyya al-Sawafir al-Sharqiyya Simsim Summil Tall al-Turmus Yasur
Haifa	Abu Shusha Abu Zurayq Arab al-Fuqara Arab al-Nufay'at Arab Zahrat al-Dumayri 'Atlit Ayn Ghazal Ayn Hawd Balad al-Sheikh Barrat Qisarya Burayka al-Burj al-Butaymat Daliyat al-Rawha' al-Dumun al-Ghubayya al-Fawqa al-Ghubayya al-Tahta Hawsha Ijzim Jaba' al-Jalama Kabara al-Kafrayn Kafr Lam al-Kasayir Khubbayza Lid al-Manara al-Mansi al-Mansura al-Mazar Naghnaghiya Qannir Qira Qisarya Qumbaza al-Rihaniyya Sabbarin al-Sarafand al-Sarkas Sa'sa' al-Sawamir al-Shuna al-Sindiyana al-Tantura al-Tira Umm ash Shauf Umm az-Zinat Wa'arat al-Sarris Wadi Ara Yajur
Hebron	'Ajjur Barqusya Bayt Jibrin Bayt Nattif al-Dawayima Deir al-Dubban Dayr Nakhkhas Kudna Mughallis al-Qubayba Ra'na Tell es-Safi Umm Burj az-Zakariyya Zayta Zikrin
Jaffa	al-'Abbasiyya Abu Kabir Abu Kishk Bayt Dajan Biyar 'Adas Fajja al-Haram Ijlil al-Qibliyya Ijlil al-Shamaliyya al-Jammasin al-Gharbi al-Jammasin al-Sharqi Jarisha Kafr 'Ana al-Khayriyya al-Mas'udiyya al-Mirr al-Muwaylih Rantiya al-Safiriyya Salama Saqiya al-Sawalima al-Shaykh Muwannis Yazur
Jenin	al-Jawfa al-Mazar Ayn al-Mansi Lajjun Nuris Zir'in
Jerusalem	Allar Aqqur Artuf Bayt 'Itab Bayt Mahsir Bayt Naqquba Bayt Thul Bayt Umm al-Mays al-Burayj Dayr Aban Dayr 'Amr Dayr al-Hawa Dayr Rafat Dayr al-Shaykh Deir Yassin Ayn Karim Ishwa Islin Ism Allah Jarash al-Jura Kasla al-Lawz Lifta al-Maliha Nitaf al-Qabu Qalunya al-Qastal Ras Abu 'Ammar Sar'a Saris Sataf Sheikh Badr Suba Sufla al-Tannur al-'Umur al-Walaja
Nazareth	al-Mujaydil Indur Ma'alul Saffuriyya
Ramle	Abu al-Fadl Abu Shusha Ajanjul Aqir Barfiliya al-Barriyya Bashshit Bayt Far Bayt Jiz Bayt Nabala Bayt Shanna Bayt Susin Bir Ma'in Bir Salim al-Burj al-Buwayra Daniyal Dayr Abu Salama Dayr Ayyub Dayr Muhaysin Dayr Tarif al-Duhayriyya al-Haditha Idnibba Innaba Jilya Jimzu Kharruba al-Khayma Khulda al-Kunayyisa al-Latrun Lydda al-Maghar Majdal Yaba al-Mansura al-Mukhayzin al-Muzayri'a al-Na'ani al-Nabi Rubin Qatra Qazaza al-Qubab al-Qubayba Qula Ramla Sajad Salbit Sarafand al-Amar Sarafand al-Kharab Saydun Shahma Shilta al-Tina al-Tira Umm Kalkha Wadi Hunayn Yibna Zakariyya Zarnuqa
Safad	Abil al-Qamh al-'Abisiyya 'Akbara Alma Ammuqa Arab al-Shamalina Arab al-Zubayd Ayn al-Zaytun Baysamun Biriyya al-Butayha al-Buwayziyya Dallata al-Dawwara Dayshum al-Dirbashiyya al-Dirdara Fara al-Farradiyya Fir'im Ghabbatiyya Ghuraba al-Hamra' Harrawi Hunin al-Husayniyya Jahula al-Ja'una Jubb Yusuf Kafr Bir'im al-Khalisa Khan al-Duwayr Karraza al-Khisas Khiyam al-Walid Kirad al-Baqqara Kirad al-Ghannama Lazzaza Madahil Al-Malkiyya Mallaha al-Manshiyya al-Mansura Mansurat al-Khayt Marus Meiron al-Muftakhira Mughr al-Khayt al-Muntar al-Nabi Yusha' al-Na'ima Qabba'a Qadas Qaddita Qaytiyya al-Qudayriyya al-Ras al-Ahmar Sabalan Safsaf Saliha al-Salihiyya al-Sammu'i al-Sanbariyya Sa'sa' al-Shawka al-Tahta al-Shuna Taytaba Tulayl al-'Ulmaniyya al-'Urayfiyya al-Wayziyya Yarda, Safad al-Zahiriyya al-Tahta al-Zanghariyya Zawiya al-Zuq al-Fawqani al-Zuq al-Tahtani
Tiberias	Awlam al-Dalhamiyya Ghuwayr Abu Shusha Hadatha al-Hamma Hittin Kafr Sabt Lubya Ma'dhar al-Majdal al-Manara al-Manshiyya al-Mansura Nasir al-Din Nimrin al-Nuqayb Samakh al-Samakiyya al-Samra al-Shajara al-Tabigha al-'Ubaydiyya Wadi Hamam al-Wa'ra al-Sawda' Yaquq
Tulkarm	Bayt Lid Bayyarat Hannun Fardisya Ghabat Kafr Sur al-Jalama Kafr Saba al-Majdal al-Manshiyya Miska Qaqun Raml Zayta Tabsur Umm Khalid Wadi al-Hawarith Wadi Qabbani al-Zabadida Zalafa

• Arab villages depopulated prior to the 1948 Arab–Israeli War
• District of Haifa