Majdal Yaba

The village stood on the western slopes of the Nablus Mountains, overlooking the route of a major international highway that ran north-south through Palestine in ancient times: the Via Maris. Majdal Yaba was directly on the eastern side of this route and was also east of a modern highway that ran north from Lydda and then split into two branches, one of which went west to Tel Aviv and Jaffa and another continuing north to Tulkarm. The Lydda-Tulkarm railway line passed about 2 km west of it. The village was given different names in different periods; the Romans called it Aphekou Pyrgos ('tower of Aphec') but the Crusaders knew it as Casal Mirable. Mirable was an important administrative center for the Crusaders until it fell into Muslim hands in 1187. Salah al-Din al-Ayyuba (Saladin) made it a base for raids on the Crusaders positioned on the coast and camped near the castle in 1192. Later the castle was destroyed to prevent its reuse by the Crusaders. The Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi (d. 1228) called it Majdal Yafa. Its name at this time may have referred to the city of Jaffa (Yafa in Arabic) which, according to al-Hamawi, was close to the village. AI-Hamawi said that the village had a formidable fort. In 1596, Majdal Yaba was a village in the nahiya of Jabal Qubal (liwa' of Nablus) with a population of forty-four. It paid taxes on a number of crops, including wheat and barley, as well as on other types of produce, such as goats and beehives.

In the nineteenth century it was named Majdal al-Sadiq, after one of its chiefs, al-Sadiq, the head of the Rayyan family. They were a branch of the Bani Ghazi tribe, who had immigrated from Transjordan in the seventeenth century. In the 1850s the Rayyan family controlled twenty-two villages in the western half of the sub-disctrict of Bilad al-Jamma'in and maintained a fortress-cum-manor in Majdal Yaba. In the mid-1850s, however, they became embroiled in warfare against local competitors and were defeated; by 1860 had lost all of their influence in the region , and even though Majdal Yaba was still their home village it was no longer a center of political power.

In the nineteenth century, Majdal Yaba was a large village situated on high ground above a plain. Robinson said that the village contained a large house for its shaykh, al-Sadiq, in 1852 , and another traveler noted the same thing a decade later. Later in the nineteenth century visitors to the village noticed the remains of a church.

The layout of the village approximated a parallelogram. Its houses, constructed of mud and straw or cement and stone, were built very close to each other, separated only by narrow alleys. Each hara (neighborhood) was inhabited by members of a single hamula and contained a diwan for receiving guests and public meetings. The population was predominantly Muslim. The village had a mosque (built in 1935), a clinic, and a school that was founded in 1888 under Ottoman rule and was reopened in 1920. In the mid-1940s, 147 students were enrolled.

Agriculture constituted the mainstay of the economy. The villagers planted rainfall crops such as wheat, corn, barley, and sesame. They also grew vegetables and tended fruit trees, especially citrus. Their fruit and vegetable crops were irrigated from artesian wells. In 1944/45 a total of 2,443 dunums was devoted to citrus and bananas and 13,085 dunums were allotted to cereals; 110 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards. The main visible antiquities in the village were the Crusader fortress of Mirabel and Tall Ra's al-'Ayn, which has been excavated. This tell contained artifacts dating from the fourth millennium B.C. The tell was surmounted by an Ottoman fortress, Bina Bashi, that was constructed in 1571.