al-Zib

The village was situated on a dome–shaped hill on the Mediterranean coast, east of the coastal highway and the railway line. It was established on top of a Canaanite town, Akzib ('trickster'), which was taken by the Assyrians in 701 B.C. Archaeological excavations have shown that settlement began long before this date, in the eighteenth century B.C., and that by the tenth century B.C. there was a walled town on the site. The Romans called it Ecdippa and the Crusaders either Casal (small citadel) Lambertie or lmbert. The Arab geographer Ibn Jubayr, who toured the area in 1182–84, said only that the village lay between Acre and Tyre. Later, another Arab geographer, Yaqut al-Hamawi (d. 1228), described al-Zib as a large village on the coast near Acre. In 1596, al-Zib was a village in the nahiya of Akka (liwa' of Safad), with a population of 875. It paid taxes on a number of crops, including wheat, barley, summer crops, fruits, and cotton, as well as on other types of property, such as goats and beehives and water buffalos. An eighteenth–century Muslim scholar and judge, Abu Ali al-Zibi, was born in the village. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the British traveler Buckingham referred to it as a small town built on a hill near the sea with a few palm trees rising above the houses.

In the late nineteenth century, al-Zib was a village built of stone and situated on the seashore. The villagers, who were Muslims and who numbered about 400, cultivated olives, figs, mulberries, and pomegranates. The village also contained a small mosque. In more recent times al-Zib was square–shaped its houses were bunched close together and were made of stone and mud, stone and cement, and reinforced concrete. The village had an elementary school, founded by the Ottomans in 1882, a mosque, and a clinic. The villagers were engaged in fishing and agriculture, especially fruit cultivation. In 1944/45 a total of 2,972 dunums was devoted to citrus and bananas and 4,425 dunums were allocated to cereals; 1,989 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards. Between 1927 and 1945 the fish catch averaged over sixteen metric tons per year. The village had two animal–drawn olive presses and two mechanized presses. There was an archaeological site in the village that contained the foundations of buildings, floors, a cistern, and rock–carved tombs. In addition, there were six khirbas within a 4 km radius around al-Zib