Deir Yasin

The village was built on the eastern slopes of a hill, the peak of which was some 800 meters in height and commanded a wide view all around. It faced the western suburbs of Jerusalem―about 1 km away―from which it was divided by a terraced valley planted with fig, almond, and olive trees. Along the northern rim of the valley ran a secondary road that linked Deir Yasin to these suburbs and to the main Jerusalem−Jaffa road about 2 km to the north. 'Dayr' [Deir] denotes a 'monastery' in Arabic. This was not an uncommon component of Palestinian village names and is hardly surprising in a village so close to Jerusalem. There was in fact a large ruin at the southwestern edge of the village which was known simply as the 'Dayr' [Deir].

It appears that the nucleus of the settlement in early Ottoman times was at Khirbat Ayn al-Tut―'The Mulberry Spring Khirba'―some 500 m to the west of the 1948 village site. In 1596 the village of Khirbat Ayn al-Tut was in the nahiya of Jerusalem (liwa' of Jerusalem) with a population of thirty-nine. It paid taxes on wheat, barley, and olive trees .

We do not know precisely when the settlement shifted to the site of Deir Yasin. But it is obvious that the name of the latter is partly derived from a Shaykh Yasin whose tomb was in a mosque named after him that stood close to the ruins of the Dayr [Deir]. We do not, however, know much about the Shaykh, nor when his mosque was built.

In the late nineteenth century the houses of Deir Yasin were built of stone. Two springs, one to the north and the other to the south provided the village with water. Most of its houses, strongly built with thick walls, were crowded together in a small area separated by narrow winding lanes, known as the Hara ('The Quarter'). All the inhabitants of Deir Yasin were Muslim. In about 1906 the westernmost Jewish suburb of Jerusalem, Giv'at Sha'ul, was built across the valley from Deir Yasin to be followed respectively by those of Montefiore, Beit Hakerem, and Yefenof. The secondary road linking Deir Yasin to Jerusalem and the road to Jaffa ran through Giv'at Sha'ul.

During World War I the Ottomans fortified the hilltop of Deir Yasin as part of the defense system of Jerusalem. On 8 December 1917, these fortifications were stormed by troops under the command of General Allenby in the final offensive that led, on the following day, to the fall of Jerusalem to Allied hands.

Until the 1920s, Deir Yasin's livelihood largely depended on agriculture, supplemented by the keeping of livestock, but the building boom in Jerusalem under the Mandate quickly changed the basis of its economy. The area around Deir Yasin was rich in limestone―the favorite building material in Jerusalem. Early in the Mandate the villagers excavated extensive quarries along the length of the secondary road leading to the city and developed an increasingly thriving industry in stone cutting and processing. By the late 1940s, four stone crushers were functioning. The business encouraged the more prosperous villagers to invest in trucking and others to become truck drivers. In 1935, a local bus company was established in a joint venture with the neighboring village of Lifta (Jerusalem sub-disctrict). As Deir Yasin prospered its houses radiated from the Hara uphill and eastward, towards Jerusalem.

In the early days of the Mandate the village had no school of its own and its children attended the school at Lifta or Qalunya (Jerusalem sub-disctrict). By 1943 Deir Yasin could boast of an elementary school for boys and in 1946 of one for girls both built by village contributions. The girls' school had a resident headmistress from Jerusalem. The village also had a bakery, two guest-houses, a social club ('The Renaissance Club'), a thrift fund, three shops, four wells, and a second mosque on the higher slopes overlooking the village built by one Mahmud Salah, an affluent villager. By the end of the Mandate, many villagers were employed outside Deir Yasin, some in the nearby British army camps as waiters, carpenters, and foremen; others as clerks and teachers in the mandatory civil service. By this time no more than 15 percent of the village population was engaged in agriculture.

Deir Yasin's population had increased from 428 in 1931 to 750 in 1948 and its houses from 91 in the former year to 144 in the latter. Relations between the village and its Jewish neighbors had started reasonably well under the Ottomans, particularly early on when Arabic-speaking Sephardic Yemenite Jews comprised much of the surrounding population. But their relations rapidly deteriorated with the growth of the Jewish National Home and reached their nadir during the Great Rebellion of 1936−39. Relations picked up again during the boom years of full employment of World War II. Thus in 1948 Deir Yasin was a prosperous, expanding village at relative peace with its Jewish neighbors with whom much business was done. Both Deir Yasin and Khirbat Ayn al-Tut contained archeological evidence of previous habitation: walls, arches, cisterns, and tombs.