Dimra

The village stood on the southern coastal plain, on a site that had distinctive, red-brown soil. It was linked by a short secondary road to the main coastal highway and by other secondary roads to neighboring villages. The coastal railway line passed a short distance to the west of it. Dimra appears to have been occupied in the twelfth century; ruins identified as Crusader in origin have been noted in the village. Al-Qalqashandi, an encyclopedic Arab scholar who died in AD. 1418 wrote that Dimra was the home of the Bani Jabir, an Arab tribe. The American biblical scholar Edward Robinson reported passing by Dimra in 1838; he said it was situated near the bend of a valley. The population of the village was Muslim. The center of the village was located at the perpendicular intersection of two main streets. The village expanded during the Mandate period, and houses were built eastward and southward along the roads that led to other villages. Dimra had an elementary school that was opened in 1946 with an initial enrollment of forty-seven students. Its agricultural land was often threatened by the movement of coastal sand dunes. Wells outside the village of depths of 20 to 25 m were found mainly at the bottoms of gullies that ran into Wadi al-Hasi, the winter of which floods fed the underground aquifers. These wells provided irrigation water for cultivation. In 1944/45 a total of 96 dunums was devoted to citrus and bananas and 7,412 dunums were allocated to cereals; 388 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards. The village contained the foundations of buildings, a cemetery, columns, and severed column capitals. Two other ruins with a variety of relics lay on its land.