Shatta (

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

: شطّة ), also spelled Shutta, was a

Palestinian Palestinians () are an Arab ethnonational group native to the Levantine region of Palestine. *: "Palestine was part of the first wave of conquest following Muhammad's death in 632 CE; Jerusalem fell to the Caliph Umar in 638. The indigenous p ...

village in Beth Shaan Valley, north-west of the city of Bisan. During the British Mandate period, it was replaced by

Kibbutz A kibbutz ( / , ; : kibbutzim / ) is an intentional community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. The first kibbutz, established in 1910, was Degania Alef, Degania. Today, farming has been partly supplanted by other economi ...

Beit HaShita.

History

Ottoman period

During the

Ottoman period The Ottoman Empire (), also called the Turkish Empire, was an imperial realm that controlled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14th to early 20th centuries; it also controlled parts of southeastern Central Euro ...

, the village named Shatta. Karmon, a geographer, suggested that Shutta was marked on the map

Pierre Jacotin Pierre Jacotin (1765–1827) was the director of the Surveying, survey for the ''Carte de l'Égypte (Description de l'Égypte)'', the first triangulation-based map of Egypt, Syria and Palestine. The maps were drafted in 1799–1800 during Napole ...

compiled in 1799, misnamed as Naim. While travelling in the region in 1838, Edward Robinson noted Shutta as a village in the general area of

Tamra Tamra (, or ) is an Arab city in the North District of Israel located in the Lower Galilee north of the city of Shefa-Amr and approximately east of Acre. In it had a population of . History Tamra is an ancient village on a hill. Old square ...

, while during his travels in 1852 he noted it as being a village north of the Jalud. When

Victor Guérin Victor Guérin (; 15 September 1821 – 21 September 1890) was a French people, French intellectual, explorer and amateur archaeologist. He published books describing the geography, archeology and history of the areas he explored, which included ...

visited in 1870, he found here "a good many silos cut in the ground and serving as underground

granaries A granary, also known as a grain house and historically as a granarium in Latin, is a post-harvest storage building primarily for grains or seeds. Granaries are typically built above the ground to prevent spoilage and protect the stored grains o ...

to the families of the village", and "The women have to go for water to the canal of 'Ain Jalud – marked on the map as the Wady Jalud." In 1870/1871 (1288 AH), an Ottoman census listed the village in the ''

nahiya A nāḥiyah ( , plural ''nawāḥī'' ), also nahiyeh, nahiya or nahia, is a regional or local type of administrative division that usually consists of a number of villages or sometimes smaller towns. In Tajikistan, it is a second-level divisi ...

'' (sub-district) of Shafa al-Shamali. In 1881, the

Palestine Exploration Fund The Palestine Exploration Fund is a British society based in London. It was founded in 1865, shortly after the completion of the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem by Royal Engineers of the War Department. The Fund is the oldest known organization i ...

's ''Survey of Western Palestine'' described ''Shutta'' as a small

adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

village on rising ground, surrounded by hedges of prickly pear and plough-land.

British Mandate era

In the

1922 census of Palestine The 1922 census of Palestine was the first census carried out by the authorities of the British Mandate of Palestine, on 23 October 1922. The reported population was 757,182, including the military and persons of foreign nationality. The divis ...

, Shutta had a population of 280; 277 Muslims and 3 Orthodox Christians, decreasing in the 1931 census to 255; 2 Jews, 3 Christians and 250 Muslims, in a total of 85 houses. The land of the kibbutz, part of the village land of Shutta including the village itself, was purchased by the Palestine Land Development Company from its Arab owners in 1931.Stein, 1984, pp. 125,134,263–264. The

tenants A leasehold estate is an ownership of a temporary right to hold land or property in which a lessee or a tenant has rights of real property by some form of title from a lessor or landlord. Although a tenant does hold rights to real property, a lea ...

contested the purchase, claiming to be the rightful owners, but the Bisan Civil Court ruled against them. The fate of the tenants and workers, numbering more than 200, became a matter of dispute between the government, the sellers, and the buyers. The Jewish Agency maintained that the terms of sale were for the land to be delivered free of residents, while the main seller Raja Ra'is apparently made use of loopholes in the law to provide the tenants with compensation below that to which they were entitled. The case led to a 1932 amendment of the law to better protect evicted tenants. In 2015, a grandchild of kibbutz residents, Jasmine Donahaye, published ''Losing Israel'' in which she expressed her disillusionment on learning of the eviction of Arabs on the founding of the kibbutz.Nathan Abrams,
A Disillusioned Zionist's Bird’s-eye View of Israel
''

Haaretz ''Haaretz'' (; originally ''Ḥadshot Haaretz'' – , , ) is an List of newspapers in Israel, Israeli newspaper. It was founded in 1918, making it the longest running newspaper currently in print in Israel. The paper is published in Hebrew lan ...

, 4 September 2015.

Footnotes

{{Reflist Palestine (region)