Beita (, translation: "Home") is a Palestinian town in the Nablus Governorate in the northern Israeli-occupied West Bank located southeast of Nablus. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the town had a population of 11,682 in 2017. It consists of five clans which branch out to thirty families. There are many houses dating back to the Roman era. Beita Municipality: Beita Town The current mayor, elected in 2004 is Arab ash-Shurafa.
The town contains four mosques and three clinics.Beita Municipality: Public Foundations Beita Municipality. Since 1967, under the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, more than 77 Beita villagers have been shot dead by Israeli forces, many during protests, 7 were killed between May and September 2021 during the suppression of demonstrations against the establishment of an Israeli outpost on Beita lands.
Location Beita (including Za'tara locality) is located – south of Nablus. It is bordered by Osarin and Aqraba to the east, Awarta and Odala to the north, Huwwara and Yasuf to the west, and Yatma and Qabalan to the south. Beita Town Profile (including Za'tara Locality), ARIJ, p. 4
History There are two historical centres in Beita; Beita el-Fauqa ("The upper Beita") to the North-East and Beita et-Tahta ("The lower Beita") to the South-West.Finkelstein and Lederman, 1997, pp. 703-4 In Beita el-Fauqa, pottery sherds from the Iron Age II/Persian. Persian and Mamluk era have been found,Finkelstein and Lederman, 1997, p. 704 while at Beita et-Tahta sherds from the Iron Age II, Persian, Roman/Byzantine, Byzantine, and Mamluk era have been found.Finkelstein and Lederman, 1997, p. 703
Ottoman era Beita was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517 with all of Palestine, and both in Beita el-Fauqa and Beita et-Tatha sherds from the early Ottoman era have been found. In 1596 Beita appeared in the tax registers as being in the Nahiya of Jabal Qubal of the Liwa of Nablus. It had a population of 50 households, all Muslim. The villagers paid taxes on wheat, barley, summer crops, olive trees, occasional revenues, goats and/or beehives, and a press for olives or grapes; a total of 8,000 Akçe.Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, 1977, p. 134
In 1838, Edward Robinson noted Beita as a "large village",Robinson and Smith, 1841, vol 3, p. 93 located in the El-Beitawy district, east of Nablus.Robinson and Smith, 1841, vol 3, 2nd Appendix, p. 128
In 1882, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine described it as "A large village, with a kind of suburb to the south, near which are ancient tombs. It is supplied by wells, and surrounded by olives. It stands upon the hills east of the Mukhnah plain, and is the capital of the district named from it."Conder and Kitchener, 1882, SWP II, p. 288
British Mandate era In the 1922 census of Palestine conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Beita had a population of 883, all Muslims,Barron, 1923, Table IX, Sub-district of Nablus, p. 25 increasing at the time of the 1931 census to 1,194, still all Muslim, in 286 houses.Mills, 1932, p. 60
In the 1945 statistics Beita had a population of 1,580 Muslims,Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics, 1945, p. 18 with 17,542 dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey.Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics. Village Statistics, April, 1945. Quoted in Hadawi, 1970, p. 59 Of this, 5,666 dunams were plantations and irrigable land, 6,916 used for cereals,Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics. Village Statistics, April, 1945. Quoted in Hadawi, 1970, p. 105 while 76 dunams were built-up land.Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics. Village Statistics, April, 1945. Quoted in Hadawi, 1970, p. 155
Jordanian era In the wake of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and after the 1949 Armistice Agreements, Beita came under annexed Jordanian rule.
At the beginning of 1930s Shaikh Rezeq Abdelrazeq Elyan Open the first school in Beita Al-Tahta and it was names (Beita National School) and the student from beita and around used to come and get education in it. In 1952, Beita opened an elementary school, which served the town and surrounding villages. In 1954, an elementary school for girls only was established and since then, four other schools have been built - including two secondary schools. Beita Municipality: Education Beita Municipality.
The Jordanian census of 1961 found 693 inhabitants in Beita Tahta ("the lower Beita"), while Beita Fauqa ("the higher Beita") had 1,498 inhabitants; a total of 2,191 inhabitants.Government of Jordan, Department of Statistics, 1964, p. 25
Post-1967
Since the Six-Day War in 1967, Beita has been under Israeli occupation.
After the 1995 accords, 89% of the village land was classified as Area B, and the remaining 11% as Area C. Beita Town Profile (including Za'tara Locality), ARIJ, p. 17
Although the town was considered a Fatah stronghold,Lockman and Beinin, 1989, pp. 81 Arab ash-Shurafa, a member of Hamas, was elected mayor in 2005. Shurafa was arrested by the IDF, along with Nablus mayor Adly Yaish and Education Minister of the Palestinian National Authority Nasser al-Shaer in 2006 for their membership in Hamas.
Israeli-Palestinian conflict In January 1988, 20 men from Beita and Huwara, identified by a GSS report after clashes with Israeli troops to have been involved in stone throwing, were assembled, bound, without their resisting, with plastic handcuffs and had their bones broken by soldiers, and then were abandoned at night in a muddy field. The International Red Cross made a formal complaint, after local press reports had been ignored.Frankel, 1996, pp. 82-83 The army did not prosecute the matter initially. Lieutenant-colonel Yehuda Meir was reprimanded, and forced into retirement, with his officer's rank and pension rights intact. He was prosecuted only after the Association for Civil Rights in Israel made an issue of the matter by appealing to the Supreme Court which ruled that he had to stand trial, which then took place in April 1991. Meir was the local Nablus district commander overseeing the operation, and testified that he had acted under orders directly coming from Yitzhak Rabin and that when he had objected to bone-smashing, Rabin had replied: "You do the work, I'll take care of the media." His superiors testified that orders were only to use force in pursuit and arrests. The court believed the latter and found that the orders were legal, but that Meir had deviated from instructions.Conroy, 2000, pp. 138-156, 191-224.Barzilai, 2002, pp. 176-177
On 10 April 2023, an estimated 15,000Clothilde Mraffko, 'The show of force by Israeli settlers in the West Bank,' Le Monde 11 April 2023- 20,000 ultranationalist settlers, protected by a full battalion (1,000) of IDF soldiers and joined by the Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, 7 other ministers, and 20 parliamentarians, staged a march towards Evyatar, reportedly to pressure the new government under Benjamin Netanyahu to legalize the outpost. The given reason for their march was to retaliate for the murder of three members of the Dee family, British settlers, three days earlier, on 7 April, at the Hamra junction. Beita villagers protesting the march suffered 191 casualties, in large part from tear-gas intoxication. 17 were injured by rubber bullet shots fired by the army,Michele Giorgio, 'Verso Evyatar, la destra estrema detta la sua legge a Netanyahu,' Il Manifesto 11 April 2023 while two were wounded in the head by gas canisters.Reuters, 'Thousands of Israelis march to illegal West Bank outpost as tensions mount,' 10 April 2023 Le Monde reported that journalists covering the event were also targeted, with one wearing a press vest also injured by a rubber bullet.
Beita Incident
On April 6, 1988, 16-20 teenage hikers from Elon Moreh, an Israeli settlement north of Beita, set out for a trek. Nature-hiking among settlers was a symbolic means of demonstrating their control of the land.Frankel, 1996, pp. 94-96 They were accompanied by two guards, both with a reputation for being aggressive Zionists:Joseph C. Harsch, 'Fundamentalism and the West Bank's Beita affair,' The Christian Science Monitor Roman Aldubi, a 26-year-old known extremist and religious militant banned by the IDF from entering Nablus for 6 months, after he had been convicted of obstruction of justice for hiding a gun used by another settler to kill an 11 year old Palestinian child, 'Aysha Bahash, in her father's bakery, during a stone-throwing incident;Lockman and Beinin, 1989, p. 84"even among the militant settlers, he has consistently stood out for his provocative conduct, which has gained him the dubious honour of being the only Jew ever subjected to a military exclusion order (whereby he is banned from entering Nablus)." Peretz Kidron, Middle East International No323, 16 April 1988. and Menahem Ilan (55), the organizer, were crossing village land in a show of strength, "to show them that we are the masters of the country", as one of the hikers later told ABC correspondent Barrie Dunsmore.Chomsky, 1999, p. 495 (Ilan had previously been convicted in 1984 of obstructing justice and destroying evidence in a prior settler killing of a Palestinian girl.Noam Chomsky. 'Scenes from the Uprising,' Z Magazine July, 1988) When the settler group sat down to make breakfast near a spring, or a local well, local farmers sowing their spring crops became alarmed at the presence under armed guard, and one of them went to the village, a kilometre away, and the villagers were notified over the mosque's loudspeaker. The village lands were under military closure at the time, and, according to their accounts, they feared, based on other precedents in the area, that the local well might be poisoned. On such walks permission was never asked of villagers, furthermore, to trek through their fields, and Menachem Ilan had not alerted the IDF of his hiking plans in a remote Arab area. Several dozen farmers, among them some teenagers, gathered in proximity of the hikers. What took place was contested at that time.
At first, according to one version Aldubi fired warning shots from his Uzi at the farmers, some of whom threw stones. One of these shots is said, in one account, to have killed Mousa Saleh Bani Shamseh.Joel Brinkley, 'Beita Journal; Where the Hot Rage of April Is Now Cold Fury,' The New York Times 23 August 1988.:' Apparently he had an expansive view of what constituted a warning, because one shot killed a farmer working in a nearby field.' In the IDF investigation, it was determined that Aldubi shot Mussa Saleh in the back at a distance of about 10 yards while the latter was fleeing.Stephen Franklin,'Israeli Army Admits Escort Shot Teenager,' Chicago Tribune 28 April 1988. In another version, Ilan reprimanded him, and led the hikers away down a riverbed, where one girl was hit in the thigh by a stone and then Aldubi opened fire with Ilan's M-16 shooting Mousa Saleh in the head, killing him and wounding another farmer.Conroy, 2000, p. 217 Aldubi later said the man had tried to grab his rifle, a claim the IDF investigation later stated was unsubstantiated by any evidence. In one version, the hikers continued on and walked into the village, despite the incident. In the other, the villagers surrounded them, and led them to Beita.