page_title: Ma'alul
section_title: British Mandate era
hierarchical_section_title: Ma'alul / History / British Mandate era
caption_attribution_description: English: Ma’alul 1947. Photograph from Palmach archives.
context_page_description: Ma'alul was a village, made up primarily of Palestinian Christians, that was depopulated and destroyed by Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Located six kilometers west of the city of Nazareth, many of its inhabitants became internally displaced refugees, after taking refuge in Nazareth and the neighbouring town of Yafa an-Naseriyye. Despite having never left the territory that came to form part of Israel, the majority of the villagers of Maalul, and other Palestinian villages like Andor and Al-Mujidal, were declared "absentees", allowing the confiscation of their land under the Absentees Property Law.
  Today, much of the former village's lands are owned by the Jewish National Fund. All that remains of its former structures are two churches, a mosque and a Roman era mausoleum, known locally as Qasr al-Dayr.
context_section_description: At the beginning of the twentieth century, the people of Ma'alul were tenants of the Sursuq family of Beirut, absentee landlords who had acquired the  village lands earlier. In 1921 the Sursuqs sold all but 2,000 dunams of Ma'alul's land to the Zionist Palestine Land Development Company. Zionist pioneers founded the moshav of Nahalal on that land the same year. The remaining 2,000 dunums were insufficient to support the village's population, so at the request of the Mandate government, the company agreed to lease an additional 3,000 dunams to the villagers until 1927. The villagers had the option to buy this land before the lease expired.
  According to the British Mandate's   1922 census of Palestine, Ma'alul had 436 inhabitants; 186 Muslims and 250 Christians,  where all the Christians were  Orthodox. By the  1931 census the population had decreased to 390;   228 Muslims, and 162 Christians, in a total of  90 houses.
  In  the 1945 statistics the population of  Ma'alul was 690; 490 Muslims and  200 Christians,   with a total  of  4,698 dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey.  Of this, a total of 650 dunams were for plantations and irrigable land, 3,462 for cereals, while 29 dunams were built-up land.
caption: Ma’alul 1947. Photograph from Palmach archives.
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