Shatta

Shatta (Arabic: شطّة ), also spelled Shutta, was a Palestinian village in Beth Shaan Valley, north-west of the city of Bisan. During the British Mandate period, it was replaced by Kibbutz Beit HaShita.

During the Ottoman period, the village named Shatta.^[1] Karmon, a geographer, suggested that Shutta was marked on the map Pierre Jacotin compiled in 1799, misnamed as Naim.^[2]

While travelling in the region in 1838, Edward Robinson noted Shutta as a village in the general area of Tamra,^[3] while during his travels in 1852 he noted it as being a village north of the Jalud.^[4]

When Victor Guérin visited in 1870, he found here "a good many silos cut in the ground and serving as underground granaries 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."^[5]

In 1870/1871 (1288 AH), an Ottoman census listed the village in the nahiya (sub-district) of Shafa al-Shamali.^[6]

In 1881, the Palestine Exploration Fund's Survey of Western Palestine described Shutta as a small adobe village on rising ground, surrounded by hedges of prickly pear and plough-land.^[7]

In the 1922 census of Palestine, Shutta had a population of 280; 277 Muslims and 3 Orthodox Christians,^[8][9] decreasing in the 1931 census to 255; 2 Jews, 3 Christians and 250 Muslims, in a total of 85 houses.^[10]

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.^[11][12] The tenants contested the purchase, claiming to be the rightful owners, but the Bisan Civil Court ruled against them.^[11] The fate of the tenants and workers, numbering more than 200, became a matter of dispute between the government, the sellers, and the buyers.^[11] 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.^[11] The case led to a 1932 amendment of the law to better protect evicted tenants.^[11] 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.^[13]