Tarbikha was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517 with the rest of Palestine, and by 1596 it was part of the nahiya (subdistrict) of Tibnin under the Liwa of Safad, with a population of 88. It paid taxes on a number of crops, including wheat, olives and barley, as well as on goats, beehives and a press that was used for processing either olives or grapes.[11][12]
In the late nineteenth century, the village of Tarbikha was described as being built of stone and situated on a ridge. The population was estimated at being around 100, and they lived by cultivating olives.[13] During this period Tarbikha was a part of the Beirut province. Only after World War I, when the borders between Lebanon and Palestine were delineated by the British and French, did Tarbikha come under Palestinian administration.[8]
The village had two mosques, and an elementary school, founded after 1938, which had an enrollment of 120 students in the mid-1940s. It also had a customs office and a police station for monitoring the Lebanese border.[8]
In the 1945 statistics the village population was counted together with that of Suruh and Al-Nabi Rubin, together they had 1000 Muslim inhabitants[2] and a total of 18,563 dunams of land.[3] Of this, a total of 3,200 dunums allocated to cereals, while 619 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards,[15][16] while 112 dunams were built-up (urban) area.[17]
1948 war and aftermath
The town was assaulted during Operation Hiram by the Oded Brigade on 30 October 1948.[18] The population was ordered to leave for Lebanon in early November.[19] The military did not let the Arabs gather the crops they planted; rather the military allowed the Jews of the kibbutz Tarbikha to gather the crops and left the villages unguarded, which allowed any passerby access to the items in the unguarded village.[20] The village lands of Tarbikha were settled by Jewish immigrants from Hungary and Romania as part of the policy of Judaisation of Northern Israel.[21]
The Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, described the village remaining structures in 1992: "About twenty houses from the village are now occupied by the residents of Moshav Shomera. Some of the roofs have been remodeled and given a gabled form. Stones from the original houses embellish the roof of the central shelter of the moshav."[6]
^Strehlke, 1869, pp. 15-16, No. 16; cited in Röhricht, 1893, RRH, p. 125, No. 624; cited in Frankel, 1988, p. 264
^Strehlke, 1869, pp. 43- 44, No. 53; cited in Röhricht, 1893, RRH, p. 248, No. 934; cited in Frankel, 1988, p. 264
^Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, 1977, p. 183. Quoted in Khalidi, 1992, p. 33
^Note that Rhode, 1979, p. 6Archived 1 March 2020 at the Wayback Machine writes that the register that Hütteroth and Abdulfattah studied was not from 1595/6, but from 1548/9
^Conder and Kitchener, 1881, SWP I, p.150. Quoted in Khalidi, 1992, p. 33
Frankel, Rafael (1988). "Topographical notes on the territory of Acre in the Crusader period". Israel Exploration Journal. 38 (4): 249–272. JSTOR27926125.