Ottoman era

Incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517, Ma'alul appeared in the census of 1596, located in the nahiya ("subdistrict") of Tiberias under the liwa' ("district") of Safad with a population of seventy-seven. It paid taxes on a number of crops, including wheat and barley, as well as goats and beehives.^[14][15]

Ma'alul, and the neighbouring towns and villages of Nazareth, Mejdal, Yafa, Jebatha and Kneffis paid taxes to the monks of Nazareth, who bought the right to collect these taxes from the Ottoman authorities in 1777 for two hundred dollars. Thirty years later, they again purchased this right, though this time for two thousands five hundred dollars, owing to the rise in the price of cereals and ground rents.^[16] Pierre Jacotin called the village Matoun on his map from 1799.^[17]

In 1859 the population was estimated to be 280, who cultivated 42 faddans of land.^[18] In 1875 Victor Guérin found Ma'alul to have 350 inhabitants; all Muslim except about 30 "Schismatic Greeks."^[19]

By the late nineteenth century, the village was made of adobe bricks, built on a hill, Just outside the village was a magnificent Roman mausoleum, called Qasr al-Dayr.^[18]

A population list from about 1887 showed that Ma'lul had about 650 inhabitants; all Muslims.^[20]

British Mandate era

Ma'alul church, in the 1930s

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.^[21] 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.^[6]

According to the British Mandate's 1922 census of Palestine, Ma'alul had 436 inhabitants; 186 Muslims and 250 Christians,^[22] where all the Christians were Orthodox.^[23] By the 1931 census the population had decreased to 390; 228 Muslims, and 162 Christians, in a total of 90 houses.^[24]

In the 1945 statistics the population of Ma'alul was 690; 490 Muslims and 200 Christians,^[4] with a total of 4,698 dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey.^[3] Of this, a total of 650 dunams were for plantations and irrigable land, 3,462 for cereals,^[25] while 29 dunams were built-up land.^[26]

Ma’alul 1947. Photograph from Palmach archives.

1948, and aftermath

The village was captured by the Israeli army on 15 July 1948 during Operation Dekel. The villagers were forced to leave and the houses destroyed.^[6]

In 1949 an Israeli military base was built on village land.^[27]

Walid Khalidi describes the remains of Ma'alul in 1992:

The village site is now covered with a pine forest planted by the Jewish National Fund and dedicated to the memory of prominent Jews and some non-Jewish Americans and Europeans. A military base is also on the site. The mosque and two churches still stand, and are used intermittently as cow sheds by the residents of Kibbutz Kefar ha-Choresh. Overlooking Wadi al-Halabi, between the village site and the site of al-Mujaydil, is an Israeli plastics factory. Cactus, olive trees, and fig trees grow on the site, which is strewn with piles of stones. A few tombs in the Muslim cemetery across from the mosque can be seen. The main village site also contains the remains of houses.^[28]