Yazur (, ) was a Palestinian Arab town located east of Jaffa. Mentioned in 7th century BCE Assyrian texts, the village was a site of contestation between Muslims and Crusaders in the 12th-13th centuries.
During the Fatimid period in Palestine, a number of important people were born in Yazur. In the modern era, the town was the birthplace of Ahmed Jibril, the founder and current head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).
Yazur was depopulated and mostly destroyed during the 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine. The Israeli town of Azor was developed on the site.
History
Iron Age
The village is mentioned in the annals of the Assyrian ruler Sennacherib (704 – 681 BCE) as Azuro.
Fatimid, Crusader, Ayyubid and Mamluk eras
The Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi (1179–1229) described Yazur as a small town that was the birthplace of several important figures during the Fatimid period. Most prominent among them was al-Hasan ibn ´Ali al-Yazuri, who became a Fatimid minister in 1050 CE. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE, Muslim and Crusader forces fought for control of the village and it changed hands several times, before finally falling under the control of the Mamluks.
Ottoman era
During early Ottoman rule in Palestine, in 1552, the revenues of the village of Yazur were designated for the new waqf of Hasseki Sultan Imaret in Jerusalem, established by Hasseki Hurrem Sultan (Roxelana), the wife of Suleiman the Magnificent. In 1586, the Maqam Imam ´Ali in Yazur was seen by Jean Zuallart, who described it as follows: "....a little further was a square mosque with nine little cupolas. Across the road there is a well or cistern."
In the 1596 tax records, Yazur was a village in the nahiya ("subdistrict") of Ramla, part of Sanjak of Gaza. It had a population 50 Muslim households, an estimated 275 persons. The villagers paid a fixed tax rate of 33,3% for the crops that they cultivated, which included wheat, barley, fruit, and sesame, as well as on other types of property, such as goats and beehives; a total of 19,250 akçe. All of the revenue went to a Muslim charitable institution. In 1602, Seusenius described the Maqam Imam ´Ali as "a mosque with nine cupolas the one in the middle being the highest".
The Syrian Sufi teacher and traveller Mustafa al-Bakri al-Siddiqi (1688-1748/9), who travelled in the region in the first half of the eighteenth century, and Mustafa al-Dumyati (d. 1764) reported visiting the shrine of a sage called Sayyiduna ("our master") Haydara in Yazur. The village appeared named Jazour on the map that Pierre Jacotin compiled in 1799 during the French campaign in Egypt and Syria.
In 1863 Victor Guérin visited. While the area was still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in 1870, Charles Netter from Alliance Israélite Universelle founded the Mikveh Israel southeast of Jaffa. Through a firman of the sultan, he received land for the school. Until then the land had been cultivated by the fellahin of Yazur village. In a Survey of Western Palestine (1882), it is noted that, "Though the land belongs to the Government, the Fellahin, from long usage, have got to look upon it as virtually their own, and resent its occupation by any other person." The peasants became bitter enemies of the school farm.
In the late summer of 1870, the governor of Damascus visited Jaffa. Accompanied by Netter and two Templars, Christoph Hoffmann and Ernst Hardegg, the governor passed by Yazur: While riding between Natter's property and the city, the Wali was beset by Arab women and men who begged him, holding onto the reigns { sic, should be 'reins'} of his mule, and onto his trousers, to help them regain their rights, the Jews were taking away their land; here they pointed at Natter, who rode next to the Wali, screaming "the Jews, the Jews." The Pasha, riding on the other side, asked Ernst for his riding crop and chased them away himself. The Wali accepted a petition handed him by a shaykh, incidentally.
The PEF's Survey of Western Palestine reported that in 1882 the village structures were built of adobe brick, there were dispersed gardens and wells, and Yazur contained a domed shrine.
British Mandate era
Modern Yazur was divided into four quarters, one for each of four clans (hama´il, sing. hamula) that lived there. The houses were traditionally made of stone or adobe brick and straw and were built in groups called ahwash (pl. of hawsh, "courtyard"). Each house in such a group opened onto a common courtyard that had a single entrance, often an arched gate. Extended families lived in the ahwash.