Ancient period Yalo is identified with the ancient
Canaanite and
Israelite city of Ajalon.
Crusader period The area was under contention in the Middle Ages by Christian and Muslim forces. In the
Crusader period, a castle called
Castellum Arnaldi or
Chastel Arnoul was built at the site. It was destroyed by Muslims in 1106, rebuilt in 1132–3, controlled by the
Templars by 1179 and taken by
Saladin in 1187. During his travels in
Palestine in 1838, American Biblical scholar
Edward Robinson studied Yalo, associating it with Aijalon, an ancient village mentioned in the
Hebrew Bible/
Old Testament. Robinson relied upon the works of
Jerome and
Eusebius, who describe Aijalon as two Roman miles from
Nicopolis; the biblical descriptions of the village; and the philological similarities between the present-day Arabic name and its
Canaanite root.
Victor Guérin visited in 1863, while an Ottoman village list from about 1870 found that
Jalo had a population of 250, in 67 houses, though the population count included men, only. In 1883, the
PEF's
Survey of Western Palestine described Yalo as "a small village on the slope of a low spur, with an open valley or small plain to the north. There is a spring to the east, where a branch valley runs down north, and on the east side of this valley are caves. The village stands 250 feet above the northern basin."
British Mandate According to the
British Mandate's
1922 census of Palestine,
Yalu had 811 inhabitants, all Muslims. increasing in the
1931 census to 963, still all Muslims, living in a total of 245 houses. In the
1945 statistics the population of Yalo was 1,220 Muslims, having a total of 14,992
dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey. Of this, 447 dunams of land was for plantations and irrigable land; 6,047 for cereals, while 74 dunams were built-up land.
1948 war In the lead-up to the outbreak of 1948 Arab-Israeli war, on the night of 27 December 1947, the Etzioni Brigade of the
Hagana blew up three houses in Yalo. This action formed part of a series what Israeli historian
Benny Morris has described as "Haganah retaliatory strikes", the operational orders of which "almost invariably contained an order to blow up one or several houses (as well as to kill 'adult males' or 'armed irregulars')." File:Yalu 1943.jpg|Yalo 1943 1:20,000 (top left quadrant) File:Yalu 1945.jpg|Yalo 1945 1:250,000 File:CanadaParkCropped.jpg|Yalo and the
1949 Armistice lines
Jordanian period After the
1948 Arab-Israeli War, Yalo was under
Jordanian rule from 1948 until 1967. On 2 November 1950 Palestinian children were targeted by the
IDF when three of them were shot, two fatally, by IDF troops near
Dayr Ayyub in the
Latrun salient. Ali Muhammad Ali Alyyan (12), his sister Fakhriyeh Muhammad Ali Alyyan (10), and their cousin Khadijeh Abd al Fattah Muhammad Ali (8) were all from Yalo village. Morris wrote, "The two children [Ali and Fakhriyeh] stood in a
wadi bed and a soldier opened fire at them. According to both [adult] witnesses only one man fired at them with a
sten-gun but none of the detachment attempted to interfere". In 1961, the population was 1,644 persons.
1967 war Israeli officials state that Yalo, Imwas and Beit Nuba were destroyed in the course of fighting that took place during the
1967 war. In June 1968, the Israeli embassy in Britain said that "these villages suffered heavy damage during the June war and its immediate aftermath, when our troops engaged two
Egyptian Army commando units which had established themselves there and continued fighting after the war."
Amos Kenan, an Israeli soldier present during the operation, later gave a firsthand account of what happened to Yalo and its neighbouring villages. He said that, "The unit commander told us that it had been decided to blow up three villages in our sector; they were Beit Nuba, Imwas and Yalu ... In the houses we found one wounded Egyptian commando officer, and some very old people. At noon the first bulldozers arrived ..." In
The Case for Palestine, John B. Quigley writes that, "The IDF blew up entire villages of
Emmaus, Yalu, and Beit Nuba—near Jerusalem—and drove the villagers toward Jordan."
Meron Benvenisti explains that a week after their expulsion on June 7, 1967, thousands of refugees from the three villages tried to return home but "encountered army roadblocks that had been put up near the villages. From there they watched as bulldozers demolished their homes and the stones from the ruins were loaded on trucks belonging to Israeli contractors, who had bought them to use in building houses for Jews. The village sites, with their verdant orchards, were turned into a large picnic area and given the name
Canada Park." On June 21, 1967,
Knesset member
Tawfik Toubi requested that
Defense Minister Moshe Dayan allow Yalo inhabitants to return to their village, but his request was denied. Since then, the village's evicted residents have campaigned for their return to and reconstruction of Yalo. After petitioning the
Israeli High Court, permission was granted. However, subsequently the signs have been stolen or vandalized. ==Artistic representations==