Abu Kabir

Abu Kabir (Arabic: ابو كبير‎‎) was a satellite village of Jaffa founded by Egyptians following Ibrahim Pasha's 1832 defeat of Turkish forces in Ottoman era Palestine. During the 1948 Palestine war, it was mostly abandoned and later destroyed. After Israel's establishment in 1948, the area became part of south Tel Aviv. Officially named Giv'at Herzl (Hebrew: גבעת הרצל‎‎, lit. Herzl's hill), the name of an adjacent Jewish neighborhood, the name Abu Kabir (Hebrew: אבו כביר‎‎) continued to be used. Part or all of Abu Kabir was officially renamed Tabitha by the Tel Aviv municipality in 2011.

The Egyptian troops of Ibrahim Pasha captured the city of Jaffa and its environs following a battle with the forces of the Ottoman Empire in 1832. Though Egyptian rule over this area continued only until 1840, Egyptian Muslims settled in and around Jaffa, founding the village of Sakhanat Abu Kabir, along with Sakhanat al-Muzariyya, among others. An eastern suburb of Jaffa, many of the Egyptians who populated it came from the village of Tall al Kabir (or Tel Abu Kabir), and named it for their hometown.

An Ottoman village list of about 1870 described Saknet Abu Kebir as a "Beduin camp", with 136 houses and a population of 440, though the population count included men only.

In The Survey of Western Palestine (1881), its name is recorded as Sâknet Abu Kebîr and it is translated as, "The settlement of Abu Kebir p.n.; (great father)."Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, the French archaeologist, visited in 1873-1874, searching for the site of the ancient Jewish cemetery of Joppa (Jaffa). He describes "Saknet Abu K'bir" as a hamlet, and relates walking through the "extensive gardens that close in Jaffa on every side" to reach it. He notes that during the heavy winter rains, the gardens between Jaffa and Saknet Abu Kabir became a small marshy lake that was known as al-Bassa by the locals. Noting that this name is commonly used throughout Syria for seasonal ponds of this nature and recalling that the bissah of the Hebrew Bible also means pond, he suggests that the similarity in the Arabic and Hebrew indicates a borrowing from even earlier linguistic traditions.

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