On the many personal Nakbas after 1948
The Nakba, which forced around 750,000 Palestinians out of their homeland, is a defining moment in the national history of Palestine. The Nakba can be approached as a historical event in the singular sense, but it is also made of the specific stories of the Palestinian families, villages, and towns that suffered this national catastrophe and its consequences in distinct ways. In his book, Nakba and Survival: The Story of Palestinians Who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee, 1948–1956, Palestinian historian Adel Manna invites us to learn about the particular reality of those Palestinians that stayed in the newly created State of Israel after 1948.
The book focuses on Haifa, originally allocated to Israel in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, and the Galilee, which should have been part of a future Arab state but was occupied by Israeli forces in two quick military operations: Operation Dekel in the Lower Galilee in July 1948 and Operation Hiram in the Upper Galilee in October 1948. The volunteers of the Arab Liberation Army tasked with defending the Galilee were no match for the Israeli army and have been defined by a contemporary observer as “ill-selected, ill-disciplined, ill-equipped, and lacking the determination needed for a mission of the sort they had come to fulfill.” [1]
Manna, a historian specialized in Palestine’s Ottoman period, deals on this occasion with a topic that is closer to him on a personal level. The author was born in 1947 in Majd al-Krum, a village in the middle of the Galilee whose inhabitants were expelled to Southern Lebanon in January 1949. In November 1948, a week after the village’s surrender, the Israeli army executed 7 men in this small Galilean town.
Dormant identities
Israel soon adopted a policy of divide-and-rule towards the Palestinians who stayed in Haifa and the Galilee. It was particularly successful with the Druze population, which — unlike the other Palestinians who would eventually gain Israeli citizenship — started to be recruited into the Israeli army in 1956. Meanwhile, most of the leaders of the National Liberation League (NLL), an Arab Communist political group with a strong presence in Haifa and the Galilee, decided to cooperate with the Israeli occupation.
These Arab Communists integrated themselves within Maki, a Jewish Marxist party, in the eventually unfulfilled hope that, through cooperation with the Israeli Communists, they could “play a decisive historic role in the Palestinian question.” [2] Although Manaa devotes considerable attention to the history of the NLL and Maki, he notes that “the majority of the Arabs who remained in Haifa and the Galilee were neither collaborators nor communists, but steadfast people who preferred living under occupation in their homeland to exile in refugee camps.” [3]
The Arab population in northern Israel was in a state of constant flux after 1948. Israel expelled around 10,000 Palestinians from the area during the years that followed the Nakba. At the same time, a similar number managed to come back through “infiltration” (crossing the border with the risk of being shot at by Israeli troops) or a few officially sanctioned returns. Not all Palestinians had the same chances of being allowed to come back by the Israeli government, however. Although they received a worse treatment than the Druze, Christians were still privileged over Muslims.
A paradigmatic example of this reality is the fate of ‘Ilabun, a village between Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee populated by Catholic and Orthodox Christians. During Operation Hiram, Israeli soldiers arrived at the village and, despite facing no resistance, killed fourteen young men. The rest of the villagers were expelled to Southern Lebanon. The clergymen from ‘Ilabun protested against the killings and the order of expulsion and managed to receive international attention to their case. At a time when Israel was highly sensitive to the position of Western governments, the Israeli government finally decided to allow the villagers from ‘Ilabun to quietly return home.
After 1948, the Arabs within Israel entered a period that Tufts University Professor Nadim Rouhana has defined as the “dormancy of Palestinian identity.” [4] If the national identity was dormant, this was largely the result of Israel’s efforts to erase the national consciousness of Palestinian citizens of Israel — instead becoming “Arab Israelis.”
In the preface to the book, Adel Manaa explains how, after having returned to Majd-al-Krum in 1951, he participated along his classmates in the festivities of the tenth anniversary of Israel’s Independence Day in 1958. Initially presented at school with a glorified and sanitized narration of Israel’s creation, the occasion of the tenth anniversary prompted Manaa’s father to explain to his son what had happened in Majd-al-Krum in 1948.
Parallel to this, the political rights of the Arab Israelis were severely limited as some of them were not granted the right to vote. In addition, Arab individuals could run in the elections as candidates but were not allowed to organize independent Arab parties. Due to the presence of a significant number of Arab Israelis within Maki, and the party’s opposition to further expulsions of Arabs from the Galilee, the Communists received significant support in the Galilee in the first Israeli elections in 1949.
Two years afterwards, the ruling Mapai party of David Ben-Gurion was determined to thwart the Communists’ influence. They repressed and encouraged the legal prosecution of Maki members, while facilitating the return to Haifa and the Galilee of prominent anti-Communist Arab leaders. Among Arabs in Israel, there was the widespread belief that Mapai allowed “infiltrators” to obtain an identity card on the condition that their extended families would vote for the ruling party.
In Nakba and Survival, Manaa draws on Israeli military reports and Arab oral sources to inform his historical narrative. Over the years, the author has collected the oral testimonies of more than one hundred people in Haifa, Nazareth, and many Galilee villages. Manaa’s book, as well as his broader effort to document the Nakba and its aftermath in Haifa and the Galilee, cover a blind spot in the historiography of the period.
It is true that our understanding of the Nakba has been furthered with the publication of multiple books on the topic in recent decades. However, these books tend to focus on the history of those who were expelled from Palestine and formed a new diaspora. There is certainly a reason why historian Ilan Pappé’s volume on the Palestinians who remained in what became the Israeli state after 1948 — which covers more than six decades and is consequently less detailed than Nakba and Survival — is titled “The Forgotten Palestinians.”
Through Manaa’s study, which combines an obvious sympathy for the Palestinians’ plight (a plight he experienced first-hand) with academic rigor, we come to better understand how the Nakba is constituted by multiple, diverse, and personal Nakbas.
Notes
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/01/on-the-many-personal-nakbas-after-1948/
