Nakba and Survival

Front matter

_ The Story of Palestinians Who Remained ~~ in Haifa and the Galilee, 1948-1956 i ea

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Introduction

2. Completing the Occupation of Galilee—Operation Hiram

3. The Arab Communists: Between the Nakba and Independence 4. Forced Migration Continues After the Cannons Fall Silent

6. The Struggle to Remain: Between Politics and the Judiciary

7. The Parliamentary Elections and Political Behavior

Epilogue

Appendices Notes Bibliography Index

128 163 198 232

275 289 335 349

Foreword

From the Series Editor

Nakba and Survival constitutes an engaging, accessible, and innovative departure in Palestinian historiography. It focuses on how 120,000 Palestinians were able to remain in the Galilee during and after the 1948 war, when most other Palestinians were driven out or forced to flee in a series of events Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe. Through intimate and well-researched stories of people and events, Adel Manna crafts an absorbing read full of new historical detail and insight.

Narrating an understudied aspect of Palestinian and Israeli history, based on family documents, oral history, and hitherto unstudied archives in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, Nakba and Survival also tells the intimate story of Manna’s own family. It contributes as well to the controversial debate about the role of Palestinian leaders of the Israeli Communist Party and others during and after the 1948 war. Its combination of boldness and intimacy constitutes a striking departure in our understanding of the seminal events of 1948 in Palestine.

Reviewers of the Arabic and Hebrew editions of Nakba and Survival offered extensive praise for its groundbreaking contributions. For decades, Israeli narratives dominated Western understandings of the 1948 War. English-language historiography of the Nakba, especially as told from the Palestinian perspective, remains seriously underrepresented. Here the story is told from the point of view of a segment of the Palestinian people who would become second-class minoritized citizens in their own country, where they today constitute 20 percent of the population. The shock and trauma they experienced in 1948 and afterwards as a result are at the heart of this remarkable book, which one reviewer described as viii FOREWORD

“a rich, powerful and paradigm-breaking contribution to the history of the Nakba, and to Palestinian historiography more generally?

Nakba and Survival provides the Anglophone reader with access to an important historical narrative that was previously available only in Arabic or Hebrew. It also offers a wealth of detail culled from a wide variety of sources regarding a seminal event in Palestinian history, as refracted through the experiences of the 120,000 Palestinians who managed to remain in Israel after over 750,000 of their compatriots were forced to leave their homes. Focusing not on the latter, but on those who remained and survived in the Galilee, it provides a unique insight into how, by managing to stay in their homes and on their land, they resisted the wave of ethnic cleansing that transformed Palestine in 1948 and that persists to this day.