Voices of the Nakba

A Living History of Palestine

Diana Allan

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780745342931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mediorientale

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021***

During the 1948 war more than 750, 000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. The legacy of the Nakba - which translates to 'disaster' or 'catastrophe' - lays bare the violence of the ongoing Palestinian plight.

Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices of the people who lived through it.

The interviews, with commentary from leading scholars of Palestine and the Middle East, offer a vivid journey into the history, politics and culture of Palestine, defining Palestinian popular memory on its own terms in all its plurality and complexity.

PART I

Life in Pre-1948 Palestine

1

Village Life in Palestine

Rochelle Davis

In Palestine, in the first half of the twentieth century, land was the cornerstone of villagers’ economy as well as identity. Villages were closely linked to others in the same region, as well as to nearby urban centres. The British Mandate government regulated village life through taxation, various registration requirements, security patrols and, to a much lesser extent, public service provision.¹ At the same time, village life was undergoing significant changes due to urbanisation and the development of urban areas. When Mandate authorities conducted their first census of Palestine in 1921, two-thirds of the population was categorised as rural. By 1944, the estimated total population of 1.7 million (1.14 million of whom were Palestinian Muslims and Christians) comprised rural and urban residents in equal measure.² The urban population had increased by almost 100 per cent, while rural growth stood at just over 50 per cent. Much of that urban growth was a result of migration from villages to cities for work.

Despite this rapid urbanisation, village life remained anchored to the land both for economic livelihood and as a source of local and national identity. Across Palestine, village life centred on agricultural production. Growing grains, tobacco, vegetables and fruits, and raising sheep and goats for meat and milk were essential parts of villagers’ livelihoods and economic activities. Hasna Mana

was born in the village of al-Manshiyya, home to over 900 residents in 1948 and located 3 kilometres east of the coastal city of

Akka (Acre). When asked about her father’s occupation, she states that he kept herds of sheep and goats, and opened a diwan. Ibrahim Blaybil is from Taytaba, a village of over 600 people that lay approximately 10 very hilly kilometres north of Safad. His father was a farmer. Ibrahim excelled academically and became a teacher after graduating from secondary school. Villages usually had local blacksmiths and truck drivers, and larger village populations included small shop owners and mechanics, among other skilled workers.

Village economies were deeply enmeshed with one another and with nearby urban economies.³ Villagers traded the crops and animals they raised with other villages or urban merchants, in exchange for cloth and other commodities. Both women and men travelled to nearby urban areas to sell produce – in particular, fruits, vegetables and home-made cheeses. Ibrahim describes the villagers growing watermelons and ‘yellow melons’, but these were not money-makers – nor was tobacco, a crop highly regulated by the government. He tells of Taytaba’s success with tomatoes, which he describes taking to market in Tel Aviv in the full interview. Ibrahim also details the villagers’ relationship with a Jewish man from Safad, who would come to Taytaba to buy milk products, meat, wool, and sheep and goat hides. With the cash they earned, villagers could purchase goods from the city markets. Villagers also provided labour for urban enterprises and infrastructures, working in ports as stevedores, and as policemen. Hasna mentions that a variety of people came to live in al-Manshiyya due to its location close to

Akka. Indeed, villages near urban areas were often bedroom communities for migrant workers from more remote villages, who travelled to the city for jobs.

As Hasna’s stories from al-Manshiyya show, the villages of the coastal plains adopted mechanised agriculture practices because grain harvesters could work on flat terrain (unlike the hills around Taytaba). The motorised irrigation pump she describes would have been rare in the highlands, which relied on rain-fed agriculture and lower temperatures.

Urban centres were also hubs for education and entertainment. Imams and teachers often came to live in villages from larger towns and urban areas with better access to education; and children travelled to larger villages and towns to pursue their studies, once they had finished school in their own villages. After completing primary school in Taytaba, Ibrahim and some other boys rented weekday accommodation in the city of Safad, in order to continue their studies until age 14. He then had to travel to the village of al-Bassa for upper secondary school. Hasna’s childhood memories include going to celebrate the Big and Small Eid holidays in

Akka, where children congregated in their new clothes, played on swings and ate special treats. She also recalls trips by girls and women to the communal bathhouse in the city.

Across Palestine, village life centred on certain physical spaces. If villagers had sufficient resources, they built schools, mosques and churches. Ibrahim explains that in Taytaba, in the late 1920s, he and the other boys went to school in the mosque, where they learned maths, Arabic, religion, drawing and sports. The mosque building became a full-time place of worship after the villagers built a school in 1935. When he became a teacher himself in the 1940s, Ibrahim taught Arabic, English and maths to boys and girls in the village of

Alma, about 15 kilometres north of Taytaba.

Every village had a baydar (bayadir in the plural), a hard-packed outdoor threshing floor for the harvest of grains (wheat and barley) and pulses (lentils, beans and chickpeas). Weddings were often held on this flat, smooth, communal space as well. Grains and pulses were harvested and threshed in late summer and early autumn. Throughout the seasons, everyone worked in the fields, planting, harvesting or tending animals. Ibrahim says he hated working with sheep and goats, a chore he escaped once he went to Safad and al-Bassa for secondary school. Women worked both in the fields and at home preparing the harvest for winter storage. Tomatoes, okra, peppers and mallow were dried. Milk was turned into yoghurt, then labneh, which was made into balls and packed in olive oil or dried with cracked wheat in large, hard balls of kishk to be reconstituted and cooked with grains and lentils. Such subsistence living characterised Palestinian village life.

The British colonial authority targeted this subsistence livelihood as part of their crackdown on Palestinian resistance. Historical documentation of the British crackdown on Palestinians during the 1936–39 revolt tell of British soldiers dumping villagers’ winter stores on the floor, breaking olive oil storage jars, and pouring kerosene on supplies. These actions by the governing authorities resulted in hardship and food insecurity for whole families, who would have to rely on other villagers for their livelihoods for the year. Hasna describes seeing British forces burn down suspected revolutionaries’ houses and destroying food supplies in al-Manshiyya.

Such accounts of collective punishment are told in every village. Palestinian anticolonial and nationalist activists – who organised, mobilised and fought against the British Mandate and Jewish Zionist settlers – relied on villagers to hide and supply them while they participated in clandestine resistance efforts. Hasna explains that political activity and armed resistance was happening all around her, but she was instructed not to talk about it as a child, for fear of leaking secrets to the British. Ibrahim tells the story of leaving his village for Safad at the beginning of the school week, when British soldiers stopped him and his cousin, who were both on horseback. The soldiers first demanded the two teenagers inform on whomever had built trenches and walls – which the army presumed to be the work of Palestinians resistance fighters – in the steep valleys outside Taytaba. When the boys could not provide an answer, the soldiers forced them into an army vehicle and took them back to the village. Along the way, they passed by another cousin, who was ploughing the fields with two bulls. When the British troops beckoned to him, he tried to unleash his bulls before approaching, but a soldier shot him dead. Hasna shares similar memories of British actions in her village. These stories testify to the ways that Palestinian anti-colonial activism was violently suppressed that took the form of collective punishment that colonial forces meted out to villagers.⁴

The British Mandate government administration penetrated into the villagers lives in other ways, evidenced in the records that villagers still possess, both at the individual level (identity cards and passports; birth, death and marriage certificates; driving licenses) and the economic level (receipts for ta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Map of Palestine
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Foreword by Mahmoud Zeidan
• Introduction: Past Continuous by Diana Allan
• Part I Life in Pre-1948 Palestine
• Part II The British Mandate and Palestinian and Arab Resistance
• Part III War and Ethnic Cleansing
• Part IV Flight and Exile
• Afterword: Oral History in Palestinian Studies by Rosemary Sayigh
• Contributors and Translators
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index