Adel Manna
عادل مناع
Historian of Ottoman Palestine and of the Palestinians who remained
Palestinian historian of Ottoman Palestine and of the Palestinians who were not expelled in 1948 — the minority whose survival inside Israel he was the first to write as a social history from within.
Adel Manna was born in 1947 in Majd al-Krum, a village in the Galilee. He has taught history in Palestinian and Israeli universities since 1980, among them Birzeit University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1999 he joined the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, where he directed the Center for the Study of Arab Society in Israel; between 2009 and 2012 he directed the Center for the Training of Arab Teachers at Beit Berl College. He is a senior research fellow at Van Leer. He has published ten books and dozens of articles, in Arabic, in Hebrew and in English.
His first field was the Ottoman centuries. Aʻlām Filasṭīn fī awākhir al-ʻahd al-ʻUthmānī — the notables of Palestine in the late Ottoman period, 1800–1918 — appeared in Jerusalem in 1986 from the Arab Studies Society and was reissued by the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut; Tārīkh Filasṭīn fī awākhir al-ʻahd al-ʻUthmānī, 1700–1918 followed from the same publisher in 1999, and a study of the Jerusalem liwāʼ under middle-Ottoman rule in 2008. That work matters to this archive for a plain reason: it documents, from within the Ottoman centuries rather than from the argument of the last hundred years, a Palestine that already had its own notables, its own towns and its own administration long before the Mandate.
The work he is best known for turns to the year that broke it. Most histories of 1948 follow the Palestinians who were expelled. Manna followed the ones who were not. Nakba and Survival reconstructs, from oral testimony and from Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries and memoirs, what happened to the Palestinians of Haifa and the Galilee during the war and through the decade of military government that followed — including those who were displaced and then made their way back. His own family and their village of Majd al-Krum are part of the account. His argument is that staying, and returning, were themselves acts of resistance, and that a national history written only around armed and cultural struggle has left that out. The book was published in Arabic in Beirut in 2016, in Hebrew in Jerusalem in 2017, and in English by the University of California Press in 2022, where it is free to read.
Key works
- Aʻlām Filasṭīn fī awākhir al-ʻahd al-ʻUthmānī, 1800–1918 (Jerusalem, 1986; Beirut, 1995)
- Tārīkh Filasṭīn fī awākhir al-ʻahd al-ʻUthmānī, 1700–1918 (Beirut, 1999)
- ha-Palesṭinim ba-meʾah ha-ʻeśrim — The Palestinians in the Twentieth Century (Hebrew, 1999)
- Liwāʼ al-Quds fī awāsiṭ al-ʻahd al-ʻUthmānī (Beirut, 2008)
- Nakba and Survival (Arabic 2016; Hebrew 2017; English, University of California Press, 2022)
Sources
- Dr. Adel Manna — Van Leer Jerusalem Institute
- Nakba and Survival — University of California Press
- Nakba and Survival (Hebrew edition, 2017) — Van Leer Jerusalem Institute
- Nakba and Survival — New Directions in Palestinian Studies, Brown University
- Adel Manna — Palestine Book Awards
- Works of ʻĀdil Mannāʻ — Open Library catalogue records
- Adel Manna (Q4681573) — Wikidata, for the date of birth
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.
Connected in the archive
26 connected records26 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
named in this record — 5 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Haifaحيفا
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Nakba and Survival reconstructs, from oral testimony and from Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries and memoirs, what happened to the Palestinians of Haifa and the Galilee during the war and through the decade of military government that followed — including those who were displaced and then made their way back.
- Jerusalemالقدس
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: He has taught history in Palestinian and Israeli universities since 1980, among them Birzeit University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
- Nakba
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Nakba and Survival reconstructs, from oral testimony and from Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries and memoirs, what happened to the Palestinians of Haifa and the Galilee during the war and through the decade of military government that followed — including those who were displaced and then made their way back.
- Nakba and Survival: The Story of Palestinians Who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee, 1948–1956
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Nakba and Survival reconstructs, from oral testimony and from Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries and memoirs, what happened to the Palestinians of Haifa and the Galilee during the war and through the decade of military government that followed — including those who were displaced and then made their way back.
- The Nakba
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Nakba and Survival reconstructs, from oral testimony and from Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries and memoirs, what happened to the Palestinians of Haifa and the Galilee during the war and through the decade of military government that followed — including those who were displaced and then made their way back.
names this person — 2 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Sha'abشَعْب
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Palestine Open Maps and Palestine Remembered label 18 July 1948 as the depopulation or occupation date, but Adel Manna's more detailed history shows why that day was not a final transfer of control.
- The Al-Alami familyالعلمي
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: …Writers on Palestine's families — Mustafa Murad al-Dabbagh, Kamil al-Asali and Adel Manna among them, as quoted on the family's own website — describe the Alamis as a sharifian house of Idrisid (Hasanid) descent that came to Jerusalem from Morocco in the Mamluk period and produced…
on a related subject — 19 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- Ilan Pappéإيلان بابيه
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "history", "Nakba".
- Nur Masalhaنور مصالحة
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "history", "Nakba".
- Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "history", "Ottoman Palestine".
- Rashid Husseinراشد حسين
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "Galilee", "Palestinians in Israel".
- Rashid Khalidiرشيد خالدي
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "history", "Nakba".
- Samih al-Qasimسميح القاسم
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "Galilee", "Palestinians in Israel".
- and 13 more
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Adel Manna.” Figures, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/figures/adel-manna.- MLA
“Adel Manna.” Figures, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/figures/adel-manna. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-adel-manna, title = {Adel Manna}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/figures/adel-manna}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }