Mukhtar

The office was formalised by the Ottoman administration in the nineteenth century as the lowest rung of a system that ran from the vali of a province down through the mutasarrif of a district and the qa’im maqam of a subdistrict. Below them, in each village, stood the mukhtar: not an official of the state but a local man, usually the head of a leading household, recognised by the government as the point at which it touched the village. A large village might have several — one for each hamula — and the position often stayed within a family across generations.

What the mukhtar did was mostly documentary and social. He kept the village’s relations with the authorities: tax assessment, conscription lists, registration of land in the tabu, and the certificates of birth, death and marriage on which any dealing with the state depended. He settled quarrels before they reached the courts, guaranteed the reputation of villagers who needed one, and hosted travellers and officials in the guest room, the madafa, at the village’s expense. Under the British Mandate the position was retained and given a defined legal standing, which made the mukhtar both the community’s advocate and the administration’s instrument — a double role that could be honourable or compromising depending on the man and the moment.

In 1948 it was often the mukhtar who negotiated with the advancing forces, who decided whether a village would surrender or fight, and who tried to protect those who stayed. It was frequently the mukhtar who counted the dead afterwards: at al-Dawayima, it was the village’s mukhtar who returned to find bodies in the mosque and in the cave outside it, and who compiled the list of the missing that historians still cite. In January 1948 at Salama, near Jaffa, British forces cleared the villagers’ roadblocks by gunfire and ordered the mukhtar to have a defensive ditch filled in — a small illustration of how the office worked in both directions at once.

The mukhtars survived the Nakba in altered form. In the refugee camps, the notables and mukhtars of the villages of origin handled the first distributions of tents, rations and tarpaulins before the agencies took over, and the camps’ quarters were organised around the same families. In Israel and in the occupied territories the title persists, now largely ceremonial, attached to men who still sign papers, still receive guests, and still know exactly which family belongs to which village.

Sources

• Salama, Jaffa subdistrict — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Ottoman Territorial Reorganization, 1840–1917 — PalQuest
• ‘We will never forget’: Reliving the pain of the Nakba amid Israel’s war — Al Jazeera, 2 December 2023