Nakba and Survival: The Story of Palestinians Who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee, 1948–1956

Almost every history of 1948 follows the Palestinians who left. Adel Manna wrote the history of the ones who did not — and of those who were driven out and then walked back. Between the war and the loosening of the military regime, the Palestinians of Haifa and the Galilee became a minority inside a state that had not planned for them, governed by permit, curfew and expulsion order. That decade is the subject of this book.

Manna builds it out of oral testimony gathered from survivors, set against Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries and memoirs, so that the recollection and the document check each other. His own family and their village of Majd al-Krum in the Galilee run through the account, which is how the cruelties of the military regime — the publisher’s word for them — are shown at the scale of a household rather than as policy in the abstract.

The argument is stated plainly by the publisher and it is the reason the book belongs on this shelf: scholarship on the Palestinian national movement has generally measured resistance by armed struggle and by cultural struggle, and by that measure the people who stayed do not appear at all. Manna’s claim is that remaining under military rule, and fighting one’s way home after displacement, were acts of heroism in their own right. It is a correction to the Palestinian record as much as to the Israeli one.

The Institute for Palestine Studies published the Arabic edition in Beirut in 2016 as نكبة وبقاء, and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad published the Hebrew edition in 2017 in the Theory in Context series. The English edition of 2022 is the sixth volume in the New Directions in Palestinian Studies series, which comes out of Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies.

About the author

Adel Manna was born in 1947 in Majd al-Krum in the Galilee. A historian of Ottoman Palestine and of the Palestinians who remained after 1948, he has taught since 1980 in Palestinian and Israeli universities, including Birzeit University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, where he directed the Center for the Study of Arab Society in Israel. He has published ten books in Arabic, Hebrew and English.

Details

• University of California Press, September 2022 — New Directions in Palestinian Studies, volume 6; 386 pages
• ISBN 9780520389366 (paperback); 9780520389373 (ebook)
• Arabic: نكبة وبقاء, Institute for Palestine Studies, Beirut, 2016 — ISBN 9786144480144, 480 pages
• Hebrew: נכבה והישרדות, Van Leer Institute Press and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2017

Where to find it

• Free, in full, and legally. The English edition is open access through the University of California Press’s Luminos programme: luminosoa.org — Nakba and Survival, DOI 10.1525/luminos.129. It is also catalogued in the Directory of Open Access Books and mirrored at OAPEN.
• In print from University of California Press, and orderable through any independent bookshop.