Of course we passed it. In May 1948, we left Jaffa. Jaffa fell, and I became a refugee in Nablus.
A nineteen-year-old Jaffa high-school student, he sat his matriculation exams in March 1948 under nightly mortar bombardment — 'Daily we knew people who got killed. We buried them.' — and weeks later fled the falling city by sea.
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod was born on 15 February 1929 in Jaffa, the son of a self-taught worker who built the first Palestinian Arab foundry before the British shut it down during the 1936–39 revolt. He attended Jaffa’s al-Amariya Government Secondary School, where he organized student strikes, and was a nineteen-year-old schoolboy when Jaffa came under siege in the spring of 1948. In May 1948, as the city fell, he left by sea — to Beirut, then Nablus, then Amman — one of some 50,000 Palestinians expelled from the city.
From exile he reached the United States, earning a doctorate in political science at Princeton and teaching for decades at Smith, McGill and Northwestern universities, becoming one of the most prominent Palestinian scholars of his generation. He returned to Palestine in the 1990s, working to rebuild higher education in the West Bank and Gaza, and died in Ramallah in 2001; he was buried in Jaffa, the city he had left as a refugee. He gave this account to the blind Palestinian scholar Hisham H. Ahmed in Jerusalem in June 1995, for the Institute of Current World Affairs’ oral-history project.
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Quoted exactly as published by Institute of Current World Affairs (ICWA Letters, interview by Hisham H. Ahmed). Visit the archive for the full testimony.
Institute of Current World Affairs (ICWA Letters, interview by Hisham H. Ahmed)