Adel Manna’s new history of what happened to the Palestinians who remained in what would become the Israeli state after the 1948 helps us understand how the Nakba was made of many personal Nakbas.
The Palestinian towns of Iqrit and Birim in the Galilee were destroyed by the Israeli army in the 1950s so as to prevent Palestinian villagers from returning under a court order. The case haunts Israeli government to this day, as Rinawie Zoabi, a Palestinian lawmaker in Meretz, demands the return of the residents as a condition of her staying in the coalition. But Foreign Minister Yair Lapid is having none of it.
Architect Elias Khuri tells the story of a home built around 12 olive trees in the Galilee village al-Mashhad. The home reflects Palestinian architectural heritage and the Palestinian tie to the land.
Noura Erakat writes in the book, “A Land With a People,” that the volume tackles power head-on, “charting the struggle against Zionism within the Jewish communities that Zionism purportedly serves. Its anti-Zionist Jewish stories are critical to decolonization.” Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh relates that the book traces some of his own history with the organization “Jewish Voice for Peace,” as he struggled to bring Palestinian narratives to a global audience.
As Israelis were evacuated from Jewish-only communities in the Galilee due to fires this month, Hatim Kanaaneh reflects, “Are you aware that within recent memory your own residential locales had Palestinian names and were inhabited by humans, some of whom with features not really different from your own and who were before their expulsion actually part of the best educated nation in the Middle East? They lived right where you live now but without all those fire-hazardous pines.”
It is impossible for an Israeli historian who doesn’t reject Zionism to understand Galilee resistance leader Tawfiq Zayyad, whose life shows, Mere Palestinian existence is undesirable in the eyes of the average Jewish Israeli, writes Hatim Kanaaneh.
Sexual and gendered practices in Arab society stand at the core of the novel “Against the Loveless World,” with author Susan Abulhawa going full force in a critique of patriarchy: With the exception of the Palestinian underground heroes of both sexes, most gendered interrelations in the novel reflect poorly on the male players.
Haaretz covers Israeli army plans to convert “an ancient olive grove in the Galilee” into a shooting range with sympathy for the Israeli residents but no awareness that the once-thriving Palestinian village of A’mka there was uprooted by Zionists to make way for the Jewish-only settlement of A’moka. The Palestinians became refugees.
Anyone who thinks that stopping the next Israeli annexation of additional parts of the West Bank would bring peace closer would be well-advised to peel away the veneer of democratic façade, one that covers an Israeli plan with only one goal in mind—completing the campaign of ethnically cleansing Palestinians—on both sides of the Green Line—that started with the creation of the State of Israel.