Palestine — The big picture across everything ingested: the Kanafani booklet, Sayegh’s Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, Said’s The Question of Palestine, Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, both read in full, and Sitta’s Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, read in full (PDF p.1-20 of 20).
Sources
Nakba and Survival — Adel Manna, Nakba and Survival: The Story of Palestinians Who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee, 1948–1956 (University of California Press, 2022; originally 2016): a history of the Palestinians who remained — the remainers — built from 120 oral testimonies, family documents and trilingual archives, arguing that non-expulsion in northern Palestine was high-level policy differentiated by sect, and that ethnic cleansing ran wider and longer than Plan Dalet, through the prohibition of return and military rule to 1956. Read in full, PDF p.1-388 of 388 in parts 1-10 of 10 (Foreword, Preface, Acknowledgments, Introduction, Chapters 1-7, Epilogue, Appendices, Notes, Bibliography and Index).
The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine — Salman Abu Sitta, The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine (Palestine Land Society, London; 1st ed. 1998, 2nd ed. 2025): the Register (Section V of the book) as one 24-column table over 20 sheets — every depopulated locality with its date, 1948 population, land, operation and UNRWA-based refugee figures: 531 fully and 662 partially depopulated localities, 804,465 people, 17,184,463 dunums, 4,940,269 refugees in total estimated for 1998. Read in full, PDF p.1-20 of 20.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine — Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006): a history arguing that 1948 was a planned ethnic cleansing — the paradigm of ethnic cleansing against the paradigm of war, transfer as Zionist ideology, the Village Files, Plans A-D and the Consultancy, and UN Resolution 181 as a partition imposed on the indigenous majority with no mechanism to prevent the cleansing. Read in full, PDF p.1-384 of 384 (Preface, Chapters 1-12 and Epilogue; Endnotes, Chronology, Maps and Tables, Bibliography and Index).
The Question of Palestine — Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (1979): a Palestinian political essay for the American reader — the Palestinian experience of Zionism, the denial and reconstitution of Arab Palestine, the Balfour Declaration against the demographic facts, the liberal West’s hegemonic identification with Zionism and its representation of the Palestinians, Zionism from the standpoint of its victims, the PLO’s rise, and the Palestinian question after Camp David, with full Chapter Notes and Index. Read in full, PDF p.1-291 of 291.
Zionist Colonialism in Palestine — Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965), excerpts in Settler Colonial Studies 2, 1 (2012): Zionist colonisation as a distinctive settler colonialism, its 1917 alliance with British imperialism, the settler-state’s racism, violence and expansion, and the five-stage Palestinian response.
The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine — Ghassan Kanafani, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine (1972): a booklet built around Kanafani’s Marxist analysis of the 1936-39 revolt, with front matter on his life and political writings, his story Letter From Gaza, a tribute and a biography.
Entities
Adel Manna — Palestinian historian from Majd al-Krum, author of Nakba and Survival, whose own family was expelled to Ayn al-Hilwa and returned by sea in 1951.
Majd al-Krum — Galilee village whose surrender, al-‘Ayn Square massacre, expulsion of hundreds and partial return open Manna’s Nakba and Survival.
Ayn al-Hilwa — Refugee camp near Sidon, Lebanon, where the Manna family and other Majd al-Krum refugees lived more than two years before returning in 1951, in Manna’s account.
Constantine Zurayk — Author of Ma’na al-Nakba (late summer 1948), who coined the term al-Nakba for the Arab defeat in Palestine, in Manna’s account.
Ma’na al-Nakba — Constantine Zurayk’s The Meaning of the Catastrophe (1948), the book that introduced the term al-Nakba, as presented by Manna.
Maki — The Israeli Communist Party, joined by the National Liberation League’s Palestinian communists in October 1948, whose wartime cooperation with Israel Manna examines.
National Liberation League — Palestinian communist organisation whose Haifa and Galilee leaders chose cooperation with Israel in 1948 and united with Maki that October, in Manna’s account.
Tawfiq Tubi — Arab communist leader who co-led the League into Maki, coordinated in Haifa during its fall, and became a Knesset member in 1949, in Manna’s account.
Fu’ad Nassar — League secretary who led its pro-partition turn, met Mapam’s Aharon Cohen, and edited the leaflet to Arab soldiers, in Manna’s account.
Emile Tuma — Al-Ittihad editor and leading League opponent of partition, imprisoned in Lebanon and excluded from leadership until the early 1960s, in Manna’s account.
Shmuel Mikunis — Israeli Communist Party secretary in the interim government who travelled with Habibi to Belgrade and Prague and led the Jewish side of the Maki merger, in Manna’s account.
Saliba Khamis — Nazareth League leader who offered cooperation to Shitrit, organised Arab labour under the military governor, and received a pistol and car, in Manna’s account.
Mapam — Zionist Marxist party, the League’s chief ally and defender inside Israel, with two interim-government ministers, in Manna’s account.
Czechoslovak arms deal — The communist-camp arms supply from March 1948 that Manna calls decisive for Israel’s victories and the basis of its gratitude to the communists.
Hanna Naqqara — Lawyer who returned to Haifa by plane on 10 August 1948 and became a pillar of Maki’s defence of survivors’ rights, in Manna’s account.
Aharon Cohen — Mapam leader who met Fu’ad Nassar, defended special treatment for League men, and commented on the Czech arms, in Manna’s account.
Elimelech Avnir — Head of the military government whose January 1949 report records 1,038 Galilee villagers expelled in surprise searches, 536 from Majd al-Krum, in Manna’s account.
Kufr ‘Inan — Galilee village emptied after Operation Hiram, its remaining villagers expelled in 1949 and its refugees settled for decades at al-Rama, in Manna’s account.
Sha’b — Galilee village expelled in Operation Hiram whose houses were given to other Arabs, its people fighting in court and by return to live in it again, in Manna’s account.
‘Illut — Nazareth-district village whose people suffered two massacres in July 1948, were expelled to Nazareth, and were allowed to return at the beginning of 1950, in Manna’s account.
Kufr Qari’ — Wadi ‘Ara village deserted for eleven months that returned under its own power in April 1949 on the eve of the Triangle’s transfer, in Manna’s account.
Al-Jalama — Triangle hamlet illegally expelled in 1950, which won a Supreme Court return order its houses’ destruction by a kibbutz defeated, in Manna’s account.
The Triangle — The strip of twenty-seven villages and 31,000 people transferred from Jordan to Israel in May 1949 under the Rhodes armistice, in Manna’s account.
Abu Is’af — Sha’b fighter Ibrahim ‘Ali al-Shaykh Khalil (1908–2002), leader of one of Galilee’s best fighting units, in Manna’s account.
Sa’id Salih al-Asadi — Sha’b fighter (1918–1997) who lived in Ayn al-Hilwa yet returned to Galilee dozens of times to meet his wife in a cave, in Manna’s account.
Shafiq Abu ‘Abdu — Damun Palestinian installed in Sha’b to keep its original inhabitants out, who had earlier intervened to halt the Majd al-Krum massacre, in Manna’s account.
Jibra’il Bishara — Tarshiha communist memoirist whose memoirs record Tarshiha’s return, census and January 1949 expulsion, in Manna’s account.
Golani Brigade — Israeli brigade whose soldiers perpetrated ‘Illut’s two massacres of 16 July 1948 and murdered ‘Ilabun’s martyrs at the end of October 1948, in Manna’s account.
Israel–Jordan Armistice Agreement (Rhodes, 1949) — The Rhodes armistice of 3 April 1949 that transferred the Triangle to Israel with commitments to protect its inhabitants’ rights, in Manna’s account.
Bishop Hakim — Melkite bishop who helped hundreds of his sect settle anew, pressed Tarshiha to accept transfer, and made the return agreement with Palmon, in Manna’s account.
Muhammad Haydar (Abu Jamil) — Majd al-Krum diarist known as Abu Jamil, whose 1950–51 diaries Manna uses as a documentary source for the village, in Manna’s account.
Lehavot Haviva — Kibbutz living on al-Jalama’s lands since 1951 whose members blew up the village’s houses in 1953 to defeat a Supreme Court return order, in Manna’s account.
Gate of the Sun — Elias Khoury’s novel, fiction labelled as such, telling Abu Is’af’s unit’s story through fictional heroes including Yunis, in Manna’s account.
‘Awda al-‘Ashhab — League communist found in the Abu ‘Ujayla camp, imprisoned in Israel, and reunited with his smuggled-in family only in 1954 after a Knesset sit-in, in Manna’s account.
Khalil Tuma ‘Abbud — Al-Rama law student who returned to Haifa in 1952 as a “new immigrant” aboard a Libyan Jewish emigration ship, in Manna’s account.
Ahmad Abu-Laban — Jaffa Emergency Committee head who signed the 13 May 1948 surrender, won a Supreme Court release the authorities delayed for weeks, and emigrated to Jordan, in Manna’s account.
Subhi al-Ayyubi — Jaffa attorney expelled from Jaffa to his Jaljuliyya plantation by military order, rejected by the Supreme Court in 1950, who emigrated to Libya, in Manna’s account.
Fakhri Jaday — Jaffa pharmacologist who returned from Beirut by family reunification in 1950 and testified to the elite’s departure, in Manna’s account.
Muhammad Nimr ‘Awda — Mandate communist expelled from the party in 1940 for “nationalist deviation,” accused by al-Ittihad of recruiting emigrants to Libya, in Manna’s account.
Elias Kusa — Haifa attorney for the expelled of al-Khisas and rebutter of the official account of the 1952 ‘Ara shootings, in Manna’s account.
Kufr Manda — Galilee village whose 13 December 1954 land protest Manna calls the first mass protest in defence of remaining Arab land.
Al-Subayh Arabs — Bedouin clan near Mount Tabur whose members under curfew in 1954 sought conversion to Christianity to lift the siege, in Manna’s account.
Qadditha — Village near Safad whose Hulayhel clan returned through Mano Friedman but was resettled at ‘Akbara while the village’s houses were blown up, in Manna’s account.
Al-Ghabisiyya — Village north of ‘Akka that won a 1951 Supreme Court return ruling and was re-expelled under a closed-area declaration, in Manna’s account.
‘Akbara — Depopulated village south of Safad where Qadditha’s Hulayhel clan was forcibly settled in 1949, in Manna’s account.
Operation Mole — Army plan to expel the southern Triangle’s population to detention camps if war broke out in late 1956, behind the Kafr Qasim massacre in Manna’s account.
‘Ara — Wadi ‘Ara village where soldiers killed two and wounded five Eid al-Fitr villagers at the border on 23 June 1952, in Manna’s account.
Amin Jarjura — Nazareth lawyer and first-Knesset MK on the Nazareth Democratic list who defended the refugees’ right of return from the Knesset podium and called Nazareth’s takeover an occupation, in Manna’s account.
Mas’ad Qassis — Catholic notable of Mi’lya brought back from Lebanon by Bishop Hakim into the Knesset in 1951, whose refusal to yield his seat in 1956 showed the bishop’s grip on the Democratic list, in Manna’s account.
Rustum Bastuni — Mapam MK from Haifa, a 1949 returnee and al-Mirsad editor dropped by his party after criticising its Zionist contradictions, in Manna’s account.
Jabr Ma’di — Druze leader of Yarka whose 1948 help to villagers made him an electoral asset of al-Zu’bi’s slate in the 1950s, in Manna’s account.
Arab Front — The Maki–nationalist front announced in ‘Akka and Nazareth on 6 July 1958 after the 1 May Nazareth confrontations, whose non-communist leaders resigned within six months, in Manna’s account.
Nazareth Elit — Upper Nazareth, the Jewish city decided in 1954 and begun in 1956 beside Arab Nazareth on confiscated land, opening the Judaization of the Galilee, in Manna’s account.
Karmiel — Jewish city prepared by decreeing 200,000 dunums between al-Shaghur and al-Battuf a closed area, in Manna’s account.
Institute for Palestine Studies — Independent Arab research institute (est. 1963), copyright holder and original publisher of Nakba and Survival.
Tom Segev — Israeli historian/journalist whose 1949: The First Israelis exposed repression of the remainers and whose Gate of the Sun review Manna attacks, in Manna’s account.
Hillel Cohen — Israeli researcher on the Arabs in Israel, author of a study of the present absentees and a book on Arab collaborators under military rule, in Manna’s survey.
Shira Robinson — Researcher combining Israeli archives, Arab sources and eyewitness interviews on the Palestinian minority after 1948, in Manna’s survey.
‘Arif al-‘Arif — Jerusalemite historian whose six-volume diary-based Al-Nakba: Nakbat Bayt al-Maqdis wal-firdaws al-mafqud 1947–49 Manna presents as a major early detailed work on the Nakba.
Muhammad Nimr al-Hawwari — Lawyer and al-Najjada founder who returned to Nazareth with Israel’s consent and wrote an indictment of the mufti, the Arab states and the Arab Rescue Army, in Manna’s review.
George Hanna — Lebanese socialist writer whose November 1948 book frankly named Russia’s imperial interest in endorsing partition, in Manna’s account.
Musa al-‘Alami — Jerusalem attorney whose The Lesson of Palestine assigned primary responsibility to Britain and first sketched the war’s two-stage division, in Manna’s account.
Ben Dunkelman — Canadian Israeli battalion commander who signed Nazareth’s surrender agreement and refused the 17 July 1948 order to expel its population, in Manna’s account.
Shakib Wahhab — Druze battalion leader whose withdrawal at Husha and al-Kasayir under agreement with the Zionist side Manna calls an important Galilee juncture.
Sayf al-Din al-Zu’bi — Nazareth-district broker who had worked with the Jewish National Fund and became a prominent collaborator leader after the city’s occupation, in Manna’s account.
Kufr Yasif — Western Galilee village saved by a Druze-mediated surrender agreement on 10 July 1948, though refugees sheltering there were expelled, in Manna’s account.
Shafa ‘Amr — Galilee town whose July 1948 fall was the first practical test of the secret Druze agreement, its inhabitants spared maltreatment and expulsion, in Manna’s account.
Nazareth surrender agreement (16 July 1948) — The eleven-article surrender agreement for Nazareth signed 16 July 1948, whose ninth clause promised residents equal civil rights without discrimination, in Manna’s account.
Al-Rama — Galilee village whose Christians were expelled on 31 October 1948 and allowed back within a day or two after Druze intervention, in Manna’s account.
Nahaf — Al-Shaghur village fired on and expelled after its surrender, allowed to return two to three days later, its story confirmed by a 1951 Supreme Court ruling, in Manna’s account.
Saliha — Border village that had resisted the ARA’s presence and was massacred in Operation Hiram — ninety-four killed by Galili’s report, one hundred and five by a 1985 testimony list, in Manna’s account.
Hula — Southern Lebanon village where ninety-four people were murdered in Operation Hiram, including thirty-four prisoners blown up in their detention house, in Manna’s account.
Tarshiha — Large western Galilee village bombarded at Hiram’s opening and mostly emptied, whose few hundred remaining, mainly Christians, refused to leave, in Manna’s account.
Jish — Maronite border village that escaped the border-strip expulsion order through the minorities ministry, most Christians staying while most Muslims were uprooted, in Manna’s account.
Moshe Carmel — Northern front commander who ordered Nazareth’s expulsion in July 1948 and, on 31 October 1948, ordered his units to purify the occupied Galilee and help its residents leave, in Manna’s account.
Bechor Shitrit — Minister of police and minority affairs who repeatedly objected to expulsions of remainers — ‘Akka, ‘Ilabun, the border strip — while they went on, in Manna’s account.
Mano Friedman — Minorities ministry representative in Safad who helped spare Jish yet delivered Kufr Bir’im’s evacuation order a week after counting its people, in Manna’s account.
Haim Orbach — Western Galilee intelligence officer who negotiated Majd al-Krum’s surrender and twice intervened to stop killings there, in Manna’s account.
Oslo Accords — The peace process begun September 1993, from which the Nakba was totally absent and which broke down in 2000 over the Right of Return, in Pappe’s account.
Peace Now — The Israeli ‘peace camp’ movement whose guidelines shaped Pax Americana and Oslo while always evading 1948, in Pappe’s account.
Ehud Barak — Labour prime minister from 1999 who committed to the law barring discussion of return and presented the Camp David plan Arafat refused, in Pappe’s account.
Ehud Olmert — Prime minister in 2006 whose hitkansut policy Pappe calls the core of Zionism in a different garb: as much land as possible, as few Palestinians as possible.
Jenin — The refugee camp invaded 3-15 April 2002, where Pappe quotes a nurse’s killing and records the abandoned UN fact-finding mission.
Zochrot — Israeli NGO that signposts destroyed Palestinian villages where Jewish settlements or JNF forests now stand, in Pappe’s Epilogue.
Safsaf — Galilee village taken on 29 October 1948, whose seventy captured men were blindfolded and summarily shot and whose people were driven to Lebanon, in Pappe’s account.
Iqrit — Maronite village evicted in 1948 on a promise of return, which won a Supreme Court ruling in 1951 and was then demolished on Christmas Eve 1951, in Pappe’s account.
Kfar Bir’im — Galilee village whose people won a court ruling for return and whose village the army then destroyed, in Pappe’s account.
Dawaymeh — Village where Battalion 89 killed 455 people by the mukhtar’s count on 28 October 1948, investigated by the UN PCC, in Pappe’s account.
Beersheba — Southern town of 5,000 occupied on 21 October 1948 and driven out to Hebron, its district ninety per cent depopulated by December, in Pappe’s account.
UN General Assembly Resolution 194 — The resolution of 11 December 1948 giving the refugees the choice of unconditional return and/or compensation, which Israel’s anti-repatriation policy was built to defeat, in Pappe’s account.
Palestine Conciliation Commission — The three-member UN committee (France, Turkey, United States) that led the return endeavour and investigated Dawaymeh, in Pappe’s account.
Operation Hiram — The October 1948 operation that took the upper Galilee and southern Lebanon in two weeks, the villages turning into strongholds before falling at the month’s end, in Pappe’s account.
Operation Dani — The July 1948 attack on Lydd and Ramla commanded by Yigal Allon, whose towns’ populations were expelled on a forced march to the West Bank, in Pappe’s account.
Operation Palm Tree — Operation Dekel, July 1948, which took Nazareth and its villages and completed the take-over of the Western Galilee, in Pappe’s account.
Lydd — The ‘city of the mosques’, bombarded from the air, scene of the Dahamish Mosque massacre and emptied by a forced march of about 50,000, in Pappe’s account.
Ramla — Town of 17,000 taken after Lydd despite an agreement that its people could stay; Rabin recalled Ben-Gurion’s hand-wave: ‘Drive them out!’, in Pappe’s account.
Nazareth — The only Arab city in pre-1967 Israel, whose total eviction Ben-Gurion countermanded because the Christian world was watching, in Pappe’s account.
Saffuriyya — Village near Nazareth bombarded from the air and evicted entire in June 1948, its people watching it become the moshav Zippori, in Pappe’s account.
Tirat Haifa — Village of 5,000 south of Haifa, ‘Tira of the almonds’, taken on 16 July 1948 in Operation Policeman, in Pappe’s account.
Kfar Lam — Apolitical coastal village taken on 16 July 1948 whose intelligence file fed the claim that it was ‘rightfully returned’ to the Jewish people, in Pappe’s account.
Ayn Hawd — Village left intact by its occupiers and turned into the artists’ colony Ein Hod, while one clan family built a new, unrecognised Ayn Hawd nearby, in Pappe’s account.
Ijzim — Village of 3,000 that resisted Operation Policeman for three days into the second truce and was expelled to Jenin, in Pappe’s account.
Ayn Ghazal — Village of 3,000 bombed on 26 July 1948 as its people broke the Ramadan fast; seventeen selected men killed on the spot, in Pappe’s account.
Hittin — Village above the Sea of Galilee defended by 25 volunteers and cleansed brutally by Brigade Seven on 17 July 1948, in Pappe’s account.
Ilabun — Galilee village occupied in Operation Hiram, whose people were expelled to Lebanon and whose Christians were then ordered back, in Pappe’s account.
Bassa — Largest of the Operation Ben-Ami revenge villages, whose young men were executed in front of one of its churches after it resisted, in Pappe’s account.
Wadi Ara — Valley of fifteen villages that held out with Iraqi help and escaped expulsion, ceded to Israel by Abdullah in 1949, in Pappe’s account.
Folke Bernadotte — UN mediator who demanded the unconditional return of all the refugees and was murdered in September 1948; Resolution 194 is his posthumous legacy, in Pappe’s account.
George Habash — Physician in Lydd’s hospital during its July 1948 massacre, whose experiences there drove him to guerrilla warfare and to found the PFLP, in Pappe’s account.
Tantura — Coastal village of around 1,500, attacked on 22 May 1948, whose captured men were selected from the village file on the beach and executed, in Pappe’s account.
Ayn al-Zaytun — Galilee village massacred on 2 May 1948 by Moshe Kalman’s Palmach troops, the best documented of the three urban-fringe massacres, in Pappe’s account.
Sirin — Village near Baysan promised immunity through its Zu’bi clan but doomed by its 1943 village file, expelled across the Jordan and demolished entire on 12 May 1948, in Pappe’s account.
Operation Nachshon — The first Plan Dalet operation, April 1948 on the Jerusalem road, whose sudden massive expulsions served as the model for future campaigns, in Pappe’s account.
Tiberias — City on the Sea of Galilee, the first urban centre of the urbicide, which fell on 18 April 1948, in Pappe’s account.
Safad — Galilee town of 9,500 Arabs taken by the Palmach after its hinterland was cleansed under Operation ‘Broom’, in Pappe’s account.
Baysan — Town seized in Operation Gideon, surrendered on 11 May 1948 and expelled across the Jordan, in Pappe’s account.
Golda Meir — Senior Zionist leader who visited Haifa’s emptied homes in April 1948 and met King Abdullah in Amman on 13 May 1948, in Pappe’s account.
Mordechai Maklef — Carmeli Brigade operations officer who orchestrated the cleansing of Haifa with orders to kill any Arab encountered, later Israeli Chief of Staff, in Pappe’s account.
Hugh Stockwell — British commander of the Northern Sector who removed the Haifa buffer and advised its Palestinian leaders to leave, in Pappe’s account.
Adib Shishakly — The ALA’s Galilee commander who replaced Safad’s able defender and refused arms to Ghuwayr, later one of Syria’s rulers, in Pappe’s account.
John Glubb — The Arab Legion’s British commander-in-chief, who dubbed the 1948 war the ‘Phony War’, in Pappe’s account.
Druze — The religious community whose 500 ALA volunteers deserted to the Jewish forces in April 1948 and became the main vehicle for the cleansing of the Galilee, in Pappe’s account.
Muslim Brotherhood — Egyptian movement whose untrained volunteers made up almost fifty per cent of Egypt’s 10,000 troops in May 1948, in Pappe’s account.
Moshe Kalman — Palmach deputy battalion commander who led the Sa’sa attack of 14–15 February 1948, in Pappe’s account.
Arab Liberation Army — The all-Arab volunteer force (Jaish al-Inqath) established by the Arab League in December 1947, whose divided command and defensive posture, in Pappe’s account, left the Palestinians defenceless while providing a pretext for escalation.
Yehoshua Palmon — Ezra Danin’s second-in-command, who in Pappe’s account took a personal interest in the post-occupation selection, interrogation and sometimes execution procedures.
Eliyahu Sasson — Consultancy member whose divide-and-rule approach was overruled as the Consultancy moved to comprehensive ethnic cleansing, in Pappe’s account.
Yossef Nachmani — Joseph Weitz’s most trusted colleague, who shared his view that taking all Arab land was a ‘sacred duty’ requiring a war of occupation, in Pappe’s account.
Lifta — Jerusalem village of 2,500 attacked on 28 December 1947 and finally expelled and mostly blown up on 11 January 1948, in Pappe’s account one of the first villages ethnically cleansed.
Balad al-Shaykh — Village east of Haifa attacked on 31 December 1947 on orders to kill the largest possible number of men, leaving over sixty dead, in Pappe’s account.
Khisas — Hula Plain village attacked on 18 December 1947 despite the operation’s cancellation, fifteen villagers including five children killed, in Pappe’s account.
Qisarya — Coastal village of 1,500, the first village expelled in its entirety, on 15 February 1948, in Pappe’s account.
Sa’sa — Galilee village attacked on the night of 14–15 February 1948, 35 houses demolished and 60–80 people killed, in Pappe’s account.
Ilan Pappe — Israeli historian, one of the ‘new historians’ of the 1980s, whose The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine accuses the Zionist leadership of his own society of a planned ethnic cleansing, as his own J’Accuse.
Consultancy — The ad-hoc body around Ben-Gurion which, in Pappe’s account, plotted and designed the dispossession of the Palestinians, finalised Plan Dalet at the Red House on 10 March 1948, and supervised the ethnic cleansing’s execution.
Village Files — The Zionist movement’s detailed registry of Palestine’s Arab villages — topography, people, an index of ‘hostility’ and 1947 ‘wanted’ lists — which supplied Plan C’s data and was used in the 1948 search-and-arrest operations.
Plan C — Plan C (Gimel), the fusion of Plans A (1937) and B (1946) preparing offensive campaigns of deterrence and retaliation against rural and urban Palestine, superseded within months by Plan Dalet’s call for systematic and total expulsion.
UNSCOP — The UN Special Committee on Palestine, whose members, in Pappe’s account, had no experience in solving conflicts and little knowledge of Palestine, and which recommended the partition that became Resolution 181.
UN General Assembly Resolution 181 — The resolution of 29 November 1947 adopting partition, which in Pappe’s account handed a movement owning less than six per cent of the land more than half the territory and included no mechanism to prevent the ethnic cleansing.
Red House — The Tel-Aviv building that became the Hagana headquarters at the end of 1947, where on 10 March 1948 the final touches were put to Plan Dalet; later razed for a car park.
Ezra Danin — The man who from 1943 systematised the Village Files with a new level of efficiency and supervised its informant network, and who, Pappe writes, would play a leading role in the ethnic cleansing.
Ben-Zion Luria — The young Hebrew University historian whose proposal to the Jewish National Fund — a detailed registry of all Arab villages — set the Village Files project in motion.
Yigael Yadin — Top-ranking officer in the Consultancy who recalled that the Village Files knowledge let the command conclude in November 1947 that the Palestine Arabs had nobody to organise them properly.
Yigal Allon — A military member of the Consultancy, named by Pappe among the figures well grounded in the local ethos who joined its top-ranking officers and ‘Orientalists’.
Yitzhak Sadeh — Chief of the Palmach and a military member of the Consultancy; his wife Margot ran the Village Files project’s secret film laboratory in her house.
Yitzhak Rabin — A regional commander of the 1948 operations who operated in Lydd and Ramla and in the Greater Jerusalem area, in Pappe’s list of the perpetrators.
Issar Harel — The colonel who supervised the intelligence officers’ operations in 1948, later the first person to head the Mossad and the Shabak.
Moshe Sharett — Ben-Gurion’s second-in-command and the Jewish community’s ‘foreign minister’, who in a 1938 lecture himself described a land purchase accompanied by ‘transfer of population’.
Benny Morris — Israeli ‘new historian’ whose archive-based work Pappe credits with disproving ‘voluntary flight’ while charging him with a very partial picture that ignored atrocities and pre-15 May 1948 expulsions.
Nur Masalha — Scholar whose Expulsion of the Palestinians shows, in Pappe’s recap, how deeply rooted the concept of transfer was in Zionist political thought.
Simcha Flapan — Historian Pappe quotes among the first to note Plan Dalet’s significance, and on how the Jewish leadership would itself have rejected the UNSCOP map had the Palestinians accepted it.
Yehoshafat Harkabi — Israeli chief of military intelligence and Arabist whose Arab Attitudes to Israel Said calls canonical, whose 1967 Position of Israel supplies Chapter Three’s cultural-superiority passage, and whom Said’s notes call the principal propagandist in Israel against everything Arab and especially Palestinian.
Arik Sharon — General and minister of agriculture to whom Begin left the post-Camp David settlements project, quoted by Said from Ma’ariv, January 26, 1979, on roads and military infrastructure in the West Bank.
Gush Emunim — The settler movement Said names as the vanguard of the growing Israeli settler population in the West Bank after Camp David.
Zeev Schiff — Israeli journalist whose Ha’aretz articles of January 14 and 16, 1979, Said quotes at length on Israeli security control under the Camp David autonomy.
Daniel P. Moynihan — U.S. Ambassador who vetoed the January 22, 1976 Security Council resolution on Palestinian self-determination the PLO had supported, in Said’s account.
George Ball — Establishment figure whose New York Times Op-Ed of April 1, 1979, Said takes to be making the point that serious discussion of the Palestinians is always postponed.
General Eytan — Israeli chief of staff quoted by Said from Yediot Aharonot, January 19, 1979, on the Arabs of the Galilee as engaged in a process of conquest.
Harold H. Saunders — Assistant Secretary of State whose June 12, 1978 testimony Said calls the clearest statement of current U.S. policy, organized around peace and moderation.
Jimmy Carter — President of the United States, first president to speak seriously of the Palestinian people, who signed the Egyptian-Israeli treaty on March 26, 1979, in Said’s account.
Anwar al-Sadat — President of Egypt, whose program Said treats as entirely Egyptian: attacking Israel’s monopoly of U.S. support rather than fighting Israel directly.
Camp David Accords — The agreements whose Palestinian autonomy plan Said calls an overt plan to put the Palestinians under Israeli military authority forever in a Bantustan.
Day of the Land — March 30, 1976, the means by which the Palestinians inside Israel welcomed the PLO as their representative, in Said’s account.
Palestinian National Council — The Palestinian parliament in exile, to which the PLO and the National Fund are accountable, whose Cairo deliberations of spring 1977 Said joined.
Karameh — The Jordan town whose March 1968 battle was the first post-1967 Israeli-Palestinian battle and the beginning of the quickest Palestinian growth, in Said’s account.
Yasir Arafat — Leader of Fateh and the PLO, the first Palestinian leader to grasp all the major factors affecting the Palestinians and to hold sway over the detail of Palestinian life, in Said’s account.
Fateh — The largest Palestinian grouping, basically Nasserite and pragmatic, which dominates the PLO as a majority group speaking for the Palestinian Question, in Said’s account.
Nagib Mahfouz — The leading Arab novelist, who made the Palestinian emergence the climax of his 1973 novel Love in the Rain, in Said’s account.
Mahmoud Darwish — Palestinian poet of Identity Card, the poem Said calls the closest thing to a Palestinian national poem.
Emile Habibi — Palestinian writer in Haifa and longtime Knesset member, whose ironic epistolary novel Said sets beside Kanafani’s work.
Albert Hourani — Historian quoted by Said for the Middle Eastern minorities as closed communities, each a world sufficient to its members.
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod — Palestinian thinker whose analysis (accommodation, rejection, then revolution and hope) Said presents as the best overview of the Palestinian segments together.
Israel Koenig — Northern district commissioner whose secret 1976 Koenig Report on handling the Arabs in Israel Said quotes at length.
Joseph Weitz — Director of the Jewish National Land Fund from 1932, whose 1940 diary entry for transfer of all the Arabs Said quotes as the voice of the Zionist consensus.
Koenig Report — Israel Koenig’s secret 1976 report to Prime Minister Rabin on handling the Arabs in Israel, leaked to Al-Hamishmar on September 7, 1976.
Tawfiq Zayyad — Palestinian poet of the remnant community whose Baqun (We Shall Remain) expresses staying on the land.
UNRWA — The UN agency for Palestinian refugees whose nonpolitical paternalism, for Said, held survival just short of political independence.
Usrat al-Ard — Palestinian nationalist group inside Israel (founded 1958, family of the land), the first Palestinian Arab group to call for a separate Palestinian state, in Said’s account.
Dalet Plan — The 1948 Zionist plan, as the Kimches describe it, to capture strategic heights and fill the British vacuum with a contiguous Jewish-held area.
Kafr Kassim — Village where, in Said’s account, 49 unarmed Arab peasants were shot by the frontier guard after a sudden curfew in October 1956.
Men in the Sun — Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Rijal fil Shams (fiction), whose opening scene Said quotes in his own translation.
Amos Elon — Israeli author of a recent book about the Israelis, quoted by Said for the settlers’ blindness toward the Arabs and the purpose of Avoda Ivrit.
Edmund Wilson — American man of letters whose Israel diary in Black, Red, Blond and Olive is Said’s second case of liberal identification with Zionism.
Edward Said — Palestinian author of The Question of Palestine (1979).
Deir Yassin — Arab village, site of the April 1948 massacre for which Begin admits responsibility in The Revolt, as Said presents it.
Farid Haddad — Palestinian doctor memorialised in Said’s dedication, tortured to death in prison in 1961.
General Gur — Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, whose May 1978 Al-Hamishmar interview on the invasion of Lebanon Said quotes in his Introduction.
George Eliot — English novelist whose Daniel Deronda (1876) Said reads as an assenting Gentile legitimation of Zionism that takes no account of Palestine’s inhabitants.
George Antonius — Author of The Arab Awakening, cited by Sayegh for the 1919 documents and named by Said as the finest Arab study of the struggle for independence.
Hannah Arendt — Writer quoted by Said on the solution of the Jewish question producing a new category of refugees, the Arabs.
Israel Shahak — Israeli professor quoted by Said for the reckoning of almost four hundred Arab villages destroyed completely.
Israeli League of Human Rights — Israeli body whose diffused information on abuses against Arabs, documented from Israeli journals, never saw the light of day in the United States, in Said’s account.
Israel Zangwill — Zionist writer who formulated the slogan of a land without people, for a people without land, in Said’s account.
Kibbutz — The collective settlement institution whose celebratory accounts, for Said, repress the Arab reality of confiscated land and excluded membership.
Alphonse de Lamartine — French writer whose 1833 Résumé politique cancelled Palestine’s resident Arabs by a future colonial wish, in Said’s reading.
Moshe Dayan — Israeli leader whose April 1969 remarks state that Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages that are not there either.
Moses Hess — Early Zionist idealist whose Rome and Jerusalem (1862) shares Eliot’s language of restoration, French patronage and civilising mediation.
Palestine Exploration Fund — British body whose scientific quarterly reports carried accounts of Palestine’s fertility and habitation into the late nineteenth century.
Rashid Hussein — Palestinian poet memorialised in Said’s dedication, who left Israel in 1966 and died in the United States in 1977.
Reinhold Niebuhr — American theologian, Said’s first case of liberal identification with Zionism, for his 1947 partition letter and 1946 Spectator article.
Sabri Jiryis — Author of The Arabs in Israel, invoked by Said on the Emergency Defense Regulations’ abuses.
Saul Bellow — Novelist whose To Jerusalem and Back rests on an Israeli expert’s representation of the Arabs, in Said’s account.
Salman Abu Sitta — Compiler of the Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine (Section V of his The Palestinian Nakba 1948) and author of the Atlas of the Nakbah (2005).
Sylvain Lévi — French Orientalist who spoke for the Zionist delegation in 1919 and conceded incoming Jews would tend to dispossess Palestine’s Arabs.
1936-39 Revolt in Palestine — The revolt of April 1936 to September 1939, its phases, losses and consequences in Kanafani’s analysis.
1939 London Round Table Conference — The February 1939 London conference at which, in Kanafani’s account, the Arab regimes imposed their will on the Palestinians a second time.
Abd al-Rahim al-Hajj Muhammad — Local commander of poor peasant origin whose killing in March 1939 was a crushing blow to the revolt.
Abd al-Rahim Mahmud — Nationalist poet of the early 1930s whose 1935 poem to Amir Saud became part of the revolutionary heritage.
Abu Salma — Poet (Abd al-Karim al-Karmi) who chronicled the 1936 revolt and its abandonment by the Arab kings in verse.
Acre — Kanafani’s birthplace, and the site of the prison where 148 revolt prisoners were hanged, in the booklet’s figure.
Amin al-Hussaini — Hajj Amin al-Hussaini, the Mufti, head of the Arab Higher Committee and of the feudal-clerical leadership.
Amir Abdullah — Amir of Transjordan, the leading figure of the surrounding Arab regimes that mediated the revolt’s end.
Andrews — British District Commissioner of Galilee, whose assassination in Nazareth in September 1937 restarted the revolt.
Arab Executive Committee — The national body whose dissolution in August 1934 left six party groupings on the eve of the revolt.
Arab Higher Committee — The committee formed on 25 April 1936 which rode, directed and called off the 1936 strike.
Balfour Declaration — The British declaration answered by Palestinian poets from the month it was issued onward.
Chaim Weizmann — Zionist leader who stated the complete similarity of Zionist and British interests in Palestine.
Charles Orde Wingate — British officer sent to Haifa in 1937 to form the nuclei of Zionist striking forces.
David Ben-Gurion — Zionist leader of the no alternative mobilisation, and a source on the Haganah’s British-backed training framework.
First Zionist Congress — The Basel congress of August 1897 under Herzl which organised Zionist colonisation and stated its aim of a home in Palestine secured by public law.
Fayez Sayegh — Palestinian intellectual and diplomat (1922-1980), author of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965), founder of the PLO Research Center, and presenter of Resolution 3379 in 1975.
Fauzi al-Qawuqji — The most prominent of the outside nationalist officers who entered Palestine in 1936 and declared himself commander in chief.
General Syrian Congress — The congress of elected representatives of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria whose unanimous 2 July 1919 resolution opposed Zionist pretensions and migration.
Gaza — Setting of Kanafani’s short story Letter From Gaza (fiction): the narrator’s home town, which in the story he refuses to leave after visiting Nadia.
Ghassan Kanafani — Palestinian writer and PFLP spokesman (1936-1972), author of the essay and the story in the first source.
Haganah — The Zionist armed force built up under British supervision during the revolt.
Haifa — Port city central to the Arab labour movement, Qassam’s organising, and the revolt’s military build-up.
Herbert Samuel — The Zionist Jew, in Sayegh’s wording, appointed by Britain as its first High Commissioner in Palestine.
Histadrut — The Jewish labour federation that dominated the Jewish labour movement and enforced Jewish labour only.
Ibrahim Tuqan — Nationalist poet who exposed the land-selling leadership in verse from 1929.
Irgun — Underground Zionist organisation whose existence, in Sayegh’s account, Britain condoned, and which later turned against the British.
Israel — The state Sayegh calls the Zionist settler-state, created in 1948 and characterised by racism, violence and territorial expansion.
Independence Party — Party of Auni Abd al-Hadi, founded in 1932, the left pole of the national leadership.
Izz al-Din al-Qassam — Syrian-born organiser in Haifa whose November 1935 movement Kanafani treats as the revolt’s real start.
Jewish National Fund — Zionist colonisation fund established in 1901, and one of the enforcers of Jewish labor only in Sayegh’s account.
Jaffa — Port city central to the Arab labour movement, 1936 demolitions, and the revolt’s outbreak.
Jewish Agency — Zionist executive that appointed the Colony Police groups’ seconds in command and raised the railway defence.
King-Crane Commission — The American commission which reported on 29 August 1919 that nearly nine-tenths of Palestine’s population were emphatically against the entire Zionist program.
Michel Mitri — Jaffa Arab workers’ federation president assassinated by the Mufti’s group in the early 1930s.
Maxime Rodinson — Writer quoted by Said tying Zionist indifference to the natives to European supremacy, and the imperialist connection to Palestine being inhabited by another people.
Menachem Begin — Israeli premier from May 1977, former Irgun head, whose admitted Deir Yassin terrorism Said presents as transmuted into statesmanship by the liberal consensus.
National Defence Party — Raghib al-Nashashibi’s party, the leadership’s right wing and Transjordan’s legal representative in the movement.
Nuri al-Said — Iraqi statesman who mediated in 1936 and spoke at London in 1939 as a declared friend of Britain.
Palestine Liberation Organization — The organisation created in 1964 by which, in Sayegh’s account, the Palestinian people reasserted its corporate personality and seized the initiative for liberation.
Palestine Land Society — The society that publishes Salman Abu Sitta’s Nakba documentation, including The Palestinian Nakba 1948 and the Atlas of the Nakbah (2005).
Palmach — The mobile Zionist striking forces which, in Sayegh’s account, Britain trained in Palestine.
Palestine Communist Party — The party whose failure to Arabise left the mass movement to the feudal-clerical leadership.
Peel Commission — The Royal Commission whose 7 July 1937 report recommended partition and a Jewish state.
Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine — The Democratic Front (DPF), an offshoot of the PFLP and a principal rival of Fateh in Said’s account, born in 1969 and the first to articulate the transitional program the PLO adopted in 1974.
Quasi-Police Force — The British-backed Zionist police forces (Quasi-Police Force, then Colony Police) that trained the Haganah.
Raghib al-Nashashibi — Head of the National Defence Party and the leading figure of the leadership’s right wing.
Stern Group — Underground Zionist organisation whose existence, in Sayegh’s account, Britain condoned, and which later turned against the British.
Sami Taha — Haifa Arab workers’ federation president assassinated by the Mufti’s men on 12 September 1947.
UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 — The 10 November 1975 resolution determining Zionism as a form of racism, jointly authored and presented by Fayez Sayegh and revoked in 1991.
Theodor Herzl — Quoted in the essay from his Selected Works on seizing land and evacuating the poor inhabitants.
Transjordan — Neighbouring state whose regime mediated the revolt’s end, suppressed its own support movement, and handed over Abu Durrar in 1939.
World Zionist Organization — The quasi-state apparatus established at Basel in 1897 to supervise Zionist colonisation, later recognised by Britain as a representative Jewish Agency.
Wadi al-Bustani — Lebanese-born poet in Palestine who first warned against the Balfour Declaration and replied to al-Risafi in verse.
Concepts
Remainers — Manna’s subject: the Palestinians who were not expelled in 1948 or who returned, 156,000 by the summer 1949 consensus figure, whose struggle to remain ran to 1956 and beyond.
Non-expulsion — Manna’s term for the cases in which Palestinians were allowed to remain in northern Palestine, which he argues were the result of high-level Israeli orders and policy, not chance.
Present Absentees — The label for Palestinians expelled from their villages in 1948 who remained inside Israel as internal refugees, barred from returning to their houses and lands, in Manna’s account.
Infiltrators — The Israeli label for Palestinian refugees who crossed back to their homes after 1948, fought through arrest, military courts and renewed expulsion, in Manna’s Chapter 4 account.
Right of Return — The refugees’ right acknowledged in Resolution 194, centred in Palestinian nationalism and excluded by Israel’s peace axioms as a ‘non-starter’, in Pappe’s account.
Fortress Israel — Pappe’s term for the Zionist project as a ‘white’ fortress in a ‘black’ world, defended by majority-at-all-costs, walls and refusal of return.
Ethnic Cleansing — The concept at the centre of Pappe’s book: rendering a mixed country homogeneous by expelling a group, turning them into refugees and demolishing their homes, then erasing them from history — a crime against humanity of which Palestine in 1948 is, he argues, a clear-cut case.
Memoricide — Pappe’s term for the erasure of the Nakba’s memory: Hebraized renaming and the JNF’s forests and parks over the destroyed villages, whose signs deny Palestinians ever lived there.
Nakba — The Palestinian term for the catastrophe of 1948, which in Pappe’s account leaves out the actor and may thereby have contributed to the denial of the ethnic cleansing.
Transfer — The Zionist concept of removing Palestine’s Arab population from the country, deeply rooted in Zionist thought from Herzl through Motzkin, Ben-Gurion, Weitz and Sharett, in Pappe’s account following Masalha.
Bitachon — Security, the meta-term Ben-Gurion made an obsession overshadowing all other issues, used in Pappe’s account to cover and justify core policies including the policy against the Palestinian population.
Secular Democratic State — The PLO’s idea of a secular, democratic state in Palestine for Muslims, Christians and Jews, which Said calls the true novelty and revolutionary force of the Palestinian movement.
Judaization — The policy of converting Arab land and areas into Jewish ones, Judaizing territory coterminously with de-Arabizing it, in Said’s account.
Self-determination — The fundamental right at the centre of Said’s Chapter Three, made difficult by exile and dispersion because it requires a clearly seen self to determine.
Mission civilisatrice — The ethos of a European civilising mission to which, for Said, both Balfour’s imperial vision and the Zionist vision belong.
Orientalism — The West’s tradition of representing the Orient, Islam and the Arabs, on which Zionism drew for its view of the Palestinians, in Said’s account.
Representation — Said’s name for Zionism’s speaking for Palestine and the Palestinians, blocking Palestinian self-representation, and the liberal West’s acceptance of mediated Arabs.
Arabisation — The Palestine Communist Party’s unachieved programme of becoming a party of the Palestinian Arab masses.
Apartheid — Sayegh’s comparison term for the discrimination practised against the Arabs who remained in the settler-state after 1948.
Eretz Israel — The name Zionists give, in Sayegh’s account, to all of Palestine emptied of its Arabs, whose minimum 1919 definition covers about double the settler-state’s area.
Feudal-Clerical Leadership — Kanafani’s first enemy: the semi-feudal, semi-religious leadership heading the national movement until 1948.
Imperialism — British imperialism in Palestine, and imperialism as a worldwide colonising body in Kanafani’s thought.
Jewish Labour Only — The slogan and policy excluding Arab labour (and goods) from the settler economy.
Liberation of Palestine — The telos of Sayegh’s five-stage Palestinian response, seized as an initiative with the creation of the PLO in 1964.
Peasant Revolt — Kanafani’s characterisation of the 1936-39 revolt in substance and leadership.
Racial Self-Segregation — The first corollary of Zionist racial identification in Sayegh: separation from non-Jewish societies and regrouping alone in Palestine.
Racism — In Sayegh, a congenial, essential and permanent trait of the settler-state, aiming in Palestine at racial elimination rather than hierarchical coexistence.
Resistance Poetry — The poetry and popular poetry that mobilised the villages and attacked the land-selling leadership.
Settler Colonialism — The transformation of the Mandate into Zionist settler colonialism, climaxing in the mid-1930s.
Territorial Expansion — The settler-state’s third characteristic and Zionism’s unfinished business in Sayegh: expansion towards all of Eretz Israel.
Surrounding Arab Regimes — Kanafani’s second enemy: the regimes of the surrounding Arab states, which curbed and ended the revolt.
Zionism — The settler movement allied with British imperialism, as Kanafani presents it.