Summary
The Israeli legal-administrative label, as Manna uses it, for Palestinians expelled from their villages in 1948 who remained inside the country as internal refugees and have not been allowed to return to their houses and lands (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.22, 41).
Details
-
Manna learned the details of their suffering from his wife’s parents, ‘Ali and Fatima (Shrayda) Hulayhel of ‘Akbara near Safad, expelled from Qadditha in 1948 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.22).
-
The thousands evicted from the area along the Lebanese border were considered the present absentees in Israel’s post-war classifications (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.41).
-
Hillel Cohen devoted his master’s thesis to their study (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.39).
-
Manna likens the remainers’ stories to their situation: present but absent (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.20).
-
Chapter 4 (part 4) states Israel banned the expellees categorised as present absentees from returning to their towns and villages, as it banned refugees abroad (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.153).
-
Chapter 5 (part 5) opens by extending the category to the The Triangle and Jaffa: by refusing villagers permission to return to depopulated villages the state opened opportunities to take their lands and settle Jews in their place, with Ilabun, ‘Illut and Kufr Qari’ the three villages that escaped that fate (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.186).
-
Sha’b is Manna’s hardest case: most of its expellees who took refuge in neighbouring villages became present absentees and did not succeed in returning in the 1950s, and many later allowed back were forced to rent their own lands from the state land office (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.173-174).
-
Chapter 5 (part 6) quantifies the category: about 20,000 Palestinians who remained in the Galilee lived a short distance from homes they could not return to; Nazareth alone held about 5,000 migrants at the end of 1948, about half of them expellees from Haifa, Tiberias, Bisan, ‘Akka and Shafa ‘Amr, and Sami Juraysi’s report recorded some 600 refugees from ‘Illut, al-Mujaydil and Um Qubi at the Salesian orphanage, where “there was nothing to separate families except for a string or a rope or a piece of wood.” City returns were relatively cost-free for the state; village returns were refused because settlers wanted the land (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.199).
-
The same section gives the type cases: Iqrit and Kfar Bir’im, evacuated on false promises of return within weeks, whose May 1951 Supreme Court case failed and whose houses were torn down in 1953, in Manna’s account; Al-Ghabisiyya, which won a return ruling on 30 November 1951 and was re-expelled under a closed-military-area declaration; Qadditha, whose Hulayhel clan was resettled in al-Ja’una and then ‘Akbara so its land stayed in state hands; and al-Khisas, whose loyalist inhabitants were expelled in June 1949 and kept out by retroactive expulsion orders in 1952 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.200-204).
-
Makdisi records a new application of the Absentee Property Law in Jerusalem: Palestinians living outside the expanded city became liable to be stripped of land “inside” it as “absentees” even when absent only because the wall was built between them and their land; some estimates suggest Israel intended to claim half the land “inside” Jerusalem through this mechanism (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.114).
Related pages
Nakba and Survival, Remainers, Hillel Cohen, Iqrit, kfar-birim