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Remainers

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aliasesthose who remained, al-baqun

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Summary

Manna’s subject term for the Palestinians who were not expelled in 1948, or who returned to their homes and towns, and who became the Palestinian minority inside Israel — the other face of the refugee problem, absent from most studies of the Nakba (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.25).

Details

  • The consensus figure Manna gives for those who remained is 156,000, estimated in the summer of 1949 from Israeli statistics after the armistice agreements; the initial nucleus registered in the first census in November 1948 was 69,000, the largest bloc being Nazareth and twenty villages in its district (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.30-31). The Foreword’s differing figures (120,000 in the Galilee / in Israel) are recorded as an open question on the source page.

  • The vast majority were peasants (fellahin) who lost the Palestinian city and had to adapt on their own to the new rulers’ language and laws (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.30).

  • The majority were, in Manna’s account, neither collaborators nor communists, but steadfast people who preferred living under occupation in their homeland to exile in refugee camps (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.29).

  • Their struggle to remain continued after the war: foiling expulsion attempts, then devising modes of conduct — citizenship and blue identity cards, Supreme Court petitions, Knesset voting — to adapt to eviction, repression and permanent surveillance under military rule until 1956 at least (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.28, 42).

  • Chapter 2’s conclusion (part 3) revises the count: on the eve of the January 1949 elections the Arabs in the Jewish state numbered 125,000, about 100,000 of them in Haifa and the Galilee, and Manna states on those numbers that the official figure of 156,000 quoted before the Triangle’s transfer is inaccurate (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.111). The Introduction’s 156,000 summer-1949 consensus figure stands on the source page under Open questions against this passage.

  • Why so many Galileans remained, in Chapter 2’s full account, combined geography, demographic composition, the prior Druze agreements and fear of international reaction with the residents’ own resistance — turning back on the mountain paths after expulsion orders, enlisting Druze neighbours and church pressure, and having learned from the prohibited return of those expelled earlier in the war (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.111-112).

  • The pervasive sentiment among those who remained, Chapter 3’s opening adds, was of being “like orphans who could only hope for scraps from the table”, from which only a small discordant minority — collaborators since the 1930s, and the Arab communists — was excepted (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.116-117).

  • The Epilogue (part 8) gives the term its arc: in 1956 the remainers escaped the planned “second round” of expulsion under the fog of war — the Kafr Kassim villages did not contemplate leaving, having learned that dying at home was preferable to the humiliating life of refugees — and the period after the Sinai War is where Manna locates the transition from the struggle for survival to rebuilding a collective identity, through Arab student activism, the 1957 communist–nationalist rapprochement, the 1 May 1958 Nazareth confrontations and the Arab Front (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.291-292, 295-297).

Nakba and Survival, Adel Manna, Non-expulsion, Present Absentees, Nakba

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