Summary
Palestinian historian from Majd al-Krum in the Galilee, author of Nakba and Survival (Arabic 2016, Hebrew 2017, English 2022), a history of the Palestinians who remained in Haifa and the Galilee in 1948–1956 built from oral testimony, family documents and archives in three languages (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.10, 13).
Details
- Manna was a small child in Majd al-Krum in 1948: his family was expelled two months after the village massacre, lived more than two years in Ayn al-Hilwa camp in Lebanon, and returned by sea in the summer of 1951 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.12, 15).
- He first heard his father’s counter-narrative of 1948 in the spring of 1958, after singing in his school’s tenth-anniversary Independence Day festivities; his father called that day istihlal (occupation), not istiqlal (independence) (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.13-14).
- In June 1984 he published a paragraph of the Majd al-Krum story in Haaretz; aggressive attacks from Jewish readers effectively silenced his interest for years, and he turned to Ottoman Palestine history and completed his doctorate at Hebrew University, returning to the Nakba only in 1998 for a fiftieth-anniversary article in al-Karmel encouraged by Mahmoud Darwish (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.12-13, 18).
- His method, as he states it, is microhistory set in a macro context, and he defends personal and family memory, used with professional caution, as a source other researchers cannot easily reproduce (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.19, 28).
- For Nakba and Survival he collected the testimonies of 120 people who lived through the Nakba and the subsequent years in Haifa and the Galilee (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.45).
Related pages
Nakba and Survival, Majd al-Krum, Ayn al-Hilwa, Nakba, Remainers