Haifa

Summary

Port city that recurs throughout Kanafani’s account: a centre of the Arab labour movement and of Izz al-Din al-Qassam’s organising, a place where Arab industry and work were squeezed out before 1936, and a military prize during the revolt, with its harbour expanded for the Zionist economy and British officers and Zionist forces based there.

Details

• The Arab labour federations in Haifa and Jaffa fell under the control of reactionary leaderships as the influence of Arab progressive forces in them diminished (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.6 / printed p.10-11).

• On one occasion the Jewish community forced a Palestinian Arab contractor and his workers to leave their work in the Brodski building in Haifa; the number of Palestinian Arab soap factories in Haifa fell from 12 in 1929 to four in 1935, and their export value fell from PL 206,659 in 1930 to PL 79,311 in 1935 (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.8 / printed p.14-15).

• Sami Taha, a trade unionist and president of the Federation of Arab Workers in Haifa, was assassinated years after Michel Mitri; Kanafani dates the killing, by the Mufti’s men, to 12 September 1947 (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.9 / printed p.17; PDF p.31 / printed p.60-61).

• Haifa’s magazine Karmel published Wadi al-Bustani’s January 1920 reply poem to Ma’ruf Al-Risafi’s poem for the High Commissioner (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.15 / printed p.28-29).

• Celebrations of the Prophet’s Birthday were turned into nationalist rallies under the direction of the Mufti of Haifa and the poet Wadi al-Bustani (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.17 / printed p.32-33).

• Al-Kayyali’s candidate for the first spark of the revolt is an armed band around a Haifa school built with Jewish-only labour in February 1936 (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.18 / printed p.35).

• Al-Qassam was based in Haifa from 1921, building his secret groups there, and after his death in November 1935 his funeral in Haifa was attended by very large crowds (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.19-20 / printed p.37-39).

• During the revolt the main road from Haifa to Tel-Aviv was paved and Haifa harbour was expanded and deepened, works Kanafani counts among the Zionist economy’s gains (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.29 / printed p.56-57).

• Charles Orde Wingate was sent to Haifa in autumn 1937 to form the nuclei of Zionist striking forces (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.30 / printed p.58-59).

• Zionist forces defended the Haifa-Ludd railway, 434 men in spring 1938 and 800 six months later, the rise credited to the Jewish Agency, and guarded the Kirkuk-Haifa oil pipeline (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.30 / printed p.58-59).

• In Pappe, Haifa was chosen as the first urban target of the December 1947 intimidation campaign: from the morning after Resolution 181 its 75,000 Palestinians were shelled and sniped from the Jewish neighbourhoods above them, and subjected to explosive barrels, ignited oil-and-fuel and booby-trapped cars by Hagana and Irgun units (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.85-86).

• The Irgun bomb at the Iraqi Petroleum Company refinery and the Palestinian workers’ riot killing thirty-nine Jewish workers are presented by Pappe as part of, and a reaction within, that terror campaign; the same night, 31 December 1947, Wadi Rushmiyya was expelled and blown up, and in January Hawassa, about 5,000 people, was attacked and expelled (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.86-87).

• About 15,000 of Haifa’s Palestinian elite left at this time; Pappe notes their departure ruined local trade and commerce (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.89).

• In Pappe’s Chapter Five, Haifa’s de-Arabisation culminated on 21-22 April 1948: the December terror had driven 15,000-20,000 of the elite out, Major General Hugh Stockwell removed the British buffer and advised the Palestinian leaders to leave, and the Carmeli Brigade under Mordechai Maklef’s orders — “Kill any Arab you encounter” — mortared the crowds gathered at the old marketplace by the port, driving the people into boats that in many cases overturned and sank (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.122-126).

• Fifteen villages of the Haifa sub-district are listed by Pappe as wiped off the map in quick succession in April 1948 (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.139-140).

• Pappe calls leaving Haifa, the country’s only major port, in Jewish control under the UN plan “yet another manifestation of the unfair deal the Palestinians were offered” in the UN peace proposal (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.122-123).

• On 1 July 1948 the Israeli military commander ordered the leaders of the 3-5,000 Palestinians left in Haifa to move into the single, crammed quarter of Wadi Nisnas by 5 July 1948, at their own cost; Tawfiq Tubi protested and Bulus Farah shouted ‘This is racism’ and called the move ‘ghettoising the Palestinians in Haifa’ (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.242-243).

• In Wadi Nisnas the confined community continued to be robbed and abused, mostly by Irgun and Stern Gang members, with the Haganah also taking part; Ben-Gurion condemned the behaviour in his diary but did nothing to stop it (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.243-244).

• Haifa also saw the first search-and-arrest operation, a few weeks after the city was occupied, run from an interrogation headquarters at 11 Daniel Street in the Hadar neighbourhood, targeting ‘returnees’ and undefined ‘suspicious Arabs’ (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.235-236).

• Sitta’s register lists Haifa (Arab) at S 295: dated 20-04-48, notes “21/4-1/5.IZL.Rem5000”, Arab Population 48 of 72,848 on 54,305 dunums, with a Massacres M mark, 187,425 UNRWA-registered refugees — the largest UNRWA figure for a single locality in the register — and a Total Refugees est 1998 of 447,364; the Haifa district subtotal is 121,196 people and 636,421 dunums (The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, PDF p.9-10).

• In Manna, Haifa is with the Galilee the centre of the Remainers: the 69,000 registered in the November 1948 census in Haifa and the Galilee were the largest segment the census proved had not been expelled, and dozens of communists and their families were allowed to return to Haifa and the Galilee in the summer of 1948 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.26, 31).

• Manna’s grandmother Zahra, a year after the Nakba, went to work washing clothes and cleaning houses of Jews in Haifa (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.20).

• In Manna’s Chapter 1 (part 2), the 30 December 1947 Irgun bombing of Arab workers at the oil refinery gate, the Arab workers’ retaliation killing a larger number of Jewish workers, and the Palmach revenge attack that night on Balad al-Shaykh and Hawwasa began Haifa’s unravelling; the National Committee under Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim failed to stem departures, and tens of thousands left before the city’s fall on 22 April 1948 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.56-58).

• Elias Kusa, of the Arab delegation to General Hugh Stockwell on 22 April, recorded that the mayor’s circular urging people not to leave had no effect because Haganah fighters were raining bullets and grenades on the Arab quarters and using force to push families to the port (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.62).

• Bulus Farah’s memoirs, in Manna’s account, tell how he reopened his bookstore with Jewish friends’ help but was chased from his al-Anbiya’ Street home, becoming part of the minority pushed into the Wadi al-Nisnas quarter, soon known as the ghetto (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.63).

• Manna also records, parenthetically, that the Hebrew press on 26 May 2015 published news of the auction of a letter from Ben-Gurion to Abba Hushi urging him to prevent the return of Arabs to Haifa (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.62).

• In Manna’s Chapter 3 (part 4), Haifa became, with Nazareth, a League stronghold of no more than one hundred veteran comrades in fall 1948 after permitted returns; the unity conference that merged the League into Maki was held at Haifa’s Mayo movie theatre on 22-23 October 1948 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.138, 141).

Related pages

The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Jaffa, Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Sami Taha, Charles Orde Wingate, Jewish Agency, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine