Summary
Lawyer who returned to Haifa by plane on 10 August 1948 and became a pillar of Maki’s public activities defending Palestinian survivors’ rights, in Manna’s account (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.138).
Details
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Naqqara returned by plane via Nicosia, unlike most returning League comrades who returned by land from Lebanon in summer and fall 1948 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.138).
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He played an important role in the defence of the rights of the Palestinian survivors in Haifa and the Galilee after the Nakba (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.138).
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At the beginning of summer 1951 Naqqara brought a central-court case on behalf of forty-eight residents of Majd al-Krum; his success set the precedent by which dozens of expellees returned from Lebanon and received identity cards, among them Muhammad ‘Ali Sa’id Qaddah and, indirectly, Manna’s own family (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.166-167).
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Among Naqqara’s Haifa papers Manna found the unique file of Sa’id Husayn ‘Abbas of Sha’b — a shot and robbed goatherd who lived in a cave, was twice arrested and exiled, handed in two found rifles, and appealed for a permanent residence permit — its file cover indicating preparations for a court case whose remaining papers Manna could not locate (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.172-173).
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In Chapter 6’s opening he is named, with Elias Kusa, one of the two most prominent of the fewer than a dozen Arab lawyers in Haifa and the Galilee up to the mid-1950s (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.223); with Kusa he volunteered for Shaykh ‘Atiya’s Supreme Court case over the al-Khisas expulsion (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.203).
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Chapter 6’s remainder makes him the pioneer of the Supreme Court identity-card cases: his November 1950 case for seventy al-Bi’na plaintiffs won a provisional order compelling the interior ministry to submit within fifteen days “reasons why it had not delivered identity cards to all those who had been registered in the population survey”, and his wins — reported as twenty-two for Majd al-Krum, al-Bi’na and Dayr al-Asad villagers — encouraged Galilee remainers to litigate for citizenship cards (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.245).
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With Waxman he won Salam Ahmad Kiwan’s case (decided 29 July 1953), which turned on “whether the plaintiff had been expelled illegally” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.249-250).
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His own passport application of 19 November 1952 was rejected over his August 1948 entry, although he held a civil identity card from 16 January 1949 and had run in Haifa’s November 1950 municipal elections; the Supreme Court accepted his election on 16 October 1953 on the basis of the Haifa central court’s decision (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.239).