Summary
Majd al-Krum diarist, named Muhammad Haydar and known as Abu Jamil, whose diaries document events in the village in 1950–51 — army operations, arrests, deportations and returnees killed — including names absent from military documents, and which Manna uses as a documentary source, in Manna’s account (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.166-168).
Details
- Searching the diaries of Muhammad Haydar (Abu Jamil), Manna found he had recorded the news of the death of Mariam, the wife of ‘Ali Sa’id Manna’, on the main road in the village on 24 June 1951, and her burial the next day; from that entry, aligned with Muhammad Sa’id Qaddah’s memory of his own arrival, Manna determined that his family’s return from Lebanon was in mid-July 1951 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.166-167).
- Abu Jamil’s diaries mention many cases where returnees, classed as infiltrators, in the villages were arrested and deported by the authorities to Lebanon during 1950–51; others paid with their lives for attempting to return to live in their homes or just to visit relatives — among them, as the diaries record, Husayn Khalil Qaddah, killed near the border, news of which reached Majd al-Krum on 15 January 1950, and Sa’id Rafi’ and his brother Mustafa, shot on 31 October 1950 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.167).
- His diaries also carry the two 28 May mine reports a page apart in Manna’s text — an unnamed Sha’b refugee killed and two others wounded (PDF p.167), and Muhammad Hikma killed and two others wounded by a mine (PDF p.168) — which the text does not say are the same incident; see Open questions on the source page.
- Abu Jamil’s diaries, which document events in the village including army operations, mention the names of many of the men and women expelled that are absent from military documents, and report a unique case in which the army imposed a curfew on Majd al-Krum for seven consecutive days and nights, not allowing anyone to enter or leave, to pressure the inhabitants to turn in their relatives instead of hiding them (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.168).