Summary
Haifa-born Mapam activist and MK (1923–1994), one of the first Arabs to study engineering at the Technion, who returned from refugee exile in 1949, edited Mapam’s al-Mirsad, and was dropped by his party after openly criticising its Zionist contradictions — in Manna’s account the able orator whose fate shows why Mapam never broadened its Arab base (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.282-283).
Details
- Bastuni (1923–1994) was born in Tirat Haifa and was one of the first Arabs to study at the institute of engineering (the Technion) in 1947; in the spring of 1949 he left his house and city, like tens of thousands of Arabs, and became a refugee in Lebanon and Syria, but his older brother Muhammad, who remained in Haifa, encouraged him to return and paved the way through his Jewish acquaintances (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.282).
- Back in Haifa he became one of Mapam’s most prominent Arab activists and was elected to the second Knesset (1951), though his party’s success with Arab voters was weak; in September 1951 the party issued the magazine al-Mirsad, which criticised Mapai and Maki and was written mostly by Jews, except for Bastuni and a few Arab comrades (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.282). With Tubi and Emile Habibi, he was one of the educated young leftist MKs with clear political positions whom Manna contrasts with the Mapai-slate parliamentarians (PDF p.272).
- After his election and al-Mirsad’s publication he attracted Arab youth to Mapam, and the party announced after the 1955 election about 6,000 Arab votes, double its earlier figure — but Bastuni himself lost his seat in 1955 and was not renominated, Yusif Khamis taking his place (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.282-283).
- Manna explains the dropping by Bastuni’s open criticism of Mapam’s socialist-Zionist contradictions — Jewish-Arab equality preached while the party established kibbutzim on depopulated Arab villages’ lands, including Kufr Bir’im and Sa’sa’ — beginning with the party’s refusal to open membership to Arab citizens: “We cannot show the generations the equality of peoples unless we serve as examples of that.” Radical leftists in Mapam found the criticism problematic, and he was replaced (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.282-283).
- In an earlier episode recorded in part 7, Bastuni told a Mapam secretariat meeting on 14 June 1949 that the party’s Arab work was failing (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.264).