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Tawfiq Tubi

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aliasesTawfiq Tubi

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Summary

Arab communist leader in Haifa who, in Manna’s Chapter 3, co-led the National Liberation League into Maki, coordinated with Labor Zionists during Haifa’s fall, and became a Knesset member in January 1949 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.126, 146).

Details

  • With Fu’ad Nassar and Emile Habibi, Tubi led the League’s pro-partition camp; the supporters held their convention in Nazareth in February 1948 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.126).

  • Tubi oversaw the League’s cooperation with Marxist comrades in the communist and Mapam parties, while Nassar led the organisation and Habibi became its spokesman (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.128).

  • Tubi remained in Haifa to coordinate with Labor Zionists while Habibi went to Beirut and Nassar to southern Palestine; after Haifa’s fall he could find only two comrades in the city, ‘Isam al-‘Abbasi and Muhammad ‘Abdu (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.130).

  • On 2 May 1948 Tubi and al-‘Abbasi wrote a handwritten leaflet to Haifa’s remaining residents that blamed British colonialism, the Palestinian leadership and King Abdullah for Haifa’s calamity, with no mention of Ben-Gurion’s role in the city’s occupation and expulsion, which Manna reads as the cost of following Moscow’s line (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.130-131).

  • Tubi was one of the few League leaders who did not leave Haifa and played a central role in bringing comrades back, turning Haifa into a second League stronghold alongside Nazareth (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.137-138).

  • At the 22-23 October 1948 Haifa unity conference Tubi was a prominent speaker for the merger into Maki (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.141).

  • Following the January 1949 elections Tubi became a Knesset member; at the head of Maki’s leaders he demanded Arabs be drafted into the Israeli army in 1949, and supported Arab military service again in 1954 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.146, 150).

  • In 1956 Tubi helped expose the Ben-Gurion government’s effort to conceal the Kafr Kassim massacre (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.147).

  • Tubi’s testimony is the first and most prominent in Ahmad Sa’d’s Roots of the Evergreen Tree; he published no autobiography, so Manna relies on that testimony and his Knesset activities (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.123).

  • In late 1949 Tubi placed “army searches in Arab villages” on the Knesset agenda and detailed the expulsions, including 200 men and 100 women and children expelled from Majd al-Krum who “are citizens who never left their country,” proposing a parliamentary investigating committee; Ben-Gurion answered by demanding the “defamation” be stricken from the record and telling Tubi, “Shut up. You are sitting here thanks to us” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.180-181).

  • Tubi pressed Tarshiha’s case in February 1949 after Jibra’il Bishara’s briefing, conveying the expulsion attempts to UN representatives; Ben-Gurion denied knowledge of any expulsion orders for the village (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.177-178).

  • In March 1951 Tubi asked the defense minister Knesset questions about thirteen small The Triangle villages subjected to expulsion (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.190).

  • Tubi carried the ‘Awda al-‘Ashhab family-reunification case in the Knesset: questions to Police Minister Shitrit on 11 December 1950 and to Immigration Minister Haim Moshe Shapira, who answered that the Hebron family had never been permanent residents of a region now in Israel, while conceding a comparable Jerusalem case may have been “a special (humanitarian) case which was dealt with outside the scope of the law” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.206).

Nakba and Survival, National Liberation League, Maki, Emile Habibi, Fu’ad Nassar

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