The wiki currently rests on six fully ingested sources, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, The Question of Palestine, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (read in full, PDF p.1-384 of 384), The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine (read in full, PDF p.1-20 of 20) and Nakba and Survival (read in full, PDF p.1-388 of 388), and everything below is those sources’ accounts, attributed to them.
Sayegh’s big picture, which frames Kanafani’s in time: Zionism was a European nationalist movement that would fulfil itself through colonisation, organised from the First Zionist Congress of 1897 by the World Zionist Organization and its instruments such as the Jewish National Fund, and distinguished from other European colonisation by its incompatibility with the continued existence of Palestine’s Arab population, because its programme was Racial Self-Segregation and statehood in a fully populated country (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.2-5 / printed p.207-210). Unilateral colonisation made only modest headway to 1914; the 1917 alliance of British Imperialism and Zionist colonialism succeeded in the following thirty years, protecting the settler community, its Haganah and Palmach and the condoned Irgun and Stern Group, and paved the way for dispossession in 1948 and the settler-state of Israel, thereafter sustained by the United States (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.6-8 / printed p.211-213). That state is characterised for Sayegh by Racism — in Palestine expressed as racial elimination and then Apartheid against those who remained, not as hierarchical coexistence — by addiction to violence, and by Territorial Expansion towards all of Eretz Israel, its unfinished business (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.9-16 / printed p.214-221). The Palestinian response, in his five stages, runs from welcome through the resistance of 1917-1948 to dispossession and then, in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization and Liberation of Palestine (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.16-20 / printed p.221-225).
Kanafani’s big picture: in the 1930s Palestine was being transformed from an Arab agricultural, feudal-clerical society into a Zionist industrial bourgeois one, a process of Settler Colonialism driven by Jewish immigration and capital under the British Mandate. Its costs fell first on Arab workers, excluded by the Jewish Labour Only policy and undercut in wages, and on peasants, evicted as land passed from Arab landowners, resident and absentee, to Jewish companies (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.7-13 / printed p.12-25). The institutions that might have organised those classes independently failed or were destroyed: the Histadrut monopolised Jewish labour, the Palestine Communist Party never achieved Arabisation, and the Feudal-Clerical Leadership terrorised the independent Arab labour movement while itself heading the national movement (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.9-10 / printed p.16-19). A resistance culture, above all Resistance Poetry and popular poetry, carried mobilisation into the villages (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.14-17 / printed p.26-33).
The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine followed: sparked by Izz al-Din al-Qassam’s movement in November 1935, a spontaneous general strike from 19 April 1936, a Peasant Revolt in substance, called off in October 1936 by the Arab Higher Committee in obedience to the Arab kings, the Surrounding Arab Regimes of Kanafani’s three-enemies thesis, renewed after the Peel Commission partition recommendation of July 1937 under almost complete peasant control, and exhausted by September 1939, at a cost Kanafani estimates at 5,032 Arabs killed and 14,760 wounded (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.18-28 / printed p.35-55). In Kanafani’s judgement its most serious result was not the losses but the growth, under British supervision, of the Zionist military and economic apparatus, the Haganah above all, which laid the foundations of the settler entity and made the defeat of 1947-1948 the conclusion of a chapter that began in April 1936 (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.28-31 / printed p.55-60).
Around the essay, the same booklet gives Ghassan Kanafani’s life and politics, his fiction of return in Letter From Gaza, set in Gaza, and his comrades’ tribute to him. Open questions and internal inconsistencies in this source (conflicting figures and dates as printed) are recorded on its page under Open questions.
Said’s big picture, which carries the other two sources’ frames forward to 1979: Palestine was an inhabited, predominantly Arab and Islamic country whose people were denied and displaced after the Balfour Declaration disposed of their country in disregard of the native majority, and the liberal West coalesced hegemonically with Zionism, diffusing the Zionist reality over the Palestinian one and representing the Palestinians instead of hearing them — the question as a contest between an affirmation and a denial, a presence and an interpretation (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.26-29, p.58-59). From the standpoint of its victims, Zionism worked by transfer, documented in Joseph Weitz’s diaries, by the machinery that kept the 1948 refugees out, and by a separate legal existence for the Arabs who stayed, from military government and absentee-property laws to the Koenig Report (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.120-135). The Palestinian side of the picture is one people in three situations — remnants, exiles and occupied — whose consciousness is carried by its writers and poets and whose Palestine Liberation Organization, risen after Karameh under Yasir Arafat, took responsibility for all three, moved from the Secular Democratic State ideal toward an independent state on part of Palestine, and made signals toward a settlement that the United States, in Said’s account, ignored (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.136-202, p.241-249). After Camp David, Said reads the autonomy plan on the ground — settlements, roads, water and a permanent security apparatus — as a Bantustan that would make the question disappear, and closes with two certainties: the Jews of Israel will remain, and the Palestinians will also remain (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.228-234, p.256-259).
Pappe’s big picture, from the whole book: 1948 was not a war that incidentally produced flight but a planned Ethnic Cleansing — the inevitable product of Zionism’s ideological impulse to an exclusively Jewish presence, prepared through Transfer as a long-held idea, through military training under British sponsorship and through the Village Files’ surveillance of every Palestinian village, and drawn up in Plans A to C before Plan Dalet finalised it at the Red House on 10 March 1948 under David Ben-Gurion and the Consultancy (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.15-16, p.41-53). Resolution 181, imposed against the will of the indigenous two-third majority and including no mechanism to prevent the cleansing, was accepted and ignored at once by the Zionist leadership, its borders to be determined by force; implemented over six months, the plan uprooted close to 800,000 people, destroyed 531 villages and emptied eleven urban neighbourhoods, and has since been erased almost totally from the global public memory (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.16, p.57-64). The execution chapters document that implementation in detail — the urbicide of the mixed towns before 15 May 1948, the massacres and expulsions of May to October, the prison and labour camps, the dividing of the spoils in land and property, and the Memoricide that renamed and planted over the destroyed villages — and the closing chapters argue that the Nakba and the refugees’ Right of Return were then systematically excluded from every ‘peace process’ from Lausanne to Camp David, while Fortress Israel was maintained against the ‘demographic problem’ into 2006. Open questions and internal inconsistencies in this source (conflicting figures, dates and spellings as printed, none of them resolved by its Bibliography or Index) are recorded on its page under Open questions.
Sitta’s big picture is a table, not an argument in prose: the Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine in Salman Abu Sitta’s The Palestinian Nakba 1948 enumerates the depopulation locality by locality — 531 fully depopulated localities and 662 further, partially depopulated ones, 1,193 in all — and gives each its depopulation date, its Exodus Causes codes, its 1948 Arab population and its land in dunums, the whole summing to 804,465 people and 17,184,463 dunums, with the refugees of each locality then carried through UNRWA records of 9/4/97 to 3,602,887 registered refugees in 1998 and 4,940,269 in total estimated (The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, PDF p.20). Its frame is in its headings — the running head is the Palestinian Nakba 1948 and its title names the depopulation the work of the Israeli invasion in 1948 — and its dates run past 1948, from December 1947 to the Beersheba Bedouin expulsions of 1950-1952, its Beersheba sections organised by tribe rather than by village. It prints no legend for its code sets and no bibliography: its evidence is the enumeration itself, cross-keyed to Benny Morris’s numbering and regions. Against Pappe, its 531 confirms his destroyed-villages figure while its row dates differ from his narrative in a handful of cases recorded on the places’ pages; against Said’s quotation of almost four hundred villages destroyed completely, it counts the partially depopulated alongside the fully depopulated for the first time in this wiki. Open questions for this source (the unexplained code legends, district parentheticals and “##” notes, three one-or-two-unit differences between its district subtotals and its grand totals, and dates printed as 1944) are recorded on its page under Open questions.
Manna’s big picture is the complement of Pappe’s and Sitta’s: not the expelled but the Remainers — the Palestinians who remained in Haifa and the Galilee in 1948–1956, whose story he builds from over 120 oral testimonies, family documents and Arabic, Hebrew and English archives. His central claim is that Non-expulsion was not arbitrary: it was the result of high-level Israeli orders and policy, differentiated by sect — the Druze spared under a cooperation agreement, Christians treated more leniently out of fear of Western reaction, Muslims subjected to the iron fist — so the same leadership that ordered Nazareth protected ordered the Galilee cleansed, and the variable was decision from above, not chaos in the field (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.25-27, 85). The Ethnic Cleansing policy, in his account, was more complex and expansive than Plan Dalet alone, and it did not end with the cannons: it ran through the prohibition of return, the legal categories of Present Absentees and Infiltrators, the January 1949 combing operations and village destruction under military rule to 1956, with at least 10,000 of those who remained expelled after the war by his concluding estimate (PDF p.184). Against that machinery the remainers’ own conduct is his second theme: surrender agreements defended and betrayed, Supreme Court cases that won individual cards and occasionally general precedents, voting itself used as a survival instrument, the Arab communists’ Moscow-determined cooperation and its price, and finally the refusal to flee in 1956 and the road from Kafr Qasim to the 1958 Nazareth confrontations and the Arab Front, where survival became collective identity (PDF p.289-297). Where Pappe centres the expelled and Sitta enumerates the depopulated, Manna documents, village by village and case by case, how a minority of some 156,000 by his consensus figure stayed — and his figures, dates and tolls conflict with Pappe’s and Sitta’s, and with each other, in the particulars recorded on his page under Open questions, none of them resolved by his Bibliography or Index.