Ottoman History Podcast - Nazareth, the Nakba, and the Remaking of Palestinian Politics

Episode Date: March 24, 2024

with Leena Dallasheh hosted by Chris Gratien | As an Arab city inside the 1948 borders of Israel, Nazareth defies many of the general narratives of both Israeli and Palestinian histories. But as our guest Leena Dallasheh explains, that does not mean that Nazareth is necessarily an exception. In fact, its paradoxical survival is key to understanding the history of modern Palestinian politics. In this conversation, we chart the history of Nazareth's rise from provincial town to Palestinian cultural capital. We consider the reasons why Nazareth survived the Nakba, and we explore the important role of Palestinian communities in the years before and decades after the foundation of Israel.    « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman History Podcast, and I'm Chris Grayton. Ever since the mass displacement of Palestinian Arabs during the creation of Israel, an event known as the Nakba, a major theme in modern Palestinian history has been survival. Not just of people, but of spaces, Villages, towns, cities, and neighborhoods where Palestinians have fought to maintain their national identity, cultural practices, and political voice. With the creeping dispossession in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, and now five months into an Israeli military campaign that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and laid to waste large portions of the Gaza Strip, questions of survival are as pressing as they were in 1948.

In this episode of Ottoman History Podcast, we're shedding light on one of the most important and improbable urban centers of Palestinian cultural and political survival since the Nakba. Not Gaza, which is the largest Palestinian city today. Not Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority. And not Jerusalem, with all its immense historical and religious significance. The city we'll be discussing in this episode is inside the 1948 borders of Israel. Nazareth. You've probably heard of it, but it's not a place that always fits into

conventional narratives of modern history. One of many small Palestinian towns during the British Mandate period, Nazareth now boasts 80,000 inhabitants and is known to many as the Palestinian city that survived the Nakba. Our guest in this episode is a scholar who spent much of the past two decades working on its history. I'm Lina Delashe. I'm a PhD in history and Middle Eastern studies. I focus on modern Palestinian history with a particular interest in Palestinians who became citizens of Israel in 1948. I'm a board member at PARC, Palestine American Research Center, and an independent scholar. And I am now in the final stages of my book about Nazareth and the transition between the mandate and Israel. Join us in this conversation with Dr. Lina Delashi about Nazareth,

its survival, its centrality in Palestinian politics and Israeli communist movements, and the enduring relevance of its history today. I'm very excited to talk to you about your work today, Dr. Delashi. Thank you. You work on the city of Nazareth, which is a very particular city in many ways in terms of its history and its modern context. Nazareth is an Arab city in the Galilee of modern-day Israel. It is part of this historical band of inland cities in historical Palestine,

most of which are now in the West Bank, sort of going from Nazareth all the way down to Jerusalem. So can you explain how Nazareth was situated before 1948, before the founding of Israel? Yes. So obviously, most listeners would recognize the name Nazareth because of its importance in Christian culture. Nazareth has existed in some form or another, in fact, since the beginning of Christianity. But for a very long time, it was actually a very small, even village at times, marginal until Zahar al-Umar, who was an Ottoman ruler who tried to reach more autonomy, and Nazareth was one of his centers. With his arrival and with the security that he was able to enforce around that area, Nazareth started flourishing. So Zahar al-Umar allowed and encouraged Christian religious institutions to invest and build in the city.

We start seeing the city expanding, and over the 19th and early 20th century, the city becomes more and more important to the region. It's got a lot of religious institutions, but it also is a trade center for the area around it. It's also a kind of small manufacturing center for agricultural tools. And with the beginning of the British Mandate in 1922, Nazareth also becomes an administrative center. So the city is, in a way, kind of continues processes of economic and socio-political developments over these changes and grows with those. So by the late mandate years, by the 1940s, it is medium-sized. It's not one of the major Palestinian cities.

It's not in the same category as Jaffa and Haifa and Jerusalem or Leda Ramli, but it is still a significant center. It still has schools and trade. It is very connected to Haifa. Most of the workers in Nazareth actually worked in Haifa, but it also had its own small industries, continuation of traditional workshops, and it still was very, very much tied to its rural area. So as you just said, Nazareth was an important town, but one of many important Palestinian towns, and by no means what it is today, which is a cultural capital, at least for Palestinians in Israel. And one of the things that stands out about Nazareth in terms of its cultural production, and this is something we talked about in a previous episode with Maha Nassar, is that there's a lot of literary and cinematic reflection on the paradoxical nature of the

Palestinian experience. A lot of it has a sort of absurdist or satirical bent sometimes. Yes. And all of this is because of the story of how Nazareth survives the Nakba as an Arab city. So can you tell us about this sort of paradox of Nazareth, or can you tell us how you see it? And maybe tell us how it actually fits? And, you know, maybe tell us how it actually fits in to the history of the Nakba? Even though the Nakba was a massive trauma that shattered and devastated the Palestinian people in many ways, it is very important to

also highlight that there are continuities despite this moment. And this is something that has been very problematic in the research and the historiography of Palestine, which tended to either begin or end in 1948. And this is a part of why I chose Nazareth, because it's one of the places that can show us clearly continuities of colonial structures, the continuities of Palestinian identification across 1948, but also the changes, the structural changes, the ways that Palestinian reality changed across Tanakhba. Nazareth, in fact, I theorize it as a city despite itself. As I mentioned, Nazareth was a smaller Palestinian town.

It was significant, but it was secondary to Haifa, for instance. It had a very active political and cultural scene even in the 1940s. The communists start a labor union in 1943 in Nazareth, and it becomes kind of a little bit of a magnet for also cultural production. By 1948, there's a branch of the Arab League of Intellectuals. There's a branch of the National Liberation League, which are all commons affiliated. But in 1948, Nazareth becomes the only Palestinian city to survive the Nakba in what became Israel. So Haifa is destroyed, Akka, Tiberias suffered, led the Ramli, Yaffa,

and the one city that remains is this town. And in that, the city has to, both its traditional leaders and the communists who had already been, as I mentioned, very active in the city, but who become leading among the Palestinians, they both realize the special place that Nazareth has and take on themselves the idea of speaking for and representing and leading the Palestinians who remain within Israel. Quickly, the city becomes the political and cultural center for the Palestinians as the only city that survived, and as one in which much of the Palestinian political development would center from that point on until today, actually, in certain ways. And it has to do in part with the way that the city survives. There's a lot of theories of why did Nazareth survive, unlike the other Palestinian cities. It's an important Christian center. The Israeli authorities were convinced that the world is watching, and they wanted to make sure that there is a good impression. So in fact, the day before the city is occupied in July 1948,

an army order is issued that threatens soldiers with severe punishment for any attacks on the holy sites in the city. In the surrender agreement of the city, there's an agreement, there's a clause about safeguarding the Christian religious localities. So clearly this Christian aspect is important in this story, but it is not the only one. Mustafa Abbasi argues that the pragmatic leadership of the city's traditional elite,

Yusuf Fahum, who was the mayor, and others, some of the religious leaders who decided not to fight and surrender even before the Israeli army got to the city, was a part of of its survival. But the last aspect, which I highlight, are two intertwined aspects, which I highlight are two intertwined aspects, are first, the lived experience. By this point, Nazareth had been a center for refugees for months. Some sources mention up to 20,000 refugees in Nazareth over those months in a city that was originally 15,000. So I argue that the people of Nazareth saw what happens to people who become refugees. And by that point had realized that leaving home is not necessarily the way to save yourself.

But that was also intertwined with the communist activism in the city. The communists were very persistent against leaving the city. They moved from door to door, telling people to stay put. And they even at some point put a checkpoint in L'chanok, which is the main entrance to the city, and kind of turned people back when the Israeli army occupies it. So all these factors kind of come together to also shape what happens, the politics and social dynamics in the city afterwards, because these two groups that can be argued to have played a significant role in the city's survival,

the communist and the traditional elite, then kind of move on almost immediately, both to deal with the immediate concerns of Nazareth, because as I mentioned, there were thousands of refugees in the city, there was shortage of water, fuel, food, illness in the city, there were all these issues that had to be dealt with, and they start negotiating on behalf of the city with the Israeli authorities, initially with a military governor, but then also with ministers. And that develops into a pattern of relationship in which I argue Nazareth becomes both a city of refuge, but also a lab for Israeli policies in which the Israeli authorities try to shape their relationship towards the Palestinian citizens and the Palestinian citizens negotiate, resist, push back, compromise and brings into this chain or kind of a continuing

negotiation that lays the basis of Palestinian citizenship within the state. So I want to circle back to something that you mentioned here, which is that because the stories we tell about Nazareth survival change how we're framing Palestinian history itself. It is conducive to sort of this process of making a myth or allegory out of the city, attesting to what I mentioned before, this idea that it's somehow paradoxical. You've already told us that it actually fits perfectly within the frame of a larger Palestinian history that may hinge on the Nakba, but is certainly not necessarily bookended in either way by it. And I was wondering if you could say more about that, that this particular space is really key

for thinking through modern Palestinian history. Thank you. This is a very good question and kind of catches at the heart of what I'm interested in in my research. Our history, I'm a Palestinian citizen myself, and our history has been kind of pushed out of both Israeli history and in certain ways out of Palestinian history.

The narrative was so entrenched, this idea of quote-unquote Arab Israelis that was so dominant in the literature and still is so dominant in popular discourse, that somehow it kind of created a reality of writing us out of the Palestinian history. And for me, telling the story of Nazareth is a way to bring us back into the fold of Palestinian history to highlight that, A, this is a part of the geography of Palestine, and the Nakba devastated and shattered this geography, and it particularly shattered the Palestinian city. Palestinian city. But Nazareth is a city that survives. I mean, it survives with a lot of issues. It's survived in a significantly changed way. I mean, the city has 15,000 people in 46, very few leave, less than 20%, but 6,000 additional refugees end up settling in the city. So it's about a third of its residents are refugees. That, of course, shapes the geography and social relations and

economy and all these things. But the city itself is still there. And it highlights and centers the continuing presence of the Palestinian city despite the Nakba, the ways in which Palestine's urbanism, even though disrupted and distorted Ramallah and Jerusalem in certain ways, but also in Nazareth, which despite the Nakba and despite pressures also maintains its Palestinian character through a very persistent struggle of the political class in the city. struggle of the political class in the city. It's important here to highlight, A, there's a continuity of the leadership. So this kind of the traditional elite, and I know that traditional elite is a problematic concept, but I haven't found another one, you know, landed religious elite, one of the few that survived within Palestine, and continues some of the politics of this elite. And in parallel, the communists who had been already active in Palestine take on a role of much more significant role within that. But that also, in order to attend to the Palestinian experience, we have to understand it in all its variations and include Palestinian citizens within that.

We've been describing things thus far as Nazareth's survival, but actually the process you just described is one of intensification of urbanization and perhaps, at least in Nazareth's case, expansion of a Palestinian urban sphere in a region that was predominantly rural prior to 1948. If you think about the Nakba, it's the story of a lot of people being uprooted from villages and invariably in some way or another, many of them ending up in these new urban environments.

So, I would love to know if there's more to say about the specifics of the urban in the post-1948 context for Palestinian politics. Nazareth municipality is one of three municipalities that survived the Nakba. The two others being Shfa Amr and Kfri Asif. And Nazareth municipality becomes a center of contest over the nature of the city, over Palestinian autonomy within the country. So the kind of what it means to be urban, what it means to have resources, to control resources, how does infrastructure work within this urban center? How does infrastructure work within this urban center? The possibilities of expansion are all being negotiated, mostly enforced by the state, but they face a lot of Palestinian resistance over this time. So if you think about water resources,

the Nazareth has had water problems since the 1930s, and I traced that. But in the post-war years, in post-48 years, this becomes even more severe because Israel decides to appropriate Nazareth's water for the benefit of the nearby Jewish settlements. So on the one hand, you have this massively enlarged city with all the refugees in it. And on the other hand, there is a state that is much more interested in promoting, as a settler colonial state, on promoting Jewish settlements around. So the urban development is a part of the victims in

a certain way, a part of the outcomes that Israeli settler colonial policy has. Similar processes are when Israel decides to quote-unquote Judaize the Galilee, and what is now Nofagalil, what was Upper Nazareth, was a central component and a very early component in this policy. But the construction of Upper Nazareth as a Jewish presence, which initially was actually supposed to be one that turns a city into a Jewish majority, but when the authorities realize it's impossible to gain a Jewish majority, then they make it into a separate town. The presence of that town also cuts and disrupts Palestinian urbanity

because it absolutely limits the possibilities of expansion for Nazareth. So all these dynamics are a part of this story of distorted, disrupted urbanism in Palestine. But in parallel, the political prominence that Nazareth gains in this period and cultural kind of anchor the urbanity despite the physical constraints. As I mentioned, very soon after the city is occupied, it becomes the center of political mobilization for the Palestinians. The elites try their own way, and some of the people from Nazareth, some of those elites play also on a national level. Samin Jarjoura and Saif-ud-Din Zorbi are Knesset members for the governing party Mapai. But the most interesting, I think, significant development in this is the rise of the Communist

Party as the main political power among the Palestinians. The Communist Party is reconstituted as a joint Palestinian-Jewish party in October 1948, and it becomes the only legal framework in which Palestinians can work. But even before that, its leaders begin speaking out as representatives of the Palestinian national interest, not only in the city, but to lead struggles of the Palestinians to attempt to shape a Palestinian strategy and discourse within this renewed context. Nazareth, because it is surviving as a Palestinian municipality, so a unit of governance somehow that has a Palestinian character, it gives it a certain

role in the politics of post-1948, where Nazareth is much more important than the number of its residents. And similarly, if we're talking about communists during this time period, Palestinians only make up one segment of the different communist groups in Israel, but the prominence of communism within the Palestinian political dynamic during these early decades makes them really critical to the history of communism, if I'm making sense. So maybe you can give our listeners more on just how important during this period Palestinians were in the communist movement, how important communism was to the perseverance of Palestinian politics in this time? This is actually my new book project, is Palestinian Communists. Working on Nazareth has clarified how important it is to understand this group outside the dichotomy of resistance

and collaboration, which they've been very much entangled in. In the 1940s, so 1943, the Palestinian communists break with the PKK, with the communist party, the Palestine Communist Party, and establish the National Liberation League, which is not a self-identified communist party, but a socialist-leaning nationalist party. And they become very vocal, and their traces and voice are far beyond their actual numbers in many ways. And it is in part because they succeed in creating a newspaper, Al-Ithad, in 1945, as a representative of the labor movement of the Arab Workers' Congress, Mu'tabbar al-Amal al-Arab. They're very vocal in a clear political line in ways that other parts of the national movement were not. So on the one hand, they try very hard to be included in the national

movement. So when the Arab Haryar Committee is reconstituted, they lobby very, very strongly for being a part of it. They call for democratization of the Palestinian national movement and even actually follow it in boycotting UNESCO, even though they had been calling for a UN-led decision about Palestine. But on the other hand, they're also very vocal in critiquing it and in presenting an alternative political line. So, for instance, one of the things they do is that they insist that we have to differentiate between Jews and Zionists. Whereas Zionism is the ally of colonial forces, and it is what it is the enemy of the Palestinians and their aspiration for nationalism, Jews are potential allies. And they actually, as the 1940s go forward, they start speaking out more clearly that this idea of separating Arabs and Jews is going to serve the colonial powers in partitioning Palestine, because it's going to

strengthen the narrative that Jews and Arabs can't live together, and they're enemies, and thus they have to be separated, and thus there has to be partition. So the political line that they present is very different, and as I said, very vocal. And even during the war in 1948, when they switched the position from anti-partition to pro-partition, they still continue to be very vocal, even though at some point they actually have to go underground. In some parts of Palestine, where the Jordanian or the Egyptian forces are controlling, they have to go underground. In Nazareth, they actually are arrested by the ALA, the Arab Liberation Army, and they're almost executed and they're saved by Abdurrahim Mahmoud, the Palestinian nationalist poet who trusts them as nationalists,

even though some claim that they're traitors, and saves them right before he goes to Sajara and dies in the fight against the Zionist forces there, or the Israeli forces by this point. But the void created by the destruction of the Palestinian political class in the Nakba, and by political, I'm using the term political class from Yazid Saig, which means the urban intellectual political leaders. The void that is created by their destruction or their disappearance, their refugiousness in 1948, allows the communists to take a much more central role. That is also, I mean, it's supported by the fact

that early on, MAPAM is the left-wing opposition, or at least early on, socialist party, which is contending for or claiming to be the representative of communism in Israel. Early on, they're trying to incorporate the Maquis, the communist party into them. So they support them a little bit. That doesn't last very much. But also because as a joint Arab-Jewish party, it is much harder for the Israeli state to outlaw them, especially that the Jewish communists had contributed to the Czech arms deal in 1948 that was very significant in the Israeli victory. So it becomes the only framework in which Palestinians can act in a

legal way. And many of the Palestinians that join actually before and after 48 are not necessarily communists, but they're anti-colonialists. And this becomes kind of the house of anti-colonialist policies or critical policies throughout, which is not a singular phenomena for Palestine. It is actually, I think, very common in third world or global south. And that's one of the things that can also help us think through communism in the Arab world, is the role that it plays as an anti-colonial home. Right. But from what we know of the history of communism in Israel during the Cold War, the end of the story is ultimately that

I think that communism ceases to be this outlet precisely because, kind of as you said, the Arab communists are a minority in this group. And as I understand it, there's like a split that basically happens among communists are a minority in this group. And as I understand it, there's like a split that basically happens among communists in Israel. Yeah, that basically marks the beginning of the end of this particular political ideology

being a viable space of resistance. Is there more to the story than that? Actually, I think it's the other way around. In certain ways, post-1965, Raqqa, the new party, so Maki splits into two parties. The Jewish majority group keeps the name Maki, and it's led by Sneh and others. Most of the Jewish members remain with this group. And Rakah, which is the predominantly Palestinian party with some Jews within it, like Meir Wilner, becomes the prominent one. So Maki disappears after, I think, one round of elections,

and Raqqa becomes now a Palestinian majority political party, even though it continues to highlight binational membership and fraternity and all these things, but it's able to express much more Palestinian political positions and needs, and that also paves the way for the unity with other nationalist forces in the creation of the Jabha democratic front. It was never a central part of Israeli politics, but it was also always a vocal opposition. But after the split in 65, it actually becomes much more prominently. I mean, the split

happens because the Palestinians by 58 become much more vocal and incorporate the nationalist Palestinian voice in a much clearer way. But by 1965, that tension drives the group into split. But after the split, Palestinians are able to become much more vocal in representing Palestinian nationalist voice and in uniting with the other groups in creating al-Jabha. That also is, the communists play a very important role, Tufiq Zayed in particular, in Yom El Ard, in Lande. So they actually do continue to play a very significant role

into the 90s in the politicization and nationalization of Palestinians inside Israel. And by they, you mean the communist movement, the palestinian communists and socialists and so forth yeah yeah no the way i framed the question was kind of implicitly centering the jewish majority israeli experience in which what we see is the decline of the left yes after this moment which is not to say that that meant the end of the left for Palestinians. Yes. And I think that's what you're getting at in a lot of your work, that these essentializations and in either or dichotomies are really obscuring a spectrum of experience, which all reflect Palestinian agency.

Agency isn't only when Palestinians do the most Palestinian thing, whatever that's supposed to be, but it's reflected in the diverse outcomes. And the reason why we have places like Nazareth and so many different Palestinian experiences is because these different experiences are, in part, a product of that agency. But here I want to say, actually, if I may, something. You said the most Palestinian thing. And one of the things that I'm arguing in my work is that what is the most Palestinian thing to do is not a foregrounded conclusion. It wasn't then, it is not now, but it's very easy to structure it as that. So one of the ways I've been calling to think about this history is thinking through the historical possibilities and the political imagination ander of displacement that continues to haunt Palestinians until well within the 60s,

al-Baqa, remaining at home, becomes the nationalist thing. It's reformulated for the communists, but also for others inside Israel at the time. It's reformulated as the most important thing for Palestinians to do, to hold on to the land, to stay put, to stay in Palestine, and to guarantee or to at least fight for keeping Palestine Palestinian. So a part of the struggle of the communists in Nazareth is not only staying, but it's a struggle to maintain Nazareth as an Arab Palestinian city, to maintain the city's Palestinian identity. So in this, I really insist on saying this is not a zero-sum game in a certain way that a lot of the nationalist, hyper-nationalist discourse would

want to say. And in this, if we actually think that the nationalist interest is being reframed as one of staying, then there's a whole range of ways that people did it. The comments were very vocal and confrontational for most of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, but there's a whole other range of ways that people do it with the clear intent of staying at home and staying Arab and Palestinian in however they formulate it, of course. Yeah. That just adds a lot of complexity to what we're talking about. But I want to wrap things up by asking you another question and preface it by saying, you know, like, when people start to learn this history and learn more the details

that don't fit with the easy dichotomies, they may also start to imagine alternate realities that maybe weren't actually possible, but are very alluring when you look at the present day situation. Realities of a different kind of Israel, political movements that transcended boundaries that feel as firm as ever. So, what does all this history mean for you today, right now? Certainly, you've been working on this forever, long before this moment. And it's not this moment is totally new, but nonetheless, I'd like to hear you reflect on that. I think if you asked me this question four months ago, my answer would have been very different than my answer today. It's a very bleak moment in Palestinian history. The devastation in Gaza is not only a massive human tragedy, even though it is predominantly that, and I want to be very clear, people of

Gaza are suffering a horrible human cost because of Israeli brutality. But this moment also is signifying the crisis of Palestinian Nationalists Project. And there is a lot of talk about Nakba because Israeli right-wing fascists have been threatening with a second Nakba because the destruction and large-scale expulsion from Gaza is raising with every Palestinian the specter of the Nakba, of the Tahajjud, of expulsion and refuginess of 1948. But it also, in many ways, it is very hard to think of where the Palestinian project is going. It has been shattered and broken between the disunity between

Hamas government and Fatah government, but also the lack of overall project since the failure of Oslo. And for me, it is sometimes appealing to think about the roads not taken and the possibilities that were not there. I think a lot about the ways that communists, the Palestinian communists in the late 1940s, imagined the possibilities. I mean, it wasn't possible, honestly, then, because most Jewish residents of Palestine did not want it. Most Palestinian residents of Palestine were not willing and did not want it. But there is some hope that I find in thinking about the ways that people could conceptualize alternative political realities. And for me, what I hope is that this history can teach us about the potential ways that we can rebuild the Palestinian national movement and reground our national project with a clear

political vision and a goal and strategies for the future. Thank you, Dr. Lina Delashi, for talking with us on the Ottoman History Podcast. Thank you, Chris.