How did the new political borders of Israel shape people's livelihoods beyond Palestine? In what ways did they generate precarity, exclusion, dispossession, the removal of populations, and migration? How does the memory of border creation also alter the meaning of a place and an individual or group's attachment to it? This panel analyzes changing geopolitical borders and the effects of spatial ordering on people's everyday lives in the Arab world following the Nakba in 1948.
Based on ethnographic and archival research, oral history interviews, immigration records, and other personal and official accounts this panel explores the effects of Zionist territorial reorganizations on people's livelihoods, identities, patterns of mobility and migration. It addresses different social, cultural, economic and physical spaces that were impacted by the events of 1948 and examines the effects of shifting systems of rule on day-to-day life.
By addressing the Nakba's effects on people's lives, this panel connects the intersecting, far reaching, and deeply personal experiences of forced migration and border creation. Oral history interviews collected in south Lebanon show how the Nakba was experienced in frontier villages, some of which were also occupied by the Haganah in 1948, but narrowly escaped the destiny of nearby villages that were depopulated, as they were returned to Lebanon after a UN agreement in 1949. In Egypt, Palestinian students at the American University in Cairo put the institution's American affiliation at odds with local and regional ties to Palestine among students, faculty and administrators as they sought support for the exiled students. Also in Egypt, the country's large Jewish population increasingly departed following the Nakba. While this voluntary migration is recollected in connection with the establishment of Israel, a careful analysis of Egypt's shifting economic and foreign policy at the time identifies an alternative narrative that is largely forgotten in popular social memory. Likewise, attending to Israeli economic policy opens up the detailed history of internal Palestinian displacement, as the new state's Absentee Property Regulations legalized the confiscation of Palestinians' financial assets regardless of whether or not they had left the borders of Israel as of November 1947. Each paper offers a detailed account of the Nakba as part of a larger conversation regarding the connection between place creation and displacement. Together, they point to the profound social, cultural and economic impacts of political border making, while also making apparent the personal meaning of the Nakba as it reshaped the region.
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Dr. Susann Kassem
“There were no mines, there was no border, there were no border crossings, wire, they put wire. Yes, there was none, they just put it the other day. When they occupied in ‘48 there was no wire. Only stones…They came and had cars, tanks, we did not see that before. We had regular soldiers, and they were placed somewhere. When people in the village would have a fight, they would go and see the Lebanese police. There was one in every village. Here there was also one station of the Lebanese army, after 1948.” (65-year old produce vendor from Blida, interviewed 2009)
This paper reflects on the changing nature of border control and everyday life in south Lebanese frontier villages following the establishment of Israel in 1948. The excerpt above is from a south Lebanese villager from Blida, situated in the immediate proximity of what are today the depopulated and destroyed Palestinian border villages of Nabi Yusha, Qadas, and Malkiyeh, three of what are now called al-Qura al-Saba?a (“seven villages”). The French and British mandate authorities competed over these seven predominantly Shi?a villages in a quest for territorial aggrandizement. Like other nearby border villages, Blida had been transferred from Ottoman to British to French rule. On the fringes of both the French and British Mandates, it often changed hands between the two, or was even subject to simultaneous and overlapping British and French rule into the 1940s. Furthermore, it was occupied and controlled by Israel in two periods, first during the 1948–49 Nakba, and second during the Lebanese civil war between 1978–2000. Based on oral histories collected in the south Lebanese frontier villages, this paper aims to situate the Nakba in a historical context of ongoing border changes between Lebanon and Palestine. One of the major goals of this paper is to explore the strong links and active networks that existed between south Lebanon and north Palestine through the stories of the village communities. It looks at and beyond the imposed boundaries through the eyes of the people that were directly affected by them. It addresses the effects of multiple systems of rule and constant spatial reorganizations of everyday life and forced migrations on the formation of political subjectivities of the population.
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Annalise DeVries
“Ma'adi was a utopia,” Samia Zeitoun recalled during an oral history interview in November 2009. She went on to describe a life of cross-confessional harmony in the elite Cairo suburb, where Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women breastfed one another’s children. Then, she continued, “our whole life was overturned with the creation of Israel.” Zeitoun then related the departure of her friend Carol Adas — “I’m never going to see you again,” she recalled saying. “What’s going to happen to us?” The emotion attached to the memory of Israel’s creation was potently real for Zeitoun and other Ma'adi residents who grew up in the neighborhood before and during World War II. The actual reason for Adas’s and other Ma'adi residents’ departure, however, was likely far more complex and perhaps far less political than adolescents could have comprehended at the time. Interpreting the memories of this period is particularly challenging because the creation of Israel and the 1952 Revolution have proven such potent flash points in Egyptian social memory. What has gone largely forgotten, however, is the reordering of Egypt’s economic relationships with the rest of the world, which also went on at this same time when the Capitulations were abolished in 1949. Because the Capitulations shielded foreigners from local taxes and the jurisdiction of local courts, their dissolution meant the emigration of large numbers of residents carrying foreign nationality, a disproportionate number of whom were also Jewish. My paper uses Ma'adi as a lens for identifying this other narrative of migration and border creation during the mid-twentieth century. Founded in part by members of Egypt’s elite Jewish community, Ma'adi became home to a well-to-do society of Europeans, Levantines, and Egyptians. As Zeitoun and others recall, the events of the postwar era transformed Ma'adi. I argue that transformation took place on terms that have been largely forgotten. Drawing from oral histories, immigration records, and other personal accounts, I argue that the end of Capitulations reordered Egypt’s upper middle-class society, helping to change the very meaning of the nation long before the establishment of Israel or the Free Officers Movement. By connecting the history of economic policy to the larger political events of the period, my paper addresses the importance of considering the impact of commercial relationships on migration, identity formation, and border creation.
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A small proportion of Palestinians displaced in 1948 took refuge in Egypt, and only a tiny fraction sent students to study at the American University in Cairo. But if AUC was marginal to the cause of Palestine and the Palestinians, the inverse was not true. The war and the plight of Palestinian students confronted the university administration with several major problems. These arose from AUC’s American roots at a time of anger toward the U.S.; the president’s commitment to remain apolitical in the face of a politically aroused staff and student body; and the institution’s scarce resources over against a deluge of requests for aid. This paper explores the “resolution” of these conflicts, detailing the constraints within which AUC operated and the problems of its Palestinian students, 1948-1958.
Three sets of research questions guide this study. (1) What was AUC’s status in Egypt and the Arab world, and what was the place of Palestinians at AUC? (2) What position did AUC take toward the Palestine conflict? (3) What problems did Palestinian students face, and how did AUC respond?
Primary sources include Board of Trustees records; papers of President John Badeau; the campus newspaper, Caravan; and contemporary Egyptian newspapers. Secondary literature includes research on Palestinians in Egypt, especially the work of Oroub El-Abed.
The documents show that, by the 1940s, AUC’s leadership detected a shift in public opinion, accepting the institution as a “normal place for Arabic-speaking youth to take university study.” Enrollments grew; Palestinians represented the second largest national contingent and were prominent in campus activities and as alumni. But the “normalization” of AUC was jeopardized by Arab anger at the U.S. over Palestine. Under internal and external pressure, President John Badeau broke with tradition to criticize U.S. actions toward Palestine, in May 1948. Moreover, the Dean, Worth Howard, declared that AUC had “an inescapable responsibility” to help students whose family assets had been lost in the Nakba. University records document the provenance, family situations, and current status of its Palestinian students. Over 50 students were given substantive assistance with funds raised from friends and alumni; but the largest and most consistent donor was the Arab League, to which AUC appealed in 1950. Ultimately, the opening of Egypt’s public universities to Palestinians from the mid-1950s eased the crisis.
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Sreemati Mitter
In December 1948, Eliezer Kaplan, the finance minister of the six-month old state of Israel issued what he called “Emergency Regulations on the Property of Absentees.” These regulations, later promulgated into law by the Israeli parliament in 1950, defined “absentees” as, essentially, all Arab Palestinians who had either fled Palestine, or remained in what became Israel or its militarily occupied territories, in 1948. These regulations were then systematically used by the Israeli state to strip all such legally defined “absentees” of their physical and financial property.
While scholars and activists have detailed how these regulations were used by the State of Israel to dispossess Palestinians of their lands and physical assets in the years following the nakba, this talk will detail the less well-known application of these regulations to strip the “absentees” of their financial assets: stocks, bonds, investments, insurance policies, and even, in some cases, their liabilities, usually mortgages.
The paper will examine how international bankers and British colonial officials implicitly sanctioned this dispossession; it will also underline how international banking law prevented the Palestinians from suing for their rights. The talk ultimately hopes to raise broad questions about property rights for the stateless in the 20th century.
The material for this talk is drawn from a variety of sources, ranging from private (Barclays Bank) archives, to the archives of the Shehadeh Law Firm in Ramallah, to official Israeli State Archives, to the British National Archives. An important portion of the material is also derived from oral interviews in Palestine and Israel.
