This paper examines the history of Palestinians from 1945 to 1955, using the olive tree and olive-derived commodities as a way to trace the effects of the monumental ruptures of this period and explicate the resultant effects on the lives of ordinary Palestinians. Drawing predominantly on the American and British diplomatic archives in addition to a variety of Arabic sources, I trace the consequences of the cataclysmic events of this period through the loss of the olive tree and its products—once some of the most lucrative exports of Greater Syria—despite Palestinian resistance to Arab and Israeli military administration and occupation. The periodization seeks to bridge the catastrophic rupture of 1948 to its aftermath. All too often, 1948 in effect marks the end of Palestinian history, as if Palestinians simply ceased to exist with their conquest and exile. In connection, 1948 also typically marks the birth of the “Israeli Arab,” as if this newfound minority had no history before the creation of Israel. The rupture is thereby doubled, severing both the history of Palestinians from post-1948 developments, and severing Palestinian Israelis from their pre-1948 past. Furthermore, 1948 did not mark the end of what the Palestinians refer to as al-Nakba, or the catastrophe. The second essential reason to bridge the late Mandate and the early histories of Egyptian-administered Gaza, the Jordanian-administered West Bank, and Israel is the continued dispossession and expulsion of the remaining Palestinians within Israeli-controlled territory. This ongoing process of expulsion and land appropriation is illustrated through a focus on some of the most lucrative Palestinian landholdings: olive groves. Historically, most Palestinians were rural subsistence cultivators, with the olive tree and its products a central means of subsistence and revenue generation for cash expenses, such as to pay taxes. Even in 1948, roughly two-thirds of settled Palestinians lived in villages. While highlighting the continued processes of colonization through the destruction, forced neglect, and illegal appropriation of olive groves on some of the best and most fertile Palestinian-owned lands, this paper also seeks to draw out the understudied Palestinian peasant resistance to confiscation and discrimination. But resistance has its limits. Although, by the early 1950s, the majority of Palestinians remained agricultural workers and cultivators, it was increasingly no longer on their own property. In the longer term, continuing colonization and dispossession set in motion and accelerated trends toward the urbanization and proletarianization of the Palestinian peasantry.

This paper calls into attention the overlooked question of Palestinian citizens’ incorporation into Israel. Focusing on Nazareth in the first two years after 1948, the paper offers an historical perspective to examine the new reality Palestinians faced within the exclusionary state and their responses to this reality. Nazareth, which survived the displacement that was the fate of the vast majority of Palestinians during 1948, still suffered from severe problems. Beyond the political defeat and the loss of contact with the Arab world, residents of Nazareth faced over-crowdedness as the city housed thousands of refugees from the area, food and water shortages, and high unemployment. The city, along with most Palestinian areas inside Israel, was also put under a strict military regime that controlled all aspects of life. Drawing upon archives in Arabic, Hebrew and English, from Israel, the UK and US, this research presents how Palestinians utilized different strategies to survive not only their larger political situation but also the day-to-day aspects of their lives. I elaborate on Palestinians’ interactions with Israeli officials in response to their new situation, and how it evolved over time: after the initial crisis of shortage of basic provisions, Nazareth representatives advanced claims that aimed at setting the parameters for longer-term relationship with the Israeli authorities, negotiating various degrees of autonomy and exploring the limits of Israeli tolerance. Such an historical perspective reveals that Palestinians responded in a variety of ways to their incorporation into the Israeli state, from enthusiastic cooperation to forceful resistance and even confrontation. In examining these strategies of survival, this paper highlights the political imagination of historical actors. Rather than accepting the popular but simplistic collaboration/resistance dichotomy, I argue for a nuanced approach that takes into consideration what was within the range of possibility at that historical moment in such a peculiarly constrained colonial transition. This paper thus argues that Nazareth’s history at this juncture echoes the experience of a national minority confronting a new, settler-colonial nation-state. In such cases, decolonization can only be seen as a partial process, so the minority’s struggle must be waged both as anti-colonial and as a struggle to secure a proper status within the new state.

This paper analyzes Palestinian students, teachers and professors who found themselves suddenly stateless as they were living, working and studying abroad in 1948. Their stories highlight diaspora as a process of decolonization, while underscoring the global effects of 1948 on an individual, day-to-day level. A different segment of Palestinian society than the more often discussed refugee camp population, these individuals were almost all from middle class or wealthy families. Many of them enjoyed illustrious careers, receiving their education in Beirut, the United Kingdom, and the United States while staffing and shaping education systems throughout the world, particularly in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait. Students, teachers, and intellectuals more broadly are seldom analyzed within narratives of victimization or resistance, as they suffered less material deprivations and were frequently not part of armed rebellions. Yet, scholarship students, teachers and professors suffered from uncertainty in terms of their employment, lack of citizenship rights, and the inability to return home to their families that remained in Israel. They also played a key role in the literary and cultural reconfigurations of what it meant to be Arab,and Palestinian both before and after 1948. These Palestinians could write and organize from the diaspora, as part of a variety of political and social movements, even as they experienced the consequences of occupation and statelessness across national borders. Using oral histories, memoirs, novels, poetry, as well as journals, alumni records, and official materials from archives in the United States, United Kingdom, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine, this paper explores the experience and consequences of 1948 from beyond the borders of Israel/Palestine. I begin this paper in 1940, after the Great Revolt and during a period of expanding education within the Mandate for Palestine, and the Arab world as a whole. A new push towards educating Palestinians by the Mandate government, local initiatives and the British Council meant that more students were supported in their study abroad. With 1948, many educated Palestinians sought and found employment in universities throughout the Arab world and beyond. I end this paper in 1958, allowing me to explore regional political upheavals and the consequences of 1948 for these teachers, students and professors, as well as their families within a global framework. Their stories underscore the need to address the myriad processes of decolonization beyond merely colonial polities and the regimes which succeeded them.

Examining the early Israeli state’s claims to jurisdictional exclusivity in historical Palestine in the year 1948, this paper seeks to shed light on Israel’s inconsistent and, even, contradictory relationship with its predecessor, the British Mandatory administration in Palestine. Though May 15, 1948 marked both the formal end of the British Mandate for Palestine and the beginning of the state of Israel, sovereignty and jurisdiction did not spontaneously transfer over on this date. Rather, the Israeli assumption of jurisdiction was contingent upon its claims and abilities to do so. Looking at a series of early Israeli legal actions and court cases, this paper seeks to highlight that, in fact, Israeli claims to jurisdiction did not adhere to a unified line regarding the primacy of May 15. On the one hand, the Israeli state cast May 15, 1948 as the date on which it assumed jurisdiction. Intentionally positioning itself as the direct successor to British Mandatory Palestine, the Israeli state affirmed its recognition of British jurisdiction up until May 15. This claim to jurisdiction beginning on May 15, which was made in an explicitly political context and was part of broader attempts to assert itself vis-à-vis internal Israeli opposition as the sole legitimate sovereign in historic Palestine, was particularly evident in the Israeli state’s retroactive claim to jurisdiction in Jerusalem made in August 1948. On the other hand and, in a contradictory fashion, throughout this period, the Israeli judiciary and executive questioned their acceptance of British sovereignty up to May 15. Reexamining and reversing a number of British judicial decisions made prior to May 15, the Israeli state extended its legal reach back into the Mandate period, retroactively contesting British jurisdictional primacy. Combining these clashing Israeli claims to jurisdiction, this paper ultimately seeks to complicate the extant legal historical literature’s notion of May 15, 1948 as a self-evident transition and a clear point of separation, whereby the period of British Mandatory rule ended and that of the state of Israel began. In contrast, this paper seeks to portray the transition as a much messier process characteristic of the postcolonial predicament, in which the Israeli state, in a contradictory fashion, both relied upon and contested its colonial predecessor.