#haifa

In April 1948, the Arab leadership of Haifa announced they wanted to evacuate the city.

Not that they were being forced out. Not that they had no choice. They announced it as a decision.

The Jewish mayor broke down in tears and begged them not to go. The British commander told them they were making a serious mistake. The Haganah’s chief officer promised full equality and peace to every Arab who stayed. The answer from the Arab Higher Committee in Beirut was evacuation anyway.

This is one of the most documented moments of 1948. It is also one of the least told.

Before any major military offensive in Haifa, between 25,000 and 30,000 Arabs had already left voluntarily. The fighting hadn’t reached most of their neighborhoods. What had happened was simpler and more damaging: the leadership had left first. British High Commissioner Sir Alan Cunningham documented it in an April 26 telegram, describing the abandonment by Arab municipal officials, military leaders, and the chief Arab magistrate as probably the greatest factor in the collapse of Arab morale in the city. When the people who are supposed to lead a community disappear, the community follows.

On April 22, a meeting was held at city hall to discuss a truce. The terms guaranteed full safety and civil rights to any Arab who stayed. Shabtai Levy, the Jewish mayor, broke down and pleaded personally with the Arab delegates, calling evacuation a cruel crime against their own people. The British commander urged them to reconsider. The Haganah promised equality and peace to anyone who remained.

The Arab Higher Committee in Beirut said go.

What Arab leaders said publicly in the months that followed tells the rest of the story.

The Economist reported in October 1948 that the departure was driven primarily by orders from the Higher Arab Executive, and that Arabs who stayed and accepted Jewish protection were being called renegades by their own leadership. Time magazine reported in May 1948 that the evacuation was partly driven by Arab leaders who hoped withdrawing Arab workers would paralyze the city economically. Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, told the Beirut Telegraph in September 1948 that the Arab states had agreed unanimously on the policy that created the refugees and must share in solving the problem. The Jordanian newspaper Falastin wrote in February 1949 that Arab states had encouraged Palestinians to leave temporarily to clear the way for the Arab invasion armies and then failed to help them return. Monsignor George Hakim, the Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, told the New York Herald Tribune in June 1949 that the Arabs of Haifa had fled despite the fact that Jewish authorities had guaranteed their safety and rights as citizens.

These aren’t Israeli sources. These are Arab leaders and Arab newspapers, in their own words, from 1948 & 1949.

The word Nakba was coined in August 1948 by a Syrian historian named Constantin Zureiq, a professor at the American University of Beirut. He used it to describe the catastrophic failure of seven Arab armies to defeat the newly declared State of Israel. In his own words, he wrote that seven Arab states declared war on Zionism in Palestine, stopped impotent before it, and then turned on their heels. He described Arab leaders whose declarations fell like bombs from their mouths but whose bombs were hollow and empty, causing no damage and killing no one. Zureiq made no mention of Palestinians as victims. He defined the Nakba as a self-inflicted Arab disaster, a failure of Arab leadership, Arab unity & Arab will.

That is what the word originally meant. A Syrian intellectual criticizing Arab governments for launching a war they were unprepared to win.

Somewhere between 1948 and the 1980s, that meaning was inverted entirely. The word that began as Arab self-criticism became the centrepiece of a narrative in which Arabs were passive victims & Israel was the aggressor 

Edite. via: Melissa Steinberg Brodsky

How the Watermelon Became a Symbol of Palestinian Solidarity

The use of the watermelon as a Palestinian symbol is not new. It first emerged after the Six-day War in 1967, when Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza, and annexed East Jerusalem. At the time, the Israeli government made public displays of the Palestinian flag a criminal offense in Gaza and the West Bank. 

To circumvent the ban, Palestinians began using the watermelon because, when cut open, the fruit bears the national colors of the Palestinian flag—red, black, white, and green.  

The Israeli government didn't just crack down on the flag. Artist Sliman Mansour told The National in 2021 that Israeli officials in 1980 shut down an exhibition at 79 Gallery in Ramallah featuring his work and others, including Nabil Anani and Issam Badrl. “They told us that painting the Palestinian flag was forbidden, but also the colors were forbidden. So Issam said, ‘What if I were to make a flower of red, green, black and white?’, to which the officer replied angrily, ‘It will be confiscated. Even if you paint a watermelon, it will be confiscated,’” Mansour told the outlet.

Israel lifted the ban on the Palestinian flag in 1993, as part of the Oslo Accords, which entailed mutual recognition by Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization and were the first formal agreements to try to resolve the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The flag was accepted as representing the Palestinian Authority, which would administer Gaza and the West Bank.

In the wake of the accords, the New York Times nodded to the role of watermelon as a stand-in symbol during the flag ban. “In the Gaza Strip, where young men were once arrested for carrying sliced watermelons—thus displaying the red, black and green Palestinian colors—soldiers stand by, blasé, as processions march by waving the once-banned flag,” wrote Times journalist John Kifner.

In 2007, just after the Second Intifada, artist Khaled Hourani created The Story of the Watermelon for a book entitled Subjective Atlas of Palestine. In 2013, he isolated one print and named it The Colours of the Palestinian Flag, which has since been seen by people across the globe.

The use of the watermelon as a symbol resurged in 2021, following an Israeli court ruling that Palestinian families based in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem would be evicted from their homes to make way for settlers.

The watermelon symbol today:

In January, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir gave police the power to confiscate Palestinian flags. This was later followed by a June vote on a bill to ban people from displaying the flag at state-funded institutions, including universities. (The bill passed preliminary approval but the government later collapsed.)

In June, Zazim, an Arab-Israeli community organization, launched a campaign to protest against the ensuing arrests and confiscation of flags. Images of watermelons were plastered on to 16 taxis operating in Tel Aviv, with the accompanying text reading, “This is not a Palestinian flag.”

“Our message to the government is clear: we will always find a way to circumvent any absurd ban and we will not stop fighting for freedom of expression and democracy,” said Zazim director Raluca Ganea. 

Amal Saad, a Palestinian from Haifa who worked on the Zazim campaign, told Al-Jazeera they had a clear message: “If you want to stop us, we’ll find another way to express ourselves.”