PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 126

1. The interview with Suad Qaraman took
place in Ibtin, thanks to Johnny Mansour, lec-
turer at the Department of History, Academic
College, Beit Berl, Israel. He is the author and
the co-author of many books on the history
and development of Haifa.
2. To discover Haifa through the eyes of a
child of the city and the poetry of his memo-
ries, see the autobiography of Samih Masoud
Haifa-Burqa, A Search for Roots, trans. Bas-
sam S. Abu-Ghazalah, Inner Child Press, 2016.
3. The oil pipeline, designed by the British,
crossed the Kingdom of Iraq, independent since
1932 having been a British mandate, and then
Transjordan and Palestine which still were British
mandates. Crude oil was processed in the Haifa
refineries, as explained by Ghassan Kanafani in
The 1936–39 Revolt in Palestine, New York, Com-
mittee for a Democratic Palestine, 1972.
4. Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss, Hai-
fa Before & After 1948. Narratives of a Mixed
City, Institute for Historical Justice and Recon-
ciliation (IHJR), 2011. The authors agree that
the fall of Haifa is one of the most important
events of the Nakba. For Palestinians, it sym-
bolizes the end of urban life. The Israeli vision
of contemporary history is diametrically op-
posed since, for them, Haifa symbolizes Jew-
ish–Arab coexistence, while any reference to
the events of 1948 is strictly avoided.
5.  The Temple Society is a German Protestant
religious sect, founded in Württemberg in Ger-
many by Christoph Hoffman, who broke away
from the Lutheran Church in 1858. At the begin-
ning, some 5000 Templers were invited to create
urban and agricultural settlements in Palestine.
In 1869, they settled in Haifa then Jaffa. In 1872
they created the farming village of Sraouna near
Jaffa, and in 1878 the German district of Jerusa-
lem. The suspicion of a link with Nazism led to
their expulsion during the Second World War.
6. The foot of Mount Carmel was the first
specifically Zionist zone to be established. In
1912, Haifa opened the first Jewish academic
institute, the Technion.
7.  Baha’i holy sites in Haifa and Western Gal-
ilee are listed as Unesco World Heritage Sites.
These places, namely the mausoleum of Ba-
ha’u’llah inn Acre and the mausoleum of Bab in
Haifa, are associated with the founding fathers
of this religion.
8. Haifa even became a highly intellectual
place, because in 1914 it had nine newspapers.
124
Memories of 1948
9. Cyrus Schayegh, The Middle East and the
Making of the Modern World, Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2017, p. 173.
10. Deborah Bernstein, Constructing Bound-
aries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory
Palestine, State University of New York, 2000,
p. 125.
11.  Jerusalem is the third most holy site of Islam.
12. The minbar is the wooden pulpit in a
mosque from where the imam delivers his ser-
mon during the Friday prayers. The minbar in
Al Aqsa was made in Aleppo in 1168, and was
offered to Al Aqsa mosque by Sultan Saladin
in 1187. This is a unique piece, the elements of
which are held together with ivory joints. On
August 21, 1969, an Australian, declared “mad”
by the Israeli authorities, set fire to the mosque.
13. Many Jewish architects were part of the
Bauhaus. They had moved to Palestine after
the Nazis closed the school in 1933. See Waleed
Karkabi and Adi Roitenberg, “Arab-Jewish
Architectural Partnership in Haifa During the
Mandate Period. Qaraman and Gerstel Meet
on the Seam Line”, in Mahmoud Yazbak and
Yfaat Weiss, Haifa Before & After 1948. Narra-
tives of a Mixed City, 2011, Institute for Histor-
ical Justice and Reconciliation (IHJR), which
mentions an interview with Moshe Gerstel’s
son, Leopold. According to him, Gerstel had
a mainly Arab clientele, which explains the de-
cline in his activities after 1948, the Zionists
considering that he did not really belong to
their “family”. Gerstel stayed in touch with the
Qaramans until his death in 1961.
14. In Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon,
the unit of land measurement still in use today
is the dunum. It dates from Ottoman times,
and was equivalent to 919.3m 2 , but during
the British mandate period in Palestine (1917–
1948), it was changed into a metric dunum,
equal to 1000m 2 .
15. Kfar Hassidim is a settlement started by
a group of orthodox Jews led by a rabbi, all
originally from Poland. They were fleeing the
economic crisis and arrived in Mandatory Pal-
estine in 1924. Today, it has become a moshav,
an Israeli cooperative agricultural community
with 800 inhabitants, associating several indi-
vidual farms.
16.  See May Seikaly, Haifa: Transformation of
an Arab Society 1918–1939, London, IB Tau-
ris, 1995. p. 197. In 1925, the British allowed
Rutenberg to be in charge of the electrification
plan for Palestine, which would be a great help
to the development of settlements around Hai-
fa. He founded the Palestine Electric Compa-
ny, Ltd., which would later become the Israel
Electric Company, Ltd. He would also be in-
volved in the creation of the Haganah group of
Zionist fighters.
17. Ibrahim Touqan, brother of the poet-
ess Fadwa Touqan (two books published in
France: Le Rocher et la peine and Le cri de la
pierre, Asiathèque langues du monde, 1998), is
a nationalist poet who ignited Palestinian emo-
tions in the 1930s.
18. Since 2004, Ibrahim Touqan’s Mawtini
has become the national anthem of Iraq.
19. Suad Qaraman wrote two collections of
poems in Arabic: Hanin el Hazar and A’arisha
el Yasmine. She has also translated two novels
from English, one by William Cook, the other
by Rula Jebril.
20.  Shabtai Levy was the first Jewish mayor of
Haifa, between 1941 and 1951, following the
death of Hassan Bey Shukri. He was born in
Istanbul in 1876 and came to Palestine in 1894,
studied at Petah Tikva in the Palestine Jewish
Colonization Association (PJCA) and became a
lawyer. He settled in Haifa in 1905.
21. David Hacohen, Time To Tell: An Israeli
Life, 1898–1984, USA, Herzl Publication, Corn-
wall Books, 1985.
22. According to Catherine Lucas, in Pales-
tine, la dernière colonie?, EPO, 2003, from the
end of 1938, the militia of Wladimir Jabotin-
sky, founder of the revisionist IZL movement,
Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organ-
ization), carried out attacks, not only against
Arabs but also against the British administra-
tion. After the repression of the Arab Revolt
(1936–1939), the Irgun, a far-right faction,
withdrew from the Haganah. The majority of
the Zionist movement, under the leadership of
Ben-Gurion, would continue its collaboration
with the British and would take advantage of
this to continue to develop the Zionist army,
the Haganah.
23. The Haganah broadcast radio messag-
es announcing that the Day of Judgment
had arrived and calling on the population to
push those they termed “criminal foreigners”
(meaning the Palestinians) to leave Palestine.
Terrorizing the Palestinian Arab population by
military attacks, radio broadcasts, etc. was part
of their strategy.