3
Orit Bashkin*
University of Chicago
The Palestinian communist intellectual and novelist Emile Habibi (1922–1996) recalled the attempt on the part of Palestinian refugees to go back to their native city of Haifa after 1948 in the following terms:
In our alley, the search for those Arab women who had smuggled themselves in along with their children never ceased. Those women of the neighborhood who were registered used to take shifts at the top of the alley staircase to alert the rest whenever there was a search campaign. Among the residents of the neighborhood were two Jewish women, one Polish married to a Pole, the other from Tiberias, also married to a Pole. The latter spoke Arabic like a native – indeed, she was a native. She was humorous and, when it was her shift, used to alert everyone in a mock-Polish accented Arabic.1
Noticeably, the divisions between individuals in Habibi’s neighborhood have very little to do with religion. Rather, they are between those who are willing to help the Arab women in their clandestine return to Haifa, and those who are not. Habibi, however, identifies command of the Arabic language by Jews as an important sign of the joint struggle against the Israeli state. Knowledge of Arabic enables the Jewish woman from Tiberias to help her Arab neighbors, and Habibi, no stranger to creative usages of humor himself, also applauds her ability to master different variations of the language, in particular the Galilee-native and the corrupted, heavily accented Arabic of Ashkenazi Jews. Habibi’s attention to Arabic is reflective of a reality created in 1950s Israel, where Arab Jews were forced to decide whether or not they would continue using Arabic as their writing and speaking language. Intellectuals such as Habibi encouraged Arab Jews to write in Arabic, and hoped that the newcomers from Arab lands shared the concerns of the Palestinians who were forced to become Israeli citizens.2
The city of Haifa, moreover, represented a place to which Palestinians wanted, and needed, to return. This theme was also at the heart of another Palestinian masterpiece, Ghassan Kanafani’s (1936–72) Return to Haifa (ʿAʾid ila Hayfa, 1970). In the novella, parents are forced to abandon their son, Khaldun, in Haifa during the War of 1948, and to flee without him. Their other son, Khalid, wishes to become a fidaʾi, but encounters the resistance of his father. Only when the father realizes that his dreams of establishing a family with his lost son in Haifa will never be fulfilled does he begin to appreciate Khalid’s efforts and comprehend the importance of the armed struggle. Habibi, by contrast, focused his attention on another strategy: relying on those Palestinians who stayed in Haifa, and their potential allies, namely individuals who might help them in the struggle for dignity and citizenship rights. These groups also included Jews.3
One such group heeded Habibi’s call and continued writing in Arabic after their immigration to Israel. In this chapter I examine the activities of Iraqi Jewish intellectuals who were affiliated with the Israeli Communist Party (ICP) and the ways in which they maintained their Arab Jewish identity in Israel. I focus in particular on four Iraqi Jewish intellectuals: Sasson Somekh (b. 1933), David Semah (1933–97), Shim’on Ballas (b. 1930), and Sami Michael (b. 1926). These writers were born and educated in Baghdad, and arrived to Israel after 1948. Somekh, Semah, and Ballas wrote and published in Arabic before coming to Israel, while Ballas and Michael had been communists in Iraq. I demonstrate how Palestinian intellectuals, most notably Habibi, reached out to these new migrants and worked with them in an attempt to create a joint Palestinian-Arab-Jewish front against the liberal Israeli state.
The first part of the chapter locates the works of these intellectuals within the field of Arabic intellectual history and looks at the communist context in which they were active. The following two parts consider the ways in which Iraqi Jews and Palestinians challenge two central components of Zionist ideology, namely “the negation of exile” (shelilat ha-galut) and “the revival of Hebrew.” The texts I analyzed arrive from a variety of archives: some appeared in the Israeli-Palestinian print media (newspaper articles, short stories, and poems), while others were unofficial and semiofficial publications (leaflets, brochures, and pamphlets), which were written by Iraqi Jews and Palestinians and circulated amongst marginalized groups in Israeli society. Both types of sources reflect the intellectuals under study – creative and innovative writers and radical political actors.
Arabic Thought in the Radical Age and Arab Jewish Thought
The Palestinian and Iraqi Jewish writers whose works I explore were active in the Arab intellectual field of the late 1940s and 1950s. The assumption that the postwar era in the Middle East (often referred to as an “illiberal age”) was characterized exclusively by military dictatorships that stifled free and liberal thinking has caused scholars interested in the history of liberal and radical intellectual culture to focus their attention on the Nahda of the mid-nineteenth century until World War I and the interwar period. The Egyptian case, in particular, has been treated in depth, since its leading thinkers often proclaimed their uncontested commitment to the ideas of liberal democracy. Furthermore, following the rise of “political Islam” and the unfortunate flood of books on Islamic “fundamentalism” in the 2000s, it is sometimes claimed that Arab intellectual history is exemplified by genealogies of Islamist thought. This narrative begins with Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (or, even further back in time, the Wahhabiyya); continues through Rashid Rida, Hasan al-Banna, and Sayyid Qutb; and ends with contemporary Islamist thinkers. However, the construction of these genealogies at once decontextualized the works of those intellectuals, while also obscuring the importance of secular, Marxist, and nationalist thinkers of the 1940s and 1950s.
During these decades prominent Arab theorists and intellectuals formulated influential ideas about colonialism, nationalism, Marxism, socialism, and Thirdworldism. The revolutions in the Arab world (especially the Nasserist movement) inspired novelists, poets, and painters, all of whom experimented with new genres and modes. Philosophically, the translations of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) into Arabic as well as discussions about the commitment of the writer to his/her public, marked in Arabic by the word iltizam (commitment), have altered perceptions regarding the relationships between the intellectual and the community.4 Palestinian intellectuals, and, to a certain degree, Arab Jewish intellectuals often acted within this context as what Edward Said has called “public intellectuals,” namely, individuals who articulated an opinion to, as well as for, a specific public; challenged well-accepted conventions and dogmas on the basis of universal and ethical principles; and operated outside the realm of state, thus rejecting exposure to institutionalized ideologies. Indeed for many Palestinian and Arab-Jewish intellectuals, the act of writing itself was conceptualized as an act of rebellion.5
As noted, the postwar works I study were written mostly by Arab Jews. Broadly speaking, Arab Jewish intellectual history during the 1940s and 1950s corresponds to broader trends and developments throughout the Arab world. As far back as the Nahda, Muslim and Christian thinkers alike protested the persecution of Jews in Europe and published essays on Jewish history, the Jewish religion, and Semitic linguistics. Jurji Zaydan encouraged the translation of the Talmud into Arabic; Farah Antun wrote a pro-Jewish novel called The New Jerusalem; and Rashid Rida defended Alfred Dreyfus in al-Manar. When writing on these topics, Arab intellectuals often underlined the fact that Europe, seeking to represent itself as the beacon of justice and democracy, was treating its own minorities in an appalling fashion. As some of these accounts were also responding to a pan-Islamic discourse of which one element was a concern for the welfare of Muslims living under Christian rule, calling attention to discrimination against Jews in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans fit well into this pan-Islamic agenda because it pointed up the hypocrisy of ostensibly liberal and tolerant Christian regimes. On the other hand, Christian intellectuals who favored citizenship rights not based on religion condemned the mistreatment of the Jews outside the Ottoman Empire, a critique that dovetailed with their campaign to promote civic equality within the Ottoman realm.6
Jews themselves engaged with these ideas. Lital Levy’s work has shown that Jewish intellectuals internalized the modernist discourses typical of contemporary Arabic print culture, with which they were often directly involved. Citing a range of examples from the famous Egyptian playwright Yaʿqub Sanuʿ to Jewish rabbis in Baghdad and Jerusalem, Levy demonstrates how the Nahda transformed the Jews’ sense of identity and framed their location in the modern world.7 Like many of their peers, Jewish intellectuals championed Ottomanism as a political option and showed their support for the 1908 Constitutional Revolution. During the interwar period, Jews suffered as a consequence of the unfolding conflict in Palestine. Yet up until 1948 many considered themselves patriots loyal to the Arab countries in which they lived.8
Iraqi Jews were probably the most integrated community within the Arab Middle East, and Iraqi Jewish intellectuals identified with nahdawi causes before but especially after World War I. Iraq’s primarily urban Jewish community (numbering around 150,000 in 1951) figured prominently in that nation’s Arabic culture and literature. In the interwar period, many Iraqi Jews embraced the causes of Arab nationalism and Iraqi patriotism, as middle-class Jewish men joined the ranks of the urban middle classes (the effendiyya), studied Arabic in schools, and read cultural journals, newspapers, poetry collections, and narrative prose in Arabic. During the 1940s, many young Jews, men and women alike, joined the Iraqi Communist Party. They identified radical and right-wing Arab nationalism with the support some Pan-Arab nationalists showed to Nazism and Fascism during the war, and resented the influence of Great Britain in Iraq and the social conservatism its national elites. They sought a political option that would allow them to critique the Iraqi state, while remaining loyal to the Iraqi people, and found it in communism. Jews were cell members, union leaders, and party secretaries and took part in the party’s translation and educational efforts.9 The Iraqi Communist Party used the term “Arab-Jew” in its publications and its members theorized about its meaning. The Iraqi League for Combating Zionism (ʿUsbat mukafahat al-sahyuniyya), which was established by Jewish intellectual Yusuf Harun Zilkha (b. 1921) in 1946 and included mostly communist Jews, argued that Zionism was a colonial movement which sought to banish the Palestinian natives from their homeland, and imperiled Jewish communities in other Arab countries by equating Judaism with Zionism.10
The visions of the Iraqi Jewish communists failed. As part of a brutal anticommunist campaign conducted by the Iraqi state in 1948–1949, many Jewish communists were arrested and jailed, and some were even stripped of their citizenship. Beginning in 1950, the state of Israel began to negotiate with the Iraqi government about the fate of Jewish community in its entirety. Many of the matters relating to Iraqi-Jewish life, especially the community’s property and the citizenship rights of its members, were decided in clandestine negotiations between the Iraqi and the Israeli governments, negotiations that Iraqi Jews had no ability to control. Within Iraq, some right-wing nationalists argued that the pro-Palestinian Iraqi position ought to be translated into a policy of treating Jewish citizens as Israel had treated the Palestinians. More ominously, established politicians among Iraqi’s pro-British elite used the Jews as convenient scapegoats in order to avoid discussing Iraq’s socioeconomic conditions. The community thus stood no chance. Most of its members, including the most radical anti-Zionists, left for Israel.11
Iraqi Jews went to Israel with virtually no money because of legislation passed in 1951 that froze most of their assets in Iraq. The state of Israel, for its part, had no financial means to absorb them.12 As most of the houses taken from the Palestinians had been given away to immigrants who had arrived earlier, in 1948–1949, most Iraqi Jews found themselves in transit camps (ma’abarot, s. ma’abarah), alongside migrants from Poland, Iran, Romania, Yemen, and other countries. In 1951, 100 camps held 212,000 people, 80,000 of whom were Iraqis.13 Iraqi Jews now lived in horrendous poverty; the sanitary conditions in the camps were unsatisfactory at best, and prospects of finding employment were bleak. Many migrants have depicted the meager food rations, their suffering from the cold during the winters of the early 1950s, and their disappointment at the gloomy reality they encountered in Israel. Most migrants, before leaving these camps, had to “progress” within the transit camp itself: first they lived in tents, with no furniture; then they transferred to better tents (badon); and finally they moved into small wooden shacks. In addition to the loss of social status, families could not communicate well with the other residents of the camps who came from European countries, nor with fellow Israelis, because they lacked knowledge of Hebrew. Finally, Iraqi Jewish families faced discrimination by the state because of their Middle Eastern origins and their Arab culture.
In response to these conditions, an important group of Iraqi Jewish intellectuals and activists, men in their twenties and thirties, joined the ICP or affiliated themselves with its cultural publications. The ICP or MAKI (Ha-Miflaga Ha-Kumunistit Ha-Yisraelit, al-hizb al-shuyuʿi al-israʿili) had its roots in the Mandate period. Like other communist parties, it supported the partition of historic Palestine into two states; some of its members, in fact, signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence. During the 1950s, Communist Party members – Jews, Muslims, and Christians – consistently challenged state policies relating to the Palestinian and migrant Jewish populations, especially the military regime under which Palestinians lived, the land confiscations of the Arab citizens of the state, and, Israel’s decision to embark on war with Britain and France, against Egypt, in 1956. In the 1950s, it won some 20 percent of votes in slums, poor cities, and especially the transit camps, where many Iraqis lived.14
Some Iraqi Jews became communists after coming to Israel while others had been communists in Iraq. Most were already deeply immersed in Arab culture in Iraq. Being the only legal non-Zionist organization in Israel, the ICP emerged as the most important political organization for the Palestinians who remained in Israel. For Iraqi Jews (as well other citizens of the new state), challenging Zionism and especially the governing labor party, Mifleget Po’aley Eretz Yisrael,“the party of the workers of the Land of Israel” (MAPAI), was an almost impossible mission. MAPAI controlled the transit camps through the Jewish Agency, the pre-state Zionist organization charged with the absorption of the Iraqis, and the organization that administered daily life in the camps. It was extremely difficult to find a job without belonging to the Histadrut, MAPAI’s umbrella labor union that united numerous smaller unions. Often, an immigrant who chose to become an ICP member was denied housing or employment. MAPAI also responded to individuals participating in sit-ins and other forms of protest with violence.
The ICP, however, offered certain advantages for Iraqi Jews. Like all parties in Israel, it quickly recognized the significance of the Iraqi newcomers as potential voters. The positions of the party were encapsulated in a poem that appeared in Kol Ha-’Am (The Voice of the People), the party’s Hebrew newspaper, summing up what Israel’s Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, gave to the different sectors in Israeli society:
What would he give the [poor] neighborhoods?
Instead of housing: thousands of graves …
We have heard nonsense about freedom as well,
The same one that Truman gives the blacks!
We have closed down Arabs in Ghettos,
Clearly, the signs of Western equality!15
Here the groups courted by the ICP are specified: the poor Jews crammed in slums and transit camps and Israel’s Palestinian population. Its leaders also hoped that the newcomers’ bitterness resulting from their horrendous living conditions would make them more receptive to the party’s views. The ICP thus demanded fair working conditions for all citizens, the evacuation of the transit camps, and the building of neighborhoods for the newcomers, and in the meantime, it made sure each camp had decent drinking water, basic sanitation facilities, a telephone, and fair representation of all its residents in its local committees.16 The ICP had far less qualms about communicating in the languages of the Jewish Diaspora, and published pamphlets in Romanian, Yiddish, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Persian, French, and many other languages. Arabic was a very important language for the ICP; it was the mother tongue of both its Palestinian members and the Jewish migrants from the Arab Middle East, and therefore the party printed pamphlets and notices in Arabic. The bilingual ICP members (Hebrew/Arabic) were able to translate Hebrew notices in the camps regarding food stamps, education, and other messages that the state had posted – in a language the newcomers did not understand. While MAPAI and other Zionist parties printed journals in Arabic, the communist Arabic press, namely, the newspaper al-Ittihad (The Union) and the literary journal al-Jadid (The New), were far bolder in terms of their willingness to challenge the state’s ideology.17
The communist press, in both Hebrew and Arabic, took it upon itself to cover the harsh socioeconomic conditions in the transit camps. Al-Ittihad featured a special column called “in the camps of the newcomers” (fi mukhayyamat al-qadimin al-judad). The word mukhayyam (“camp” in Arabic), unlike the Hebrew word used for a transit camp, ma’abara (pl. ma’barot; maʿabir in the Arabized plural), created important semantic connotations between the situation of Iraqi Jews and those of the Palestinians in exile, although al-Ittihad took notice of the differences between the two groups. Later, the Hebrew words ma’abara and ma’abarot appeared more frequently in al-Ittihad. Reporters in both al-Ittihad and Kol Ha-’Am expressed their sympathy for the agony of the newcomers. Sami Michael, who was on the editorial board of al-Ittihad, contributed many items about the camps, using his pen name, Samir al-Marid (“Samir the rebel”). Al-Ittihad reported that the newcomers got no clothes for months, that some went without getting a piece of soap for a long period of time, and that they suffered from a shortage in basic necessities and lacked medical treatment.18 Nonetheless, even within the ICP, the Ashkenazi leadership had a very problematic relationship with Iraqi Jews; none of them ever became a part its politburo and the party’s Knesset members were either Ashkenazi or Palestinian.
Negating the Negation: Iraq and Israel
Zionist ideology assumed that the progressive state of Israel represented the opposite of the Jewish experience in Iraq. More broadly, a key ideological feature of Zionist ideology was “the negation of exile” (shelilat ha-galut), a concept suggesting that Jewish life in the Diaspora was typified by cultural, political, and social failures. Jews could never be fully integrated into the societies in which they lived, because of anti-Semitism, and only in their native land, Israel, under Jewish autonomy and statehood, could they manifest their national lives in fullness. Thus, Jewish existence could only be territorial, in a space where the connections between the ancient Israel’s past and its Zionist present undo the abnormal life of the Diaspora.19
Iraqi Jewish communists, however, were not committed to these temporalities, since their Marxist perceptions of liberation and emancipation were based on parameters relating to class and not on place; the “return” to the Israeli homeland had thus very little to do with reviving ancient Jewish history. Moreover, to Iraqi Jewish intellectuals, it was the existing state of Israel, and not the Iraqi “exile,” which appeared to be the abnormal space, often seen as outside the realm of history. Other communist publications denied the uniqueness of the Jewish-Israeli experience by comparing Israel to Iraq and pointing the similarities between the two states. Thus, just as Iraq, despite its claims, could not have been called a true democracy because of its discriminatory policies towards minorities and commitment to British interests, neither could Israel, which discriminated against both the Arab minority and the Jewish newcomers from Arab countries. It was a democracy in name only.
The comparison between Iraq and Israel was articulated in a pamphlet addressed to the people of the transit camp in Holon, in which Iraqi communists called on all the noble people (shurafaʾ) to resist Israel’s attempts of terror and starvation.20 When Iraqi Jews wanted to join the ICP they referred to their activities in Iraq. Eliyahu Cohen and Avraham Cohen noted in their application letters to the ICP that they had been persecuted by the Iraqi regime as communists as a way of establishing their communist credentials in Israel.21 A group of communists, all Iraqis, which included David Semah and Shimon Ballas (under the pen name al-adib al-qass, the intellectual and writer) circulated a pamphlet that reminded Iraqi Jews how Iraqi communists had stood up to fascism and anti-Semitism, while those who called themselves Iraqi patriots accused the communists of being traitors and Zionists. These phenomena reoccurred in Israel where the ICP was perceived as traitorous because it fought the state’s ethnic nationalism.22
In 1949, Sami Michael published an article, “[W]ho persecutes Iraqi Jews?” which contended that the Iraqi regime aided by the British had attacked the Jews, yet Jews and Muslims had worked together in Iraq. Michael paid special heed to the case of Sha’ul Tuwaiq, a Jewish communist and a member of the League for Combating Zionism, who was martyred while demonstrating against British policies in Palestine; he described the delegations from Kazimiyya and Najaf who came to identify with the Jewish family that had lost their son. Michael also recalled an Iraqi Muslim cleric who called on his flock to kill every Jew they met; a young Muslim girl who stood beside him spat in the cleric’s face and said: “[W]e, and the Jews, want bread, work, and democracy.” Michael hailed the heroism of Iraqi women, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, which he contrasted with the opportunism of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said’s (referring to his term during January–December 1949) regime. He ended his article by saying:
A final word, to certain elements in Israel; as a Jew who lived twenty-two years in Iraq, I saw … that the oppressors of the Jews [in Iraq] were not the people. This is utterly impossible, because the enemies of the very same people are the ones who oppressed the Jews. I lived amongst, worked with, and fought for, this people. I know them. Their sons are good and brave.23
The Iraqi identity of Michael gave him the expertise, as an insider, to testify to the fact that the Iraqi people, unlike the regime, were neither racist nor anti-Semitic. That Jews, Muslims, and Christians had worked together against colonialism, Western imperialism, and Zionism was meaningful not only for the Iraqi context, but also for the Israeli one.
Iraqi Jews projected their conceptual framework for understanding politics onto the Israeli scene. Musa Huri wrote that when faced with protests in the transit camps, the Israeli government began to speak of an “Iraqi problem.” The problem, however, was the entire state of Israel – its taxation system, its lack of social services, its poverty, and, more broadly, its loyal service to its imperialist masters at the expense of its citizens. The solution to the plight of the Iraqis should be comprehensive, for if Iraqis alone were identified as a “problem,” a new sectarianism (taʾifiyya) would be created in Israel.24 Huri used a highly loaded word from the Iraqi, Syrian, and Lebanese contexts – sectarianism – to indicate that splitting the struggle between Jews and Arabs would yield no results.
The Iraqi Jewish communists had to work hard within their own party in order to draw parallels between Iraq and Israel, and to convey ideas and thoughts about their previous homeland and the Middle East more generally. Shim’on Ballas reports that informing the Israeli public about events in the Arab world was a difficult task not only because of the self-imposed ignorance of Zionist circles, but also with respect the ICP’s Jewish leadership: “Back then I realized the role I, and people like me, had to fulfill, in order to diminish the wall of foreignness buffering between Israel and the Arab world.” This was a complex role, and a frustrating one, especially since building this bridge was done when Ballas was living in a transit camp, having lost all sense of privacy he once had “whether inside the tent or the wooden shack or outside of it.”25 In 1955, Ballas managed to convince the initially reluctant editorial board of Kol Ha-’Am to publish his essay on Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (a man few had heard about), and he later became the newspaper’s reporter on Arab affairs. In 1956, based on his reading of al-Jumhuriya and al-Ahram as well as other sources, he dared to critique Gamal Abdel Nasser’s stance towards the communists. The editor of the newspaper was displeased:
“Who made you the critic of Nasser? Have you heard such a criticism from one of the leaders of the party?” When I tried to explain that I was merely quoting from statements of Egyptian communists themselves, he did not let me finish my words: “How do you know they are communists and not provocateurs? Has Pravda written about this trial? Have you read about this in L’humanité?”26
Nonetheless, thanks to the efforts of Ballas and Michael, Kol Ha-’Am included reports on Iraq; it published stories on political prisoners in Iraq, on Nuri al-Sa’id’s campaigns against the communists (during the terms in office in 1949, 1950–52, 1954–57), and on the histories of the Wathba (Leap Forward) (1948, a series of grass-roots demonstrations against the state’s pro-British politics and its unjust social regime) and the Intifada (1952, another series of mass demonstrations in Baghdad), citing such Iraqi newspapers as the social-democratic Sada al-Ahali and the communist al-Qaʿida.
The celebration of the shared interests of Iraqis, Israelis, and Palestinians found its expression in the translation of a poem by Muhammad Salih Bahr al-ʿUlum. A 1955 pamphlet, printed by the ICP and written by Sasson Somekh, included the following introduction, which established the poet’s credentials as a committed poet:
Muhammad Sadir Bahr al-’Ulum is one of the Iraq’s greatest popular progressive poets [living] today. He has suffered for years from cruel persecution by the regime. During the days of the anti-imperialist uprising of 1948, his revolutionary poems were chanted by everyone, and the poet was tortured severely in the dungeons of the police, which led to the collapse of his health and ignited a public outcry in the Iraqi community. He was released because of popular pressure; today he is yet again imprisoned in the jail of Nuqrat al-Salman in Southern Iraq, from where he sends his blessing to the people in Israel.
The poem itself speaks about the friendships between peoples tortured by tyrants hostile to freedom; these tyrants abhor peace as their regimes are founded on war and bloodshed. Yet both peoples should struggle for a common future, lest darkness prevail. The poem vowed that Jews and Arabs are “stronger from this war / and from the ploys of the merchants of death.”27
It is not entirely clear how Bahr al-ʿUlum learned about the Iraqi Jews in the ICP; most likely he came to know about them from Jewish communists jailed with him in Iraq. Of great importance, however, is the mediation of Somekh, which enabled the ICP’s Jewish members to understand this poem. The ICP’s most noted intellectual, poet Alexander Penn, read the poem in Somekh’s translation and replied with a poem of his own, in Hebrew.
The attempts to link Israel and Iraq were also made by Palestinian intellectuals in the party, Emile Habibi most prominently. Habibi wrote about the Iraqi Communist Party, mentioning that his Iraqi friends had told him about the heroism of its leader, Yusuf Salman Yusuf, who was executed in 1949. He then wrote: “[W]e bow our heads in the memory of Yusuf Salman and his friends, the victims of imperialism and reaction, and pledge to avenge those who killed them.”28 Habibi and fellow communist Tawfiq Tubi addressed the question of Jewish property in Iraq, as the representatives of the ICP in the Knesset, and the communist press reported on the freezing of Jewish property in Iraq and about the resistance in Iraq and in the Iraqi parliament to this action.29 In his speech to the Knesset Tubi said that this was a racist act directed against the will of the Iraqi people.30 Habibi condemned “the hangman” Nuri al-Saʿid and identified the move as a part of a persecution campaign, yet at the same time argued that instead of caring for the Iraqi Jews who had come to Israel, MAPAI and the Israeli right-wing party Herut (Freedom) had manipulated the situation in order to confiscate more Palestinian property.31
Habibi not only addressed Iraqi Jews in writing, but also spoke to them directly. The ICP held meetings at the transit camps that were attended by many Iraqis.32 Habibi attended these meetings, where he won the sympathy of the Jewish audiences. In a meeting held in the camp in Rechovot which included several speakers, Habibi spoke of the merits of agency. The newcomers, he said, should take matters into their own hands; they should struggle and they should vote; the worst they can do is to come to terms with their horrible living conditions. According to the report in al-Ittihad, the audience responded with laughing, clapping, and cheering.33 While Habibi went to this meeting as a politician seeking votes, his ability to communicate in Arabic with Iraqi Jews turned to be a great advantage. Shim’on Ballas describes the meetings in which Habibi participated as “delightful,” because Habibi would talk to people during the intermissions between speeches, and use his famous sense of humor to convey his ideas.34 Habibi’s literary talents also attracted Sasson Somekh and David Semah, who both felt that Habibi “was our kind of writer – a witty master of the treasures of the classical language, but one who did not shy away from employing the basics of spoken Arabic.” The two read Habibi’s writings on Marxist literature with great interest and very much identified with what he wrote.35
In 1951, the Israeli right-wing party Herut (Freedom) orchestrated a demonstration in Tiberias calling for the execution of two Arabs in Israel for every Jew killed in Iraq. Following this demonstration, Habibi published a long opinion column in Kol Ha-’Am, in which he underscored the fact that Herut, whose hands were soaked in the blood of Arab women and children (referencing Deir Yassin in particular), had taken advantage of the ignorance of the Iraqi newcomers. This art of propagandistic deception, in the tradition of Goebbels, would fail, however, because the migrants from Iraq were victims themselves, and therefore “were the last people on earth to march under the imperialist slogans of the criminal Herut.” Herut and Nuri al-Saʿid, Habibi wrote, were both enslaved by the same imperialist masters, who were responsible for “the pure Jewish blood spilled in Iraq by the butcher Nuri al-Saʿid.” Habibi called Iraqi Jews to remember the racist demonstrations that the Iraqi al-Istiqlal (Independence) Party organized against the Jewish citizens, and the similarity between the two parties: “Liberty [Herut] here, and Independence [istiqlal] there, both share the same language, shared by fascists everywhere.” The Iraqi migrants, Habibi wrote, had been abandoned by the Israeli government, consigning them to unemployment and despair. Nonetheless, anti-Arab racism was not the solution. In fact, in response to Herut’s actions “the masses in Israel should declare firmly and resolutely: this land is the Israel of its workers and not Hitler’s Germany or America of the ‘lynching worshipers.’”36 Although Herut had been labeled “fascist” by other Zionist parties in Israel, including MAPAI (whose leader, Ben Gurion, had also compared Begin to Hitler37), Habibi used these historical references to convince the Iraqi Jews that they had much in common with the Palestinians. The article also expressed Habibi’s hope that the Arabs and Iraqi Jews could engage in a different conversation about citizenship and human rights. And that conversation was indeed carried out, in the literary works of Ballas, Somekh, Semah, and Michael, and in the writings of Habibi himself.
Iltizam at Work: Resisting in Arabic
The second domain in which Iraqi Jews challenged prevailing Israeli assumptions about the nature of the state was their refusal, or at least hesitance, to write in Hebrew. Zionist thinkers reviewed Hebrew as a language through which the national project was to be revived. While Arabic was acknowledged as an official state language, Jewish migrants were encouraged to forsake the languages of the Diaspora, such as Yiddish, Ladino, and Arabic. Hebrew was considered a revived ancient language, whose usage, especially in the print media, was connected to the normalization of the state as a Jewish homeland. Furthermore, after 1948, many of the Arabic names of sites in the new state were changed from their Arabic original into Hebrew, in order to create an ancient geography that would erase the Palestine past, while at the same time linking the Jews to their ancient birthplace.38 Iraqi Jews, however, refused to relegate Arabic to the Diasporic sphere. For them, it was a political statement, a way of keeping their Arab-Jewish culture alive, and a vital channel through which to connect with the Palestinians. It reflected their refusal to turn their backs to the Arab cultures of their past, to their vitality and their richness, and a refusal to see the Jewish state as the sole source for their cultural creativity.
Generally speaking, Iraqi Jewish writers believed in the theory of iltizam, committed literature inspired by the notion of engagement innovated by Sartre, which called on writers to engage in politics and use their literary gifts for the sake of society. Sami Michael argued in favor of social realism, maintaining, “realism in literature obliges the immigrant writers to deal with the problems facing the masses that surround them.”39 In his essay about the communist poet Alexander Penn, Somekh compared Penn to Mayakovsky, Aragon, Neruda, and Hikmet. Penn’s image was constructed as a revolutionary who paid a price for his anti-imperialist commitments and his engagement with themes pertinent to “the souls of the Jewish workers.” Penn “stood against the current” by refusing to believe that in order for the Jewish worker to thrive, he needed to banish the Arab worker from the labor market. Penn was also committed to seeing another Israel, one that belonged to the East and in which Arabs and Jews were brothers and partners, whereas most Israeli poets, even the most innovative, preferred seeing the Arab as an enemy, or in “a romanticized, Scheherazade-like” fashion (nazariyya romantikiyya shaharazadiyya).40 More significant than Somekh’s description of Penn himself was the way in which he understood his work; he was a man deeply committed to the revolutionary struggle and to Arab-Jewish camaraderie. Interestingly, Somekh chose to reflect on this Hebrew poet not in the pages of the communist Hebrew press, but rather in al-Jadid.
The Iraqi-Jewish literary activity in Arabic originated with the Club of the Friends of Arabic Literature in Israel (later The Hebrew-Arabic Literary Club), whose members called for cooperation between Arab and Jewish writers “despite the barriers of bloodletting.” The club was established thanks to the efforts of Somekh, Semah, and Ballas. In March 1954, Somekh and Semah wrote a letter to al-Jadid:
We are from Iraq and were previously engaged in Arabic literature. Several of us published poems and stories in Iraq and in Israel … But we quickly tired of the decadent bourgeois culture. Therefore, we entirely abandoned this kind of literature and turned towards a militant literature that was free of decadent influences. However our association with Arabic literary circles since came to a halt. Some of us stopped writing while others nearly gave up the possibility of someday writing Arabic literature again. Then along came al-Jadid and infused us with a real sense of hope.41
The two ended their letter asking for permission to establish a club associated with al-Jadid that would bring them closer to Arabic literature. Al-Jadid’s editorial board responded to this call: Jabra Nicola, the editor, and Sami Michael came from Haifa and held a meeting in Semah’s home with Somekh, Ballas, and other Iraqis. The group discussed the almost unbridgeable gap between the Arabic literature produced in Israel and that produced in other Arab countries, due to the fact that Israel was essentially at war with all of its Arab neighbors. Writers held further meetings during 1954, the minutes of which were published in al-Jadid.42 Ballas, Somekh, and Semah also decided to publish in al-Jadid and invited more Iraqis to do so.43 Ballas explained, “I stressed that Arabic is a fundamental component in our identity as human beings, and in that we are no different than other people in the region, and therefore we should preserve this identity in our writings.”44 Nevertheless, when Ballas shared his cultural dilemmas concerning which language he needed to write in with one of the party’s Ashkenazi Jewish intellectuals, Woolf Erlich, he was told that it would be “natural” for him to relate to the Arabs; “But the Arabs are [now] sitting in camps outside the border, and those who remained [here] are jailed under military rule … You are also different than the rest of the newcomers who dwell with you in the transit camps.” Finally he was advised that what really mattered was content, not language; he was told to reread Lenin.45 Ballas decided to continue writing in Arabic.
Communist poets (unlike the poets in the Zionist Arabic press) were interested in “free verse” (al-shiʿr al-hurr), especially the Jews, who had already been exposed the innovative works of poets such as Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (1926–64).46 They likewise used their writings in Arabic to inform fellow Palestinians about cultural and political developments in Iraq. Iraqi-Jewish writer Ibrahim al-Khayyat (who was a graduate of the Teachers’ College [Dar al-Muʿallimin] in Baghdad) wrote in al-Ittihad about committed, anti-colonial Iraqi poetry. He reviewed the neoclassical poetry of Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawarhiri, as well as the poets who mocked the monarchy, and discussed the great importance that Iraqis, especially the youth, ascribed to poets such as al-Sayyab and Buland al-Haydari.47 Al-Jadid did likewise, publishing articles on the theme by Arab intellectuals such as the Lebanese Islamist-Marxist Husayn Muruwwa.48 The journal printed a story about a poetry reading that the communists held to commemorate the Wathba49 and published Semah’s poem, al-Wathba al-ula (“The First Wathba”) in which the speaker yearned for a second Wathba and, more broadly, for a revolution.50 After the anti-monarchic revolution of 1958 in Iraq, led by ʿAbd al-Karim Qasim, with the freedom granted to Iraqi communists, more items were printed in al-Jadid about Iraq and its literature. For the Iraqi-Jewish communists 1958 signified a dream come true; communist activist Nesia Shafran even recalls that some Iraqis considered migrating back to Iraq when Qasim came into power.51 They thus wrote more on the culture of their country after the revolution.52 The poetry of the communist Iraqi bard ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, who wrote extensively on the sufferings of the Palestinian refugees and his commitment to them as a progressive poet, now appeared in al-Jadid; the paper printed “Barbed Wire,” one of Bayyati’s most celebrated poems, on the pain of the refugees.53
Iraqi Jews also used the Arabic language in order to protest the conditions of the Palestinians who now became Israeli citizens. The Palestinian-Iraqi-Jewish alliance crystallized during the massacre in Kafr Qasim. On October 29, 1956, on the eve of the war against Egypt, the Arab population, already under a military regime that severely limited its movement, was declared to be under curfew from 5 p.m. until 6 a.m. (normally curfew started at 9 p.m.). The villagers of Kafr Qasim, who did not know of the change in the hours of curfew and were found outside their homes, were shot at close range by the Israeli Border Brigades. Forty-nine people were killed. Israeli censorship prevented the publication of the story; when communist Knesset members protested, their comments were taken out of the minutes. Following a decision of an investigation committee convened later, the Border Patrol brigade and its commander were tried and convicted for killing the victims in cold blood. Some received substantial prison sentences that were later reduced (the last of the convicted was released at the beginning of 1960, less than a year and half after the trial). Three weeks after the massacre ICP members Meir Wilner and Tawfiq Tubi went beyond police barriers and interviewed the survivors. They tried to publish their findings in the media but were censored. Tubi then sent by mail the report to hundreds of individuals in Israel.54
Many of those killed were teenagers and children (twenty-two were under the age of eighteen). Some families lost more than one member: a forty-five-year-old mother and her seventeen-year-old daughter, a thirty-year-old father and his twelve-year-old son, and two teenagers, a brother and a sister, were listed amongst the casualties. Shortly after the slaughter took place, David Semah published his poem: “He Shall Return” (Sawfa yaʿudu), which was dedicated to the people of Kafr Qasim. The poem was constructed as a dialogue between a mother and her daughter, who asks the mother repeatedly where her father is. The mother imagines a few returns. Initially, she answers that the father shall return.
Yes, he shall return,
A father, a beloved companion,
And in his hand a bouquet of roses
Engulfing our souls with their perfumes
Then the mother says the father is about to return; he is in a faraway place, “Like the salvaging, blissful dawn.” Next, she feels that he might return,
His hands handcuffed with iron bars,
Because he went to the village
To work for no pay,
He might return one day,
Only to leave us anew
Finally, the daughter confronts her mother, telling her that her not to lie and face the truth. The daughter confesses that she had heard the neighbors saying that the father was killed; “My father will never return!”55 The mother then admits that the father is dead. Yet she pleads with her daughter to cease crying. Tomorrow, she prophesies, crowds will appear in the city, pour into the streets, and ignite a revolution against the oppressors that will bring an end to their miseries. The poems ends with the exact same lines the mother had begun with, depicting the father returning with perfumed roses, yet the meaning of this return at the end of the poem is entirely different.
The poem is a literary triumph in many ways, as Semah manages to capture the naiveté of the daughter, while at the same time indicating that she is the one who knew all along the fate of her father. Moreover, the changes in the mother’s consciousness are constructed through the careful use of the Arabic verb yaʿudu (sawfa yaʿudu, qad yaʿudu, yaʿudu): these changes in tense and mood depict the transformation of the mother from a passive woman imagining that her dead husband shall return to a political subject willing to fight to uproot the system that led to his murder. While other Palestinian poets commemorated the women and children massacred, Semah chose not to write about the dead women and children, but about those who survived. Reuven Snir, the literary scholar who rediscovered the poem and was the first to point to its enormous significance, points to the parallels between this poem and “The Rabbi’s Daughter and Her Mother” by the Zionist poet Saul Tchernichovsky (1875–1943), a poem depicting the murderous pogroms against Ukrainian Jews in the years 1648–1649, since both poems are constructed as a poetic dialogue between a mother and her daughter in the context of mass murder.56 If indeed Semah knew Tchernichovsky’s poem, he drew a parallel between the massacre in Kafr Qasim and the horrors of the Holocaust, to which Tchernichovsky’s work was written as a response. However, Snir’s analysis did not take into account the centrality of the idea of return as related to the Palestinian right of return, a theme which appeared in poems written in Iraq, in particular those of ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati.57 The perception that the return should not be conceptualized as the return of individuals but should occur as a result of a political struggle that would ensure the rights of the Palestinians circulated in the Arabic literary culture of time and was also conveyed in Semah’s words. Thus, the similarities between Semah’s poem and poems written at the time by Palestinians such as Samih al-Qasim relate to a political culture that underscored the commonalities between oppressive political cultures in the Middle East and the ability of intellectuals of all religions to challenge them.
Iraqi Jewish writers also functioned as cultural mediators between Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking audiences. Their writing in Hebrew, especially their translations, brought to the Ashkenazi readership’s attention an Arab culture that many were unfamiliar with, although their efforts were marked by a partial failure to get their message across to the Zionist intellectual elite. This became evident in October 1958 during a meeting in Tel Aviv that brought together Zionist and Palestinian poets. Somekh was assigned to translate three Arabic poems, written by Palestinian poets Rashid Husayn, Hanna Abu-Hanna, and ʿIssa Loubani, into Hebrew. Husayn’s poem was addressed to his “Jewish friend who asked me why I never portray the kibbutz and moshav in my poetry.” His answer was simple: “You forget, dear brother, you have locked me out / Do you want me to be a liar and a ludicrous fool?” Abu-Hanna’s poem about an infatuated villager applauded the people of the Galilee: “Oh my country, the struggle of a proud and steadfast people / Who have learned from suffering the meaning of bravery.” Loubani’s poem, also set in the Galilee, depicted villagers rebelling against the wicked who took over their lands. After the poems were read the response was total silence. The conversations that ensued later were not particularly interesting; one Israeli poet contrasted the Syrian calls for war with the Jewish desire for peace, while another Jewish bard was willing to acknowledge the Arabs only as part of the exquisite landscape of the land. Despite Somekh’s best efforts to function as a mediator, there was little desire, by the hegemonic society, to hear what the Palestinian intellectuals had to say.58
As committed writers, Iraqi Jews wrote Arabic short stories based on actual events in the hope of galvanizing the new Iraqi immigrants. Sami Michael’s works in particular bore witness to Iraqi practices of resistance. During the 1950s, Iraqi Jews staged protests, sit-ins, strikes, and demonstrations (often organized by the ICP) in many transit camps and major cities in Israel. Demonstrators often made specific demands, mostly for housing and employment, yet they also attempted to break down the invisibility of the transit camps and make them, and the sufferings of their residents, known to the Israeli public.59
The demonstrations in the big cities were also seen as a response to misrepresentations of the newcomers in the mainstream Israeli media. The unofficial newspaper Sarkhat al-Maʿabarot protested a film that showed residents in the camps playing cards and drinking, while Michael himself disputed the representations of Mizrahi Jews as criminals in al-Ittihad. A similar concern about representation was articulated by a fourteen-year-old girl who refused to let a reporter take her photo for a story he wrote on the transit camp in Talpiot, saying:
We know you; you take our picture; [you photograph] our poverty and our shacks made of tin; then, you send the pictures to America and get money that should be ours, but we do not see it. It disappears, and we continue living in shacks made of tin and cloth, while you build for yourselves neighborhoods and houses.60
Sami Michael covered many of these sit-ins as a reporter. A resident of Haifa, he took upon himself to tell the story of a tragic incident that led to a major demonstration in his city, which shocked many in Israel and received coverage in the Hebrew and Arabic press. In the transit camp of David, near Haifa, three children were burned alive when a fire broke out in their tent: Najah, twelve years old, Eliyahu, eight years old, and Najd, six years old, were killed. The father, ‘Aziz Shemesh, thirty-eight years of age, called for help and the residents threw sand on the shack. Two people, a Romanian and an Iraqi, tried to break in, but there was no water in the water tanks in the camps. ‘Aziz, who was a widower, had been given permission to send the children to an educational institution in a kibbutz, but his children died before that could happen. The father then tried to commit suicide, but was saved by the people in the camp. He was later hospitalized in Haifa where he tried to commit suicide again.
The press covered this event and the state offered to help, but there responses came too late.61 A demonstration of 6000 people, communists, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, the people of the camp, and other communist activists, protested the brutal and tragic deaths.
To capture the event, Michael published the story al-Hariq (“The Fire”), one of his best works in Arabic. The text recounts the fire in the camp, paying less attention to the stories of the victims and more attention to the camp as a whole. It opens with a young man named Meir entering the camp and finding his blind neighbor cursing his wife, Masʿuda, who decides to leave him at home as she rushes to help the children. The story, which begins with Masʿuda’s movement, captures the themes of passivity (blind husband) and activity (wife) to indicate that passivity is no longer an option. In the opening scene, the intensity of the fire is mediated to readers through the questions of the camp dwellers, as the narrator depicts those who rushed to help the children; first the women, and then the men in the coffee house. They discover that there is not enough water to put out the fire; Meir and his girlfriend, the Ashkenazi Dalia, stand helpless. The story in many ways is about coming to full consciousness; the men in the camp turn angry after their initial horror and shock, and they look for the institutions, and more broadly the state, responsible for their sufferings. Meir comes to believe that the transit camp is not a temporary place but rather a permanent one, and moreover that staying in the camp gives birth to submissiveness and docility. Dalia comprehends that there are two Israels: a happy, affluent, Israel; and a poor, oppressed, desert-like space, satirizing the image of Israel as a desert made to bloom. The fire, in the story, destroys not only the three lives, but also burns to the ground any trust that the residents of the camp might have felt towards their state, and they decide to protest their living conditions. Michael uses a few clusters of images related to light/darkness and movement/immobility to capture the abnormality that both characterized life in the camp and resulted in horrible tragedy.
In similar fashion to the commonalities between the works of Emile Habibi and Ghassan Kanafani mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the resonance between the writing of Kanafani and Michael has been noted by only a few literary scholars. Both authors were concerned with the themes of displacement, poverty, and misery and their effects on the family.62 In Kanfani’s novels and short stories, the abandonment of children by their parents, and the deaths of such children, accentuated the pain of separation, violence, and exile, and the inability to lead a life of dignity and normality, in which parents provide for their children and take care of them. The themes Kanafani associated with exile, and with the existence in the refugee camps, that is, passivity, destitution, and orphanhood, were evoked by Michael to discuss the so-called Zionist homeland, which was also characterized by the inability to care for family and kin, by powerlessness, and by death. Such miserable living conditions, however, caused both Kanafani and Michael to call for radicalization and rebellion in an attempt to change such realities; for Michael, through demonstrations and protests, for Kanafani, through armed struggle. Furthermore, the call for radicalism ties Michael’s story to Semah’s “He Shall Return.” Both texts deal with tragedies caused directly or indirectly by the state of Israel, both focus on the families hurt by the disaster and the emotional suffering of families: the longing of a mother and daughter for a murdered father in the case of Semah, and the father’s loss of his children in the case of Michael. Also, both suggest that the appropriate answer to these tragedies is the toppling of the institutions responsible for them; while this would not bring the dead back to life, it might give some comfort to the living. Michael could have depicted the demonstration as well, but his story ends with the expressed desire to demonstrate, which was far more important to him than the actual event that followed. When al-Jadid introduced the story to its readers, it subtitled the text qissa israʾiliyya, “an Israeli story,” indicating that to the readers of al-Jadid that Israel was the Israel of its camps.
Conclusion
The efforts of the intellectuals whose works I have analyzed in this paper, Palestinian and Iraqi-Jewish alike, were ultimately unsuccessful; today most Jews from Arab lands who live in Israel speak Hebrew; their children do not understand Arabic; and most consider themselves Zionists. The violence of the state and its power to oppress, but also to reward, turned extremely effective in the Mizrahi case. Nonetheless, intellectual historians should celebrate the writings of Iraqi Jews and Palestinians during the 1950s. In this paper, I have said little about either “influence” or “reception” since the majority of Israelis at the time were unaware of Somekh, Semah, Michael, or Ballas, although their works were read by Palestinians in Israel and by fellow Jewish communists. Their writings in Arabic do reflect a context in which the Arab culture of Middle Eastern Jews persisted in Israel of the 1950s. Many Israeli accounts complain about the Arabic spoken in transit camps and in cities such as Ramat Gan, and that Jews from Arab lands still continued to listen to music played on the Egyptian radio station Sawt al-ʿArab (Voice of the Arabs), which broadcasted, most famously, the beloved Umm Kulthum rather than Israeli music. My point here was not to address issues of reception, though, but rather to celebrate the power of the intellectual to analyze and comment critically on injustice and suffering, to see (if helplessly) how the split between the hyphenated Arab-Jewish identity came to be a reality even as (s)he struggled to keep this hyphen alive. In this sense these intellectuals were unique individuals, blessed with sharp insights, and their works speak volumes about the virtue of being at the margins, of in-betweenness, and of not belonging, the same qualities that allowed them to produce critiques of the state they were forced to live in. The Palestinians, living under military rule, were coping with the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 as survivors and as relatives of people who had died or had been exiled. The Iraqi Jews were extremely angry at the Iraqi regime that persecuted them and took their property. This shared sense of pain, however, brought them together.
Like interwar intellectuals, these Iraqi-Jewish and Palestinian writers engaged with the themes of modernity, progress, and secularism. But these intellectuals, Palestinians and Iraqis alike, could not sing the praises of the West as the interwar generation had done to some extent; they could not sing the praises of Britain and America (whose role as the regional power took shape in these years), and certainly not of Israel. Their “selective borrowing” of European ideas meant turning their backs on Western liberalism, which they identified as being responsible for their predicament.
*I wish to thank Max Weiss and Jens Hanssen for their thoughtful comments on various stages of this essay.
1Emile Habibi, “Haifa: Wadi Al-Nisnass & Abbas Street.” http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/1948/habibi.htm, accessed on October 1, 2012.
2On Habibi and Palestinian resistance, see Coffin (1998).
3Kanafani (1972–1978: 341–414).
4Bashkin (2010a; 2011). See, too, the chapter by Yoav Di-Capua in this volume on the challenge posed to Taha Husayn and the udabaʾ establishment by younger intellectuals inspired by Sartre and other new intellectual traditions.
5Said (1996: 3–45).
6Bashkin (2012b), 1–15; Sehayyek (1991); Levy (2007); Gribetz (2010). On Arab Jewish identities, see Shenhav (2006); Shohat (2006).
7Levy (2007).
8Campos (2011); Bashkin (2010b).
9Bashkin (2012b: 141–83).
10Zilkha (1946).
11Bashkin (2012b: 183–229).
12684,000 newcomers came to Israel by this date; 50 percent were European, and 50 percent were characterized as “Asian” and “African”; 124,000 of them were Iraqi Jews. Most arrived in 1950–1951, though 9,000 Iraqis had arrived before and during 1948. Most were young; about 39 percent were under 15 and 32 percent were 15–29 years old. Meir-Glitzenstein (2008: 75–77), Bashkin (2017: 32–59).
13By 1954 the number of Iraqis had dropped to 43,553 in 60 camps. Meir-Glitzenstein (2008: 111–12).
14Bashkin (2017: 124–131); Bashkin (2016: 612–613); Sami Michael, “A Migrant in His Own Country,” Haokets, June 27, 2012, accessed August 12, 2015: http://www.haokets.org/2012/06/28/%D7%A1%D7%9E%D7%99-%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9B%D7%90%D7%9C-%D7%9E%D7%94%D7%92%D7%A8-%D7%91%D7%AA%D7%95%D7%9A-%D7%90%D7%A8%D7%A6%D7%95/
15Kol Ha-’Am 15 June 1951, no. 1320, 4.
16Yad Tabenkin Archive [henceforth: YT] 35 (Ha-Miflaga Ha-Kumunistit Ha-Yisraelit, henceforth: MAKI) Series: Districts, Box 7: file 1 (1954–55).
17On the ICP, see Bashkin (2017: 17–18; 124–130): Bashkin (2016: 612–614); Beinin (1990); Kaufman (1997). On Palestinian communists, culture and literature, see Taha (2002); Nassar (2006); Furani (2012). On Arab Jews in the party, see the insightful analysis in Snir (2006).
18Al-Ittihad, 19 May 1951, 8:4; al-Ittihad 24 May 1952, 9:5.
19Raz Krakotzkin (1994).
20YT 35 (MAKI), Series: Publications, Box 7, file 3, pamphlet from the transit camp of Holon. Arabic. 21 May 1951; (Bashkin 2016: 615); (Bashkin 2017: 190).
21YT 35 (MAKI) Series: Particulars, Box 5: file 6.
22YT 35 (MAKI), Box 7, file 3, an Arabic pamphlet addressed to newcomers from Iraq. Possibly 1951; (Bashkin 2017: 190).
23Kol Ha-’Am, 1 November 1949, no. 527, 2.
24Al-Ittihad, 12 July 1952, 9:12; Bashkin (2017: 129).
25Ballas (2009: 41).
26Ibid., 54.
27YT 35 (MAKI) Series: Publications, Box 6: file 5, pamphlet dated 1955 Bashkin (2017: 192).
28Kol Ha-’Am, 11 March 1949, 633, 2.
29Kol Ha-’Am, 19 March 1951, no. 1245, 1.
30Kol Ha-’Am, 20 March 1951, no. 1249, 1.
31Kol Ha-’Am, 23 March 1951, no. 1252, 2.
32YT 35 (MAKI) Series: Secretariat, Box 1: file 3, letter from Taufik Tubi to Emile Habibi, 4 January 1954.
33Al-Ittihad, 9 June 51, 8:7, 4 (ijtimaʿ shaʿbi fi Rehovot).
34Ballas (2009: 41).
35Somekh (2012: 32).
36Kol Ha-’Am, 30 November 1951, no. 1456, 2, 8; Bashkin (2012a).
37On the representations of Begin as Hitler, and comparisons drawn by labor Zionists between rightwing Zionism and Fascism, see Segev (1993: 24, 375).
38Piterberg (2001).
39Al-Jadid, July 1954, quoted in Somekh (2012: 34).
40Al-Jadid, April 1957 4:4, 16–22.
41Somekh (2012: 32).
42Ibid., 33–36.
43Ballas (2009: 44–45).
44Ibid., 45.
45Ibid., 48.
46Snir (2006: 101); Somekh (2012: 31). For more on the free verse movement and the place of poetry in modern Arab intellectual culture, see the chapter by Robyn Creswell in this volume.
47“Modern poetry in Iraq,” al-Ittihad, 2 June 1951, 8:6.
48Al-Jadid, Vol. 4, No. 1 (January 1957): 11–15. On Muruwwa, see Di-Capua in this volume.
49Al-Jadid, Vol. 4, No. 5 (May 1957): 42–46.
50Semah (1959: 61–66).
51Shafran (1983: 28).
52Ballas (2009: 61). Ballas was suspicious of the revolution during the show-trials of al-Mahdawi. Somekh and Semah listened to them enthusiastically.
53Al-Jadid Vol. 8, No. 9 (1961): 23–27.
54Ha-Miflaga Ha-Kumunistit Ha-Yisraelit (2006: 1–3); this book includes the original report written by Tubi. See, too, Robinson (2003); Bashkin 2017: 207-208.
55Semah (1959: 41–45); Bashkin (2017: 108).
56Snir (2006: 104).
57Noorani (2001).
58Somekh (1999).
59See, for example, the story in al-Ittihad, 3 May 1952, 9:2.
60On refusing to take photos, see Central Zionist Archive S71/111 (Ma’abarot; 18/October/1953).
61YT 35 (MAKI) Series: Districts, Box 14: file 2, a pamphlet to the people in the transit-camp David [Mahane David]; Kol Ha-’Am, 24 October 1952, no. 1752, 4; Ha’aretz, 23 November 1952, S71/108 [Ma’abarot]; Bashkin (2016: 619–620).
62Sheetrit (2010).