Methodology

The 418 villages presented in All That Remains are sorted into fourteen chapters, each corresponding to an administrative district, or qada',1 which was either partially or wholly occupied during the war. (As already noted, two administrative districts, Nablus and Ramallah, do not figure in the study at all, as neither was occupied in 1948.) Within each chapter or district, villages are arranged alphabetically. The sources used for the various sections of the entries, as well as certain editorial decisions, follow.

I. Basic Information

In cases where the village was known by more than one name, the less common follows in parentheses. Transliteration is according to a modified version of the Library of Congress system.

The grid references (PGR) were taken from the Palestine Index Gazetteer.

The straight-line distance from the village to the district center was measured on the map Palestine: Index to Villages and Settlements.

The average elevations were taken from the topographical map (1:100,000) prepared for the Survey of Palestine, 1941-1945 and from the map (1:20,000) included in the Survey of Palestine.

The 1945 land ownership and population figures are from Sami Hadawi (1970), Village Statistics 1945: A Classification of Land and Area Ownership in Palestine. The statistics themselves are exactly as they appear in the Mandate Government's 1945 Village Statistics (a largely internal document intended for government offices and a few interested private organizations) with one major difference: Hadawi amalgamated the original categories of "Muslim," "Christian," and "Other" (essentially Druze) into the single category "Arab." This change is reflected in both the population and land ownership statistics.

The land ownership figures, extracted by the Department of Land Settlement from the fiscal assessment records, reflect land holdings as at 1 April 1945. One might note that the "public lands" figure, in addition to the relatively minor item of land used for public buildings and roads, includes a number of categories of lands that were in fact cultivated and utilized by the villagers as if they held actual title.2

It should also be stressed that the population figures are not the result of an actual census but extrapolations as at year-end 1944 prepared by the Mandatory Government's Department of Statistics on the basis of the 1931 census. (Hadawi's work includes a lengthy explanation of the methodology used.) It should also be noted that a listing of both Arab and Jewish populations for a given village generally denotes the existence of a Jewish settlement within the boundaries of the lands recorded for the village in question. The 1931 population figures and the number of houses (1931) are from the Census of Palestine, 1931, the last census carried out in Mandatory Palestine.

II. The Village Before 1948

The core of this section has been derived from al-Dabbagh's Biladuna Filastin and from Al-Mawsu'a al-Filastiniyya, which are not specifically cited so as to avoid cluttering the text. The geographical setting was provided by the field research teams and sometimes supplemented by these two sources (particularly in the cases of Gaza, Jaffa, and Ramla districts).

The road and transportation links were taken from the following maps: Palestine, produced by the Arab Studies Society (1988); Kharitat Filastin published by al-Sabbagh (1985); and Palestine and Transjordan prepared by the U.S. Army (1944).

The information on the Hebrew and Crusader periods was primarily drawn from the Encyclopedia Judaica (1971). G.W. Bowersock of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, acted as advisor on the ancient, classical, and early Islamic historical background and reviewed and amended these portions of the text. The IPS is grateful to Professor Bowersock for his assistance.

Aside from al-Dabbagh and Al-Mawsu 'a, the basic sources used for the periods following the Arab conquest of Palestine in the seventh century were al-Khalidi (1968), Hiitteroth and Abdulfattah (1977), and C.R. Conder and H.H. Kitchener (1881). Khalidi's Ahl al-'ilm wa al-hukm fi rif Filastin (Scholars and Rulers from the Palestinian Countryside), arranged alphabetically by village, includes extracts relating to individual villages taken from a wide variety of Arabic sources. These include works of classical Arab geographers, historians, and travelers up to the Ottoman conquest (drawn principally from the work of the Palestinian Jesuit scholar Marmarji [1951]), supplemented by a number of hitherto untapped sources. The most important of these are the Tabakat, a series of biographical collections by century for the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries; the encyclopedic work about social and political life in the Jerusalem and Hebron districts by the fifteenth-century Jerusalemite scholar Mujir aI-Din al-Hanbali, and especially the accounts of three Sufi mystics (Nabulsi, Bakri, and Luqaymi) whose travels throughout the Near East in the late seventeenth and first third of the eighteenth centuries included a number of voyages in Palestine. We also made use of the historico-geographical compendium of references in Islamic literature to localities in Palestine by the nineteenth-century British orientalist Le Strange (1965). (See the bibliography for a chronological listing of early Arab and Muslim geographers and chroniclers).

In addition to the above, the Palestinian countryside was looked at through two widely spaced vantage points: the Ottoman "detailed registers" from the late sixteenth century, and the results of nineteenth-century British exploration efforts in Palestine. The Ottoman daftar-i mufassal, compiled in 1596 by the Ottoman census takers for tax purposes, served as the primary source material for Hutteroth's and Abdulfattah's A Historical Geography of Palestine, a portrait of mainly rural society – settled and nomadic – at the end of the sixteenth century with detailed discussions of economic activity, administrative divisions, the taxation system, and population distribution. The Ottoman registers, which list some 145 of the villages in the present book, include population figures, production yields, and administrative locations – both the liwa' (province) and its subunit, the nahiya – or individual villages. The Ottoman administrative units of the time are shown on map 6.

Conder's and Kitchener's Survey of Western Palestine was based on the results of the field survey undertaken by the Palestine Exploration Fund from 1871 to 1878. Villages are arranged alphabetically by district, followed by entries of varying length that include such information as topographical descriptions, the religious affiliation of the inhabitants, crops, water supply, architectural details, and sometimes historical comments especially relating to the biblical and Crusader periods. Descriptions by travelers are also given for certain villages. Some 225 of the villages in our text are described in the Survey.

For economic material on the villages, Hadawi's Village Statistics 1945 was used, particularly the tables giving breakdowns for each village of the land taxation classifications according to land use.

Palestine Gazette Extraordinary (no. 1375,1944) supplied information on archeological relics.

III. Occupation and Depopulation

Given the purpose and format of the book, and particularly its deliberate exclusion of any discussion of the fall of the cities and towns, no attempt has been made at an integrated military account of the 1948 war, even at the village level. Instead, a select number of sources both Israeli and Arab have been juxtaposed without attempting to reconcile or evaluate them.

The Israeli side is represented by official and revisionist versions. The two voluminous official accounts, Sefer Toldot ha-Haganah (History of the Haganah) and Toldot Milchemet ha-Qomemiyyut (History of the War of Independence), cover respectively the periods from 29 November 1947 to 15 May 1948 and from 15 May to the Armistice. These works, compiled by the Israeli military establishment, have not appeared in English, but were meticulously translated into Arabic and published in full3 in a single volume by the Institute for Palestine Studies in 1984; the Arabic translation was used in preparing our text, but the page numbers given refer to the pagination of the original Hebrew sources. While these volumes were concerned with the overall prosecution of the war, incidental reference is made to about one fourth of the villages mentioned on our list.

The revisionist account is by the scholar Benny Morris (1987) who, while denying any Zionist/lsraeli prior intent in the 1948 Palestinian exodus, has nevertheless produced a work that stands out for the range and quality of the archival material it uses and for the objectivity with which it deals with issues other than prior intent. Moreover, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, while not strictly speaking a military history, is by far the most comprehensive of all the works cited in terms of the villages covered, with some mention of the large majority of those on the IPS list. Together, these works provide what could be said to be a basic minimal version of the occupation and depopulation of the villages from the Israeli perspective.

On the Arab side, no single military work of a synthetic nature exists comparable to those on the Israeli side; 'Arif al-'Arif's already-mentioned six-volume work, while relatively comprehensive, is of limited use for our purposes because of its primarily political focus. The wide range of Arab works on the 1948 war, especially political and military memoirs, contemporary newspaper accounts, and material in archives both private and public, are not easily accessible. Limitations of time and resources forced us to select a small number of eyewitness accounts from different areas of the country to show how matters appeared at the time from the Arab point of view. For the southern area, these accounts include those of Tariq al-Ifriqi (1951), the Sudanese commander of the Palestinian irregulars operating in the Gaza area from February to 15 May 1948; Gamal 'Abd al-Nasir (1955), later president of Egypt, a staff officer with the Egyptian expeditionary force on the southern front from 15 May to the Armistice Agreements, and Muhammad 'Abd al-Mun'im (1968), an Egyptian officer with this same force who based his chronicle on his own experience as well as interviews and documents. For the central area, we used the memoirs of Fawzi al-Qawuqji, the Lebanese commander of the Arab Liberation Army, the 5,000-strong force of irregulars organized by the Arab League that entered Palestine in small formations between January and May 1948. For the northern area, we used Nafez Nazzal (1978), who was not an eyewitness himself but who relied on the personal testimonies of over 100 eyewitnesses for his account ofthe depopulation of 32 villages in the Galilee.

Two newspapers were also used. Filastin was the leading daily of Palestine, and although it ceased publication in April 1948 with the fall of Jaffa, where it was based, it is important for its detailed coverage of the crucial period marking the start of the Palestinian exodus. We also used The New York Times, the correspondents of which accompanied the Israeli forces, as a source for the entire year.

The ten sources used in this section are identified in the text by letters cited in the List of Abbreviations in the front of the book.

IV. Israeli Settlement on Village Land

To determine the presence on village lands of Israeli settlements, the 1946 map accompanying the Palestine Index to Villages and Settlements (scale 1:250,000), which clearly shows the village sites as well as the boundaries of each village's territory was superimposed on a 1988 map showing Israeli settlements put out by the Center for the Mapping of Israel (scale 1:250,000). It might be noted that due to the irregular configurations of village land holdings, settlements close to one village site can in fact be located on lands belonging to a village at considerable distance.

While this section focuses on the settlements established on village lands after the 1948 war, the nearby pre-1948 settlements are also mentioned. It should be noted that in many cases, these settlements moved in to take over lands of the villages that had been their neighbors following the hostilities. (For a listing of post-1948 Israeli settlements on village lands and their political affiliations, see Appendix V.)

V. Photographs

Although anywhere from five to thirty photographs were taken of each of the sites visited, only 230 of the 418 villages, or 55 percent, are depicted in the book for reasons of space; the unpublished photographs are on file at the Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington, D.C. Photographs are dated, as the condition of the village sites is subject to change. It should also be borne in mind that the photographs have been selected to "show" something-the remains of houses, public structures, current uses of what remains. In this sense, they are not representative, as the vast bulk of the photographs show largely empty sites. The book also includes photographs of twenty villages before 1948. The great majority of these photographs – 23 of a total of 34 – came from the Matson Collection at the Library of Congress. These were taken between 1898 and 1946 by Eric Matson, a Swedish-American photographer who lived in Jerusalem; those taken before 1935 were not dated and are labelled simply "pre-1935" in the captions. The remaining pre-1948 photos are from the collections of the Palestine Exploration Fund and the Imperial War Museum, both in London, the PLO Information Center in Beirut, and the Middle East Center at St. Antony's College, Oxford. To the librarians in all these collections, the Institute expresses its gratitude.

• 1. British Mandate officials translated the Ottoman Arabic term qada' as "subdistrict" and called the larger unit encompassing it, the liwa', "district." Palestine as of 1945 was divided into six "districts" – Galilee, Haifa, Samaria, Lydda, Jerusalem, and Gaza which in turn were divided into sixteen subdistricts: Acre, Beersheba, Baysan, Gaza, Haifa, Hebron, Jaffa, Jinin, Jerusalem, Nablus, Nazareth, Ramallah, Ramla, Safad, Tiberias, and Tulkarm. Prior to 1945, the country had had three districts – Southern, Jerusalem, and Northern. These were divided into eighteen subdistricts – the sixteen already mentioned plus Bethlehem and Jericho. Government statistics about villages were gathered at the level of the qada' and were recorded under this heading; hence the qada' is the most important unit for data on village life. We translate the term as "district" in preference to the more precise but clumsier subdistrict.
• 2. For a discussion of land tenure in Palestine and categories of public land, see A Survey of Palestine, volume I, chapter viii.
• 3. Sefer Toldot ha-Haganah is a three-volume work covering the entire history of the organization; the IPS translated only the chapters relating to the 1948 war.

For Arabic, we have adopted the Library of Congress system of transliteration, but without diacritics. For Anglicized place names, we used the spelling of Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (e.g., "Gaza" instead of "Ghazza"). (The British Mandate's quite different transliteration of village names is given in parentheses in the list of the Appendix "Palestinian Villages Depopulated in 1948: A Comparison of Sources".) For Hebrew, we used the American Language/Library of Congress system, again without diacritics. When a word has passed into English, we used the English spelling (e.g., "kibbutz" rather than "qibbutz").