Contested Citizenship: Nazareth’s Palestinians in the Transition from British Mandate to Israel, 1940-1966

FAIN: HB-257369-18

Leena Dallasheh
Cal Poly Humboldt Sponsored Programs Foundation (Arcata, CA 95521-8222)

A book that chronicles the political history of the city of Nazareth, Israel’s only all-Arab city, from the 1940s through the 1960s.

I will complete a book manuscript tracing Palestinian local politics and identity formation in British-ruled Palestine and in Israel as two parts of a single story of transition, thus bridging the historiographic rupture of 1948. It focuses on Nazareth, a Palestinian city that was already an important center during the Mandate and became Israel’s only all-Arab city and primary urban center for its Palestinian citizens. Drawing on archival research in Arabic, Hebrew, and English-language sources, I show how Palestinians built on strategies they developed during the Mandate to assert their collective rights as a national group within Israel. I study the interactions between local politics and the colonial state in the context of global decolonization in the mid-20th century, highlighting how Palestinian political strategies were shaped by the realities of colonialism: both colonial states’ policies and Palestinians’ understanding of their political possibilities as a colonized group.