Description

Photos: Published by Haaretz

Mustafa Kabha. "A source of values and a symbol of the constant search for fairness and justice," says a friend. Credit: Hadas Parush

In this 1952 photo, refugees walk through a refugee camp in Nahr el-Bared, Lebanon, one of the first camps established as part of emergency measures to shelter Palestine refugees after 1948. Credit: S.Madver, UNRWA Photo Archives / AP

A participant in the "March of Return" of Palestinian citizens of Israel, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, in 2023. Credit: Fadi Amun

A campaign of the Joint List party in Tel Aviv, during the 2021 elections. The sign reads: "This Bulldozer Isn't Destroying Houses. It's Building a Shared Future. "Credit: N/C
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Mustafa Kabha, the keeper of the count of Arab villages destroyed during the War of Independence, and a pioneer of Palestinian oral history, is uniquely qualified for his latest mission: mediating efforts to reunite Israel's Arab political parties

by David B. Green for Haaretz
Apr 6, 2025 8:30 pm IDT

If the four Arab political parties that made up the now-defunct Joint List succeed in overcoming their differences and reuniting before the next election, it will in large part be thanks to Mustafa Kabha's mediation.

Kabha is neither a politician nor a lawyer, but rather a professor of history. He has a unique standing in Arab society that makes him a natural to serve on the so-called Consensus (or Reconciliation) Committee.

An informal body of distinguished men, the committee was midwife to the birth of the Joint List in 2015 and is working hard today to bring about its rebirth. According to former Hadash MK Yousef Jabareen, Kabha possesses "impressive abilities at mediation and peacemaking" that have placed him at "the center of the activity of the Consensus Committee."

At its peak, when it functioned briefly as a coalition of Israel's four main Arab parties, the Joint List achieved an unprecedented 15 seats in the Knesset (it disbanded permanently in 2022). Currently, the three Arab parties that remain in the Knesset hold only 10 seats between them.

For years, polling has shown that the Arab public in Israel wants its politicians to be united and that voters will come out in larger numbers if that is the case. The divisions that led to the breakup of the Joint List go beyond personal egos and political disagreements. They also highlight the differing ways that the various parties perceive their identity as Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. These differences reflect their various views on their responsibilities toward the broader Palestinian struggle to end the occupation and achieve other goals.

Prof. Kabha is a member of Israel's academic elite – he is a professor at the Open University and former chairman of its Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies. He also serves as a keeper of Palestinian identity following the Nakba – an Arabic term meaning "catastrophe," which refers to the effects of Israel's founding on Palestinians.

Kabha is, for example, widely recognized for being the go-to guy for the most up-to-date list of Arab villages that were destroyed between 1947 and 1949.

"[Benny] Morris spoke of 362 villages," explains Kabha. "[Walid] Khalidi wrote about 418, Salman Abu Sitta said there were 532; I say 577. And I think there are others. I'm still looking."

Kabha's standing in Palestinian-Israeli society derives from other accomplishments and pursuits too. Since 2021, for example, he has been president of the state-sponsored Academy of the Arabic Language, which, among other things, has published trilingual (Arabic, Hebrew, English) lexicons for professionals working in such fields as communications, citizenship and education. Currently, the academy is working on a lexicon for the dental profession.

The 62-year-old wrote his master's thesis about Egypt during the War of Attrition with Israel (1969-70), and earned his doctorate writing about the Palestinian press from 1929 to 1939.

All told, he has written or edited more than 30 books. These include "The Palestinian People: Seeking Sovereignty and State," a political history, and, more recently, "The Lost Orchard: The Palestinian-Arab Citrus Industry, 1850-1950," co-written with economist Nahum Karlinsky (worth owning if only for its cover, which reproduces a painting by Sliman Mansour of an idyllic orange orchard of yore).

He also has published an encyclopedia of place names in the Land of Israel/Palestine and continues working on a compilation of the genealogy of Palestinian families.

If you ask him about the history of his own family, for example, he can tell you that he has traced the name "Kabha" back to the seventh-century Arabian Peninsula, which his forebears left as part of the Islamic Conquest of the region. In their case, they settled in the area around Hebron, before moving to the Wadi Ara region in the center.

Kabha's explorations of the land have earned him a reputation as a guide ("I know every tree and every bush, and every plant that grows in this country," he told me some years ago, undoubtedly exaggerating a bit).

"If you follow his stories on Facebook, you see he's in the field all the time, and he posts photographs all the time" of the ruins of Palestinian villages he has visited, says Arik Rudnitzky, a researcher in the Program on Arab Society at Jerusalem's Israel Democracy Institute. "Prof. Kabha embodies the endeavor of reviving Palestinian memory," which has given him "the image of a loyal, courageous, authentic representative of the Palestinians, above any political agenda," Rudnitzky adds.

You could see him leading a group of students in the recent documentary film "1948: Remember, Remember Not" – if the public broadcaster Kan, which produced it, were to overcome its reluctance to subject Israelis to such "sensitive" content while the country is still at war.

Neta Shoshani's beautifully produced film is an eclectic history of the War of Independence, as captured in primary sources, both personal and official, from both sides of the conflict: contemporary diaries, letters, documents, films and photographs. Originally scheduled for broadcast in the fall of 2023, its screening was put on hold indefinitely after the October 7 attack.

In one scene, we see Kabha leading a group of Arabic-speaking students through the ruins of Abu Shusha, overlooking Kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek. On April 10, 1948, the Arab Liberation Army, commanded by the charismatic Fawzi al-Qawuqji, launched a devastating attack on the kibbutz.

Using a brief cease-fire – granted by Qawuqji so that the kibbutz could evacuate its women and children – to rearm, the Haganah then retaliated, destroying Abu Shusha and expelling its residents. We learn about this dramatic turn of events from readings from Qawuqji's logs and from the written testimony of a kibbutz resident, Adam Shadmi, both accompanied by rare movies from the time. It's difficult not to feel sympathy for both sides in the battle.

One of Kabha's goals is to help Jewish Israelis understand what the Palestinian side went through without feeling threatened by their empathy. He knows that such understanding does not come easily, and that may explain in part the barely perceptible smile he often wears. It is accompanied by a mischievous tendency to tweak Zionist historians with their own facts and figures.

Thus, in Shoshani's film, Kabha turns on its head the conventional wisdom that says the newfound state overcame a huge numerical disadvantage in the War of Independence, citing figures from a book published by Israel's Defense Ministry stating that, whereas all of the Arab forces fighting in the war amounted to no more than 35,000 troops, the Haganah fielded 67,000 fighters.

According to Kabha, "the Jewish forces had a strategic advantage that was decisive and obvious." In this way, he debunks what he calls "the ethos of the few versus the many," smiling slyly as he asks an interviewer to "excuse me if I'm disturbing your ethos."

Later in the same film, he explicitly calls on "the Jewish side" to become familiar with Palestinian memory and the role that the land plays in it. "'Every grain of earth here has a name in Arabic,'" he explains, adding that "Moshe Dayan said that, not me!"

Scarce documentation
Traveling northeast along Route 65 from Kabha's village of Umm al-Qutuf to Umm al-Fahm, one arrives at the city's art gallery. Last summer, the Culture Ministry tapped it to become the country's first Arab museum. The gallery is home to another of Kabha's projects: a historical archive of Wadi Ara. The gallery's founder and director, Said Abu Shakra, turned to Kabha after he taped a series of interviews with his own mother before her death in 2009.

Maryam Abu Shakra had lived through the Nakba, and although she could not read or write, she was an articulate oral witness of what she experienced during Israel's founding and early years. This gave her son the idea of collecting the testimony of other veteran residents of the region, and for this he turned to Mustafa Kabha.

In the early decades of Israeli statehood, the Arabs who remained were not prone to speak about the traumas of the war or the years of military rule they were subjected to. Written documentation from the Palestinian side was also scarce.

Although he didn't specifically set out to do so, Kabha told me recently, "You could say that I laid down the fundamentals of Palestinian oral history." Initially, he quips, "People said that Mustafa Kabha interviews people who are senile." Today, however, there's acceptance of "oral history as a narrative for the weaker side in conflicts. In the eyes of the stronger, the weak side is [simply] numbers. I present the numbers as human stories."

In Umm al-Fahm, Kabha trained a cadre of oral historians who, beginning in 2005, went out and filmed interviews with 600 locals, the majority of whom are now deceased. (The archive also includes thousands of historical photographs from the region, a collection curated by photographic historian Guy Raz.) As Kabha said in 2023 at the launch of a trilingual volume of selected oral histories from the archive, "Oral history doesn't consist simply of interviewing someone and publishing what they say. It has to go through a scientific process of cross-checking, and because we present testimony in the language in which it was said, it also means knowing the local dialect."

When I asked how he learned the skills of oral history-taking, he gave a surprising reply: "I went back to the sources, specifically the Islamic-Arabic sources, in the collection of hadith [accounts of the life] of the Prophet Mohammed." The hadith, he explains, were selected and compiled during the first millennium after Mohammed's death by way of an exacting method of authentication called Al-Jarh wa l-tail (crediting and discrediting).

Kabha believes in the need of not only Jews but Palestinians themselves to learn about this history and to do so with a critical eye. In his own book "The Palestinian People," he is critical of the decisions made by the Islamist Hajj Amin al-Husseini during the decades that he dominated the national movement and stifled any opportunity for compromise with the Zionists. "A people that can't look at itself critically is a handicapped people," says Kabha.

Despite the special tension in Arab-Jewish relations that has characterized the recent period, Kabha remains steadfast in his belief in the possibility of attaining equality and mutual respect. Like others who deal with the subject, he speaks about "shared society" rather than "coexistence." The latter, he believes, ultimately has the effect of "making permanent the differences between two separate groups, who encounter one another in a venue that is under Jewish hegemony – eating at the expense of the kibbutz," for example.

"That doesn't work. They need to meet someplace that is exterritorial or at a location where they feel a partnership or see eye to eye. They can begin in Hebrew, but should aim [eventually] to have their meetings also in Arabic. Therefore, you need to aim to make Arabic a required language of study in Jewish schools.

"This can't be just lip service. Everything has to be shared. Not just to equalize budgets for road paving but also for natural resources. Everything. If an Arab hears that Israel has discovered natural gas fields, he has to be a partner in it. Water too. You can see that Jewish communities, both here and in the West Bank, get it automatically, including water for [agricultural] irrigation, but not Arabs. The kibbutzim get water for agriculture, and we don't, even when we're in the same local council."

Getting the List back together
This brings us to the subject of politics and Kabha's role as the spokesman of the Consensus Committee. The committee's chairman – novelist, poet and public intellectual Muhammad Ali Taha – explains that it was convened for the first time in 1992, "first, to unite the Arab parties in one list, and second, to get more people to vote in elections."

Its efforts did not bear fruit until 2015, when the four main parties representing Arab voters – Hadash, the United Arab List, Balad and Ta'al – faced new electoral rules that threatened to keep one or more of them out of the Knesset altogether, and finally joined forces. They were rewarded with an unprecedented 15 seats in the Knesset that year.

Ideological and personal differences, and some meddling by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who helped convince Mansour Abbas, leader of the Islamist United Arab List, to go it alone, led to the first cracks in the Joint List in 2021 (following which the UAL joined the short-lived coalition led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid), and its final dissolution before the 2022 election.

Polling shows that the vast majority of the Arab public want their representatives to be part of the governing coalition and, to that end, want to see the Joint List reconvene. The party leaders, however, remain split ideologically over the question. Muhammad Ali Taha describes the quandary: "The Islamic Movement of Mansour Abbas, they want to be part of any coalition. It doesn't matter which one. ... Hadash and Balad don't want to be part, though they are willing to support [a centrist coalition] from outside."

At the moment, the question is moot, since even the opposition leaders who dared to invite Abbas into their government four years ago have now pledged to boycott him and the other Arab parties if and when they have the opportunity to form a government.

This is among the differences that the Consensus Committee is attempting to resolve.

Hadash's Yousef Jabareen, who is widely expected to be elected the party's new chairman after the promised retirement of Ayman Odeh, also believes that "today, we are closer to two lists than to a single one. That may more reliably reflect the differences that exist with [Abbas'] UAL on the issue of membership in a coalition. This is a matter of super-principle. To this day, I hear that in UAL they don't rule out going with Netanyahu, and I simply can't believe it."

There is agreement, however, about Mustafa Kabha. According to Jabareen, he is "a source of values and a symbol of the constant search for fairness and justice." Both he and Taha separately referred to Kabha as a "walking encyclopedia."

"This is my homeland the same way it's your homeland," Kabha told me the first time we met seven years ago. "I want to arrive at a point where you are reconciled to this and I am reconciled to it. I don't want to be at a point where I come to lecture at a Jewish-religious high school, and the teacher tells the children that I love to hike the land, and the children ask, 'Where do you come off loving my land?' That's the most painful thing I was ever told, ever."

If today Kabha knows "every tree, every bush and every plant" that grows here, he says he sees a day when "everyone knows these things. But for everyone to know them under the motto of a shared homeland, where I have a place."