The Abu Hameds of Mulabbis: an oral history of a Palestinian village depopulated in the Late Ottoman period

Abstract

Late Ottoman period) of their independent place in Palestinian social, cultural and political history. Although the name of Mulabbis does figure in Palestinian historiography, it is surprising to discover that the history of the village has yet to be studied in any detail. The great Palestinian educator and geographer Mustafa al-Dabbagh, the author of the comprehensive encyclopedia Biladuna Filistin ("Our country of Palestine"), refers to Mulabbis only as a parcel of land (al-buq a al-ma rūfa bi-sm…Mulabbis ʿ ʿ ). 5 Al-Mawsu a al-ʿ Filistiniyya ("The Palestinian Encyclopedia") notes that Mulabbis was an Arab village that preceded the establishment of Petah Tikva, but in contrast to its treatment of most other villages, it does not devote a separate entry to it. 6 Mulabbis is also missing from All That Remains, Walid Khalidi and Sharif al-Musa's book about Palestinian villages depopulated in 1948. 7 As of March 2021, Mulabbis is absent from sites dedicated to the history of depopulated Palestinian villages, such as Palestine Remembered and Zochrot. Nearly nothing is known about the Arab residents of Mulabbis from published Palestinian or Western scholarship, neither is any alternative reading of its past offered. 8 This regretful state of research is illustrative of the rest of the Arab villages fully depopulated during the Ottoman period like al-Mutilla (Metulla), Yamma (Yavniʾel), Masha (Kefar Tavor), Deiran (Rehovot), Karkur, al-Burj and al-Zurghaniyya (Binyamina), al-Marah (Givʿat ʿAda), al-Khudeira (Hadera), Dardara (Gan Shemuʾel), Umm al-Tut (Bat Shelomo), Shfeyya and Zummarin (Zichron Yaʿakov) (see figure 1). As part of Jewish stateenforced regimes of truth, control of knowledge, and public remembrance, the physical remains of many Palestinian villages had been expunged, and archival sources pertaining to them, and to their inhabitants' expulsion, had been closed for access by Israeli authorities. 9