Apr 08 2013
Book Addresses Forgotten Palestinians of Israel
By Daoud Kuttab
Haifa University student Rabae Eid’s interruption of US President Barack Obama’s speech in Jerusalem was more than just an act of a radical heckler. The 24-year-old’s rejection of Obama’s demand that Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state echoed the feelings of more than 20% of the population of today’s Israel who are not Jewish.
The story of Palestinians who are citizens of the state of Israel is one of the untold stories of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Palestinians who stayed put in their homes and lands as the state of Israel was being established have been either forgotten or, worse yet, wrongly accused by fellow Arabs of being traitors and a sort of fifth column.
No one tells the story of the Arabs of Israel better than the people who have lived through the decades since the establishment of Israel. And among those, no one better tells their story than Nazareth-based Atallah Mansour, perhaps the most prominent of his generation.
Mansour, who grew up in the Galilee, relates the story of his people in a comprehensive first person narrative in his book Still Waiting for the Dawn. Continue Reading »