THE PALESTINIAN VILLAGE OF IJZIM DURING THE 1948 WAR: FORMING AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL HISTORY THROUGH VILLAGERS ACCOUNTS AND ARMY DOCUMENTS EFRAT BEN-ZE’EV* The Truman Institute, Hebrew University, Israel In the summer of 1948, following over six months of clashes, the Palestinian village of Ijzim was captured by Israeli troops and its inhabitants were uprooted and dispersed throughout the Middle East. Ijzim was one of roughly 400 Palestinian  villages  and  towns  that  were  depopulated  during  the  1948  war  in  Palestine.  The  combination  of information gathered from Israeli army documents and the refugees’ oral accounts, collected in Israel, Jordan and the Occupied  Territories  of  the  West  Bank,  yields  a  complex  picture  of  the  local  guerilla  fighting  and  the  social conditions that influenced the final consequences. Two main arguments are presented along the historical recounting of the events. The one sets the microcosmos of one village in contrast to the macro picture of the war. The other highlights the uniqueness and contribution of oral histories as sources that reveal facets otherwise missing.¹ During the war of 1948, events that occurred in one Palestinian village and its vicinity, the Mount  Carmel  coastal  plain,  demonstrated  a  significant  ambiguity  in  terms  that,  on  the macrocosmic   level,   are   taken   to   be   obvious.   Such   terms   as   “expelled”   or   “fled”, “negotiations,” “collaborators” and the very usage of the term “war” acquire fluid meanings. Beyond the historical probing and the attempt to sketch the local meanings, concerns and motivations, the refugees’ narration uncovers social concepts and events that characterized village life and Palestinian rural society. The two major sources for the material presented here are oral descriptions of the war given to me by villagers  who became  refugees—(whether  from Ijzim—the  Jizma¯wi¯s—or from  neighboring  villages—)  and  documents  found  at  the  Israel  Defense  Force  Archive (IDFA).² The IDFA material comprises officers’ reports of attacks and battles, intelligence evaluations, informers’ reports, confiscated Arab documents, prisoners’ interrogations³ and a UN committee inquiry that included the questioning of the villagers after they had reached the Iraqi lines. Complementary sources incorporated into this paper include oral testimonies of Israeli soldiers who participated in the fighting in Ijzim and the surrounding area, Mandate archival material and newspaper reports. What  is  common  to  the  two  main  sources—the  villagers’  accounts  and  the  army documents—is  that  they  derive  from  people  who  witnessed  the  war  events.  They  are predominantly first-hand accounts. Needless to say, the distinction between archival sources and  the  villagers’  oral  accounts  is  that  the  latter  are  reflections  told  after  fifty  years  of “remembering.” The fact that oral accounts are a reflection does not necessarily suggest that *Corresponding author. Tel.: ‡972-2-5817101. ISSN 0275-7206  q  2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/02757200290002860 History and Anthropology, 2002 Vol. 13 (1), pp. 13–30