limited. “Palestine” comes across as two different entities—the symbolic, discursive one, as it looms in the general Arab attitude, and the actual land for which the villagers were fighting. I choose to conclude with Abu¯ Na’i¯m’s reflection on the fatal hasty escape from Ijzim. His narration blurs the division between the personal, the local and the national, as it epitomizes the kernel of the Palestinian tragedy: The feeling was bad but we deceived ourselves, thinking we would be back next week. We did not feel as bad as we should have because we thought we would be back in a week or two. What happened? People imagined this was temporary, as if it was an outcome of rain or flood. We will move for a week and then the flood will be over.⁷¹ This was the feeling that led to this catastrophe. Notes 1.  This  paper  is  a  segment  of  a  larger  study  entitled  “Narratives  of  Exile:  Palestinian  refugee reflections on three villages, T i ¯ret Haifa, Ijzim and ’Ain Hawd.” Fieldwork, conducted between 1996 and 1998 comprised archival research and interviews with Palestinian refugees residing in Jordan, Israel and the West Bank. All of the interviewees appear under pseudonames. I would like to  thank  Paul  Dresch,  Samer  al-Karanshawy,  Benny  Morris,  and  Jay  Winter  for  their  useful comments on this paper while it was still in the form of a doctoral chapter. More recently, Sahira Dirbas, Larry Lerner and Emmanuel Sivan offered their fine advice. The  transliteration  follows  the  spoken  Palestinian  dialect.  For  example,  ta  marbuta  o¨   is transliterated as “eh,” (as in mahrameh ). Words from written texts (unlike the oral narration) are transliterated as the literary Arabic. Names that have often appeared in English are left as they are in the English. The names of Arab authors who have published in English will appear without Arabic  diacritics.  In  the  Hebrew,  the  consonants  are  transliterated  but  no  distinction  is  made between long and short vowels (since the Hebrew spelling of vowels varies). 2.  Israel Defense Force is the army’s official name—Tsva Hahagana L’Yisrael in the Hebrew. 3.  The interrogations were conducted with men after the fall of the village. The IDF no longer needed details about the village but mainly wished to prove certain claims to the UN commission that was investigating the circumstances of the fall of Ijzim. Because of the terms used in these investigation reports (such as “gangs” for the village fighters and “police” for the Israeli army forces), I suspect that some reports were written by the Israelis and the villagers were made to sign. Hence, these reports are a dubious historical source but can shed light on the budding construction of the Israeli historical narrative. See, for examples, Israel State Archive, 2427/1 Foreign Ministry files. 4.  On the al-Ma¯d i ¯s see Manna¯’ 1986; Al-Ba¯sh 1998; Yazbak 1998. 5.  This data is based on a census titled “Village Statistics” conducted by the British Mandate on 1 April 1945. An IDFA document, (2168/1950, file 57), from 17 September 1948, based on the last official British statistics from December 1946, states that the inhabitants of Ijzim numbered 3,140. The document is a memo adjunct to a letter to the Foreign Minister regarding the three villages. See also Khalidi 1992. 6.  See Stern 1980:52. The division among the different segments of the population is presented in this atlas  as  follows:  In  1922,  according  to  a  British  census,  there  were  9,377  Moslems,  8,863 Christians, 6,230 Jews and 164 “others.” The 1944 estimate is 35,900 Moslems, 26,600 Christians, 66,000 Jews and 300 “others.” As the population is divided according to religion, it is not clear what percentage of the Christians was Arab, although it was clearly the great majority. 7.  Morris (1991:150–154) wrote of the harsh conditions in Acre after the arrival of the refugees from Haifa and the outbreak of a typhoid epidemic. After a two-day attack, Acre surrendered to the Jewish forces on 18 May. 8.  These numbers are drawn from the above-mentioned Mandate “Village Statistics” of 1945. The population was probably slightly higher by 1948. 9.  See Slutsky 1965 (the Hagana history book), 1965:1363–4; Toldot Milhemet Haqomemiyut (The History of the War of Independence), 1959:253; Lorch 1961:277–279. EFRAT BEN-ZE’EV 26