went by bus and they saw the jeep on the road. He said to the people on the bus: “Hold on tight” and he ran over that jeep. Killed the people. But the English were still here. They hadn’t left yet. And it began—The Jews were shooting buses, and people [namely the Arabs] were shooting at the Jews. Abu¯ Ashraf described these two consecutive events on the main road as the first significant war  incidents  in  the  area.  The  Ijzim  bus,  which  collided  with  the  Jewish  car,  was  a memorable event also for Jami¯l, who lives in the northern Jordanian City of Irbid. Jami¯l, of ’Ein H awd , was a boy of ten and a half at the time of this road incident and as he studied in the village of ’Ein Ghaza¯l, he often rode the bus that connected Ijzim and Haifa, driven by Sa’i¯d al-Madani¯. The following was his version (delivered in English and hence the intact mistakes) of the incident in which Sa’i¯d al-Madani¯ ran over the Jewish vehicle:^E Jami¯l: The early months. . .. Once the driver called Sa’ i¯d al-Madani¯, I think he was living in Baghdad. . .. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he is still living. Till three or four years [ago] he was still living. He was the driver of the bus [that] belonged to Ijzim and he was from Ijzim. And he saw a small taxi. Inside it—three or four engineers—political men, I don’t know. And he told the people in the bus—just seize your desk tightly.¹⁹ As we say in the airplane—fasten your seat belt. And he used the brakes over the taxi to go down and kill the people there. After that, of course, a trial was held by the English people in Haifa, and people from at -T i ¯reh surrounded the court to prevent any hurt to that person. . .. After that, and that is funny really, instead of glass for the windows for his bus, they put steel windows. Imagine. It is possible that an event described in the Jewish Haaretz newspaper on 3 February 1948 relates to the above mentioned road “accident.” Haaretz reported that two Jewish men were killed and one was injured when an Arab bus collided with their small car on the Haifa–Tel Aviv  way.  One  man  was  a  hydraulic  engineer,  the  second  was  the  head  of  the  Hebrew Masonry  Committee  in  the  Organization  for  Home  Produce  and  the  injured  man  was  a member of the Clerk’s Union.²⁰ Expectedly, the Jewish newspaper named the Jews involved whereas the Jizma¯wi¯s named the Palestinian actors. (Only the Palestinian nurse on the bus, a woman, remains anonymous). Whereas Abu¯  Ashraf and Jami¯l limit themselves to telling the story as part of a somewhat discontinuous  historical  chronicle,  Shafiq  added  a  theory  that  framed  this  event  within  the escalation of the war in Ijzim. Shafiq, born in 1930 in Ijzim and today a resident of Haifa, thought that the people of Ijzim would never have chosen to get involved in the war since “they were simple farmers who did not own weapons and did not know how to use them.” Shafiq, a member of the al-Ma¯d i ¯ family, reflected on the social classes within the village and related the events with a certain distance from “the simple farmers.” Both he and another member of his family were trying to figure out what had happened to the village leadership as they narrated the historical events. They deplored the fact that the leadership before 1948 did not invest enough resources in education and in the preservation of the family’s property. In addition to this internal trajectory, they noted, came the events of 1948. In Shafiq’s opinion, two Jewish acts of provocation triggered the lethal “war.” One was the kidnapping of seven men who were working in the fields near the main road and the second was the shooting at Sa’i¯d al-Madani¯’s bus. Certain aspects are highlighted in the oral narratives on Sa’i¯d al-Madani¯. Jami¯l noted that until not long ago al-Madani¯ was still living in Baghdad. Jamil was informed because the dispersed people of the Haifa district keep in touch. Furthermore, the story of al-Madani¯’s action  had  been  circulated  for  the  last  fifty  years  and  his  act  and  its  significance  for  the district’s villagers did not end in 1948. The narration is part of a commemorative act in which people are being transformed into local heroes. In retrospect, these events are perceived as landmarks and framed within the national struggle. KIDNAPPING AND NEGOTIATIONS As  of  the  spring  of  1948,  the  Israeli  army  was  consolidated,  the  clashes  along  the  road intensified, and we find that the army also documents the events described by the villagers. EFRAT BEN-ZE’EV 16