History told by the vanquished : a critical reading of 1947-1948 war diaries as historical sources

Abstract EN

Few studies and historical texts, especially in Arabic, discuss the battles fought over the coastal city of Jaffa during the 1947 - 1949 War.

But alongside these few works, there do exist memoirs and autobiographies written by various characters active in the city during the same period.

These texts are very important to writing the history of the first part of the War (December 1947 - 15 May 1948).

Given the prominence of autobiographies and memoirs as sources, recent critical studies have considered their place in Palestinian historiography as a whole.(3) Using a group of archival documents telling the story of the garrison of Jaffa and the role it played in the trajectory of the battle, I have worked to write the history of the garrison's military activities from December 1947 to April 1948.

The central thesis of this work is that Jaffan memoirs – like most of those written about the war, at least in its first stage – are written from the perspective of the defeated.

This has a negative effect on the accuracy of the information, comments, conclusions and assessments presented by these memoirs.

Overall, these documents end up being accusatory or self-justifying, and must thus be approached with care.