The city of Nazareth was the only Palestinian urban center to survive the 1948 war. It became the cultural, political, and economic capital for Palestinians who remained within the borders of the new Israeli state. Struggling for the City offers a social and political history of Nazareth, tracing how Palestinians negotiated the transition from British colonial to Israeli rule. Rather than understand 1948 as a moment of absolute rupture, this book demonstrates how continuities in Palestinian political strategies and social formations evolved across this threshold.
Reconstructing everyday politics through the daily press, military government reports, municipal council minutes, and political pamphlets, Leena Dallasheh reveals key struggles over resources and representation. Municipal governance, labor organizing, and water infrastructure emerged as key sites of politicized confrontation with state power. Diverse groups of Palestinian actors, including both communist activists and traditional political elites, exposed fissures between Israeli military government officials and civilian authorities over controlling Palestinians or maintaining democratic appearance. Through this rich micro-history of a city in transition, Dallasheh restores Palestinians as active players in their own history, not merely passive victims of the colonial states under which they live—and shows what it cost Palestinians to survive in their homeland after 1948.
