“TO THE HONORABLE MILITARY RULE COMMITTEE” Palestinian letters, dispossession, and survival (1948–1956)

This essay examines the letters submitted by Palestinian citizens of Israel to the Military Rule Committee in 1955–1956, foregrounding them as a vital site of political articulation, resistance, and survival under settler-colonial domination. These letters, written by workers, students, fellahin (peasants), and villagers, responded to a state-appointed committee tasked with reviewing the future of the military regime. While framed as petitions for rights, mobility, and land restitution, these writings were more than administrative requests. They were acts of speaking truth to power, authored under surveillance, censorship, and fear. This essay argues that these letters represent an archive of political consciousness, written in a system designed to erase and suppress. The study reveals how Palestinians navigated the structures that governed them while asserting presence, demanding recognition, and challenging domination; hence, the letters disrupt the presumed authority of the Israeli archive by refusing silence. What emerges is a complex politics of writing under military rule, and a settler-colonial regime: how Palestinians negotiated the very mechanisms that dispossessed them, and how, through the act of writing, they reinscribe themselves into history. This essay examines forms of resistance expressed through writing, political opposition, including the role of communists and leftist activists, lawyers, teachers, students, and struggles rooted in economic and agricultural life.