Named and unnamed
Nineteen names in a hundred and seventy-five years
Before December 1987 this archive holds 737 clippings. Across all of them, nineteen ordinary Palestinians are named. After 1987 there are 80.
A long feature names more people than a two-paragraph wire brief, so the fair test is whether the early clippings had less room. They had more. The earlier half of this collection carries a higher share of long pieces than the later half, 76% against 76%, and the clippings themselves are bigger.
Officials were always named. Ambassadors, muftis, lawyers, doctors. It is the ordinary people who appear as quantities: 200,000 refugees, 750,000 inhabitants, 60,000 forced out of Haifa, three killed and 137 injured, a twelve-year-old boy at Jabalia whose name the wire did not carry. Below is every Palestinian these papers named, officials included: 145 people in all, of whom 46 held some office. The figure at the top of this section counts only the ordinary ones, and only in clippings printed before December 1987. The distinction between an ambassador and a farmer is the one the papers themselves kept.