Researchers interested in Palestinian history, politics, identity, refugees and women have moved in the direction of oral history through intensive use of the interview. This category is too large to include instances here, but I note that the surge in women’s studies that began in the 1970s brought subjectivity and speech to the fore in work with Palestinians (as in Peteet 1991; Najjar 1992; Moors 1995; Abdo and Lentin 2002; Fleischmann 2003; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2009; Abdo 2014), and in a number of personal memoirs (e.g. Sakakini 1987; Shahid 2000; Karmi 2002). An increase in reportage on Palestinian communities also brings “ordinary” people to the foreground, quoting, naming and contextualizing them (e.g. Sayigh 1994; Slyomovics 1989; Pearlman 2003; Yahya 1999; Tabar 2007; Hammami 2010; Omer 2015).
The recent establishment of the Palestinian Oral History programme in the Library Archive of the American University of Beirut gives hope that smaller collections may be replicated and made more accessible to researchers.24 The tragedy of Syria and the destruction of Palestinian communities there reminds us that the consequences of the Nakba are still being played out. Syria was the host country where Palestinian NGOs such as Wajeb (Palestine Return Community) were most active in commemorating and recording village histories (Al-Hardan 2016: 199 fn 4); and Yarmouk was the site of Al-Shajjara, publisher of many village histories until the death of its founder Ghassan Shihabi in 2013 at the hands of a sniper. The Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies at Birzeit has a varied oral history holding. Other small local collections are known to exist but do not so far figure on any central register.
There have been a number of critiques of oral history by scholars engaged in work with Palestinians. Yezid Sayigh lists among its defects:
the effects of weak or selective memory, lack of imprecision of concrete historical detail, ideologically driven portrayal of past events, personal self-promotion, and adaptation or outright distortion of responses in accordance either with the perceived aims and prejudices of the interviewer or with the current political agenda of the interviewee. (Sayigh 1997: xvi)
The Israeli historian Benny Morris has expressed scepticism about the reliability of Palestinian memory of 1948: “My limited experience with such interviews revealed enormous gaps of memory, the ravages of aging and time, and terrible distortions or selectivity, the ravages of accepted wisdom, prejudice and political beliefs and interests” (Morris 1987: 2). But later research has revealed the inadequacy of Morris’ documentary sources, for example in underestimating massacres, rapes (Abdel Jawad 2007) and, most importantly, intentionality on the part of the Zionist/Israeli leadership. Pappe notes:
As he exclusively relied on documents from Israeli military archives, Morris ended up with a very partial picture of what happened on the ground … The picture was partial because Morris took the Israeli military reports he found in the archives at face value or even as absolute truth. Thus he ignored such atrocities as the poisoning of the water supply into Acre with typhoid, numerous cases of rape, and the dozens of massacres the Jews perpetrated. He also insisted – wrongly – that before 15 May 1948 there had been no forced evictions … Had Morris and others used Arab sources or turned to oral history, they might have been able to get a better grasp of the systematic planning behind the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, and provide a more truthful description of the crimes the Israeli soldiers committed. (Pappe 2006: xv)
Rosemarie Esber, who recorded with Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan in 2001, justifies using oral history on the basis of the illiteracy of the older generation, making orality the “only choice”. But she adds that “Palestinian oral interviews in the aggregate are supported by a wealth of independent sources, are internally and externally consistent, and provide a credible means of contributing to the reconstruction of events” (Esber 2008: 400).
ACTIVIST ORAL HISTORY, REPARATIVE HISTORIES
Up to this point I have been writing as if the major rationale of work in Palestinian oral history is to challenge the exclusion of the Nakba from world knowledge. While such an aim is justified by the international community’s complicity in Zionist colonialism (Cronin 2011), there is more crucial work that Palestinian oral history work can carry out. The Nakba is not past but ongoing, manifested in the occupation itself, settlement construction, in killings that are not investigated or punished, illegal detention, torture, home demolitions, land grabs and community evictions.25
In an essay comparing Palestinian and Zapatista resort to law, Linda Quiquivix notes that Zapatistas engage with law “as a particular form and structure for the exercise and circulation of power”, one based in modern Western political thought that sharply divides ruler from ruled. While Zapatistas act outside state law to assert their rights, Palestinians wait for self-determination to be “granted by a small group of actors in the carefully controlled arenas of courts and legislatures”. This writer admits that legal appeals have increased sympathy for the Palestinians in the West, yet “the situation on the ground continues to slip further into the most dire” (Quiquivix 2013‒2014: n.p.). This analysis underlines the need for more radical forms of anti-colonial struggle.
A crucial point in Zapatista strategy, according to Quiquivix, is their takeover of schooling in areas they control. For Palestinians to achieve a more effective liberation strategy they need a different kind of history from those offered by UNRWA and Arab education systems: histories that tell about their resistance. Though histories of Palestine invariably mention the Great Revolt of 1936‒1939 as a major challenge to British domination, there has been little study of its modes of organization and popular participation. Even Ghassan Kanafani’s booklet “The 1936‒39 Revolt in Palestine” (n.d.), valuable though it is for political analysis, lacks the details that only participants could give. Working much later in Lebanon, Zeina Ghandour (2011) sought out survivors of the revolt in the camp of Baddawi, and recorded their memories. Maryse Ghandour’s film about the Great Revolt, The Land Speaks Arabic (2007), includes testimonials by militants from Balad al-Sheikh and Safsaf. But there were many other episodes and forms of resistance against both the British government and the Zionist colonizers. Traces of these may remain in Palestinian memories, post-memories and oral traditions, and can be sought out by researchers and activists. As an example of popular resistance I offer this extract:
Somebody told the Ingleez that there are revolutionaries hiding in al-Birweh. The British captured them and took them to an open space with subayr. It was July. They told the youths to pick the cactus fruits. Then they threw the cactus branches on top of the shabab and stepped on them. They made another group carry heavy stones and soil in their kumbaz from one place to another … They came to the houses of the rebels to take clothes, mattresses and grains to burn them. I rescued the mattresses and took them to the bayara … people asked me to take water to them. The Ingleez tried to stop me. I grabbed a soldier’s rifle and threw it down. The soldier said, “I’ll shoot you”, but I went on with the water to my son and the others among the olives. They were black, black, you couldn’t recognize them. My son was crying, he said the other shabab are dead under the cactus. I poured [water] into my son’s mouth. I said, “No, my dear, they are alive. Share the water among you”.26
As a people whose lives have been damaged by imperialist/colonialist power, Palestinians are in need of reparative histories. Reparative histories are of a kind that restore agency:
reparative history is about more than contemplating injury or apportioning blame. It is about agency, and it can be wedded to a form of memory energised by the emancipatory activism, solidarity and political struggles of the past … The concept of the reparative … enables the work of mourning to be connected to the politics of material redress by refusing to understand the history of “race”, imperialism and slavery from the vantage point of contemporary reason and progress. The point here is to excavate histories of resistance, solidarity and collectivity as vital for the now. (Bergin and Rupprecht 2016: 12; italics added)
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People with “damaged lives” need full knowledge of the capacities and methods of resistance their forefathers and foremothers employed in the past, so as to revive and adapt them for “the now”. They need to sustain their anger and desire for restoration. Reparative history “is concerned with grievance as the starting point of politics, with no easy relation to a restorative project, but recognising grievance and rage as the agent of history” (Bergin and Rupprecht 2016: 12). It will replace narratives founded in liberal universalism with “those founded in rage, resistance and redress” (15).
Close to seven decades after the Nakba, Palestinians are still refusing to forget. Yet access to their past is constrained by the educational programmes to which they are subjected. As noted earlier, resistance during the Mandate has not been fully researched, and questions have not been asked about informal modes through which, after 1948, the expulsees remembered Palestine, nor how they adapted to the shatat without abandoning their Palestinian-ness. The little investigated history of life in the shatat would certainly yield testimonies of how people coped from day to day with “damaged lives”.
Currently the Nagab is a target area for displacement, with Israel planning 1,195 new settlements and renewing attacks on Bedouin villages.27 Recording attacks and resistance to them would make oral history more relevant to Palestinians, as well as developing its original aim of challenging the narratives of the powerful. As Thayer Hastings writes:
While recording stories of Palestinian elders who witnessed the Nakba is more urgent than ever, oral history also has the potential to amplify community struggles to defend against current displacements by documenting protests, legal battles, and cultural expression. This provides a space for a counter narrative that is particularly useful to Palestinian communities living under Israeli rule, whether in the Occupied Palestinian Territory or in Israel, or for Palestinians marginalized by other governments. (Hastings 2016)
Hastings adds:
Two communities in urgent need of oral history as an activist practice are the neighboring villages of Attir and Umm al-Hiran in the northern Naqab. These villages immediately south of the Green Line of the West Bank are home to around 1,000 residents and are under immediate threat of expulsion, much like the nearby South Hebron Hills villages including Susiya. A recent Israeli High Court ruling has slated Attir and Umm al-Hiran for demolition and replacement with a Jewish-only town and a Jewish National Fund forest.28
Hastings crucially links activist oral history practice to the future, and to the right of return as target point for Palestinian cultural activism:
Working outside of and in opposition to the legal discourse highlights the law’s limitations and affirms indigeneity in the face of settler colonial law. It therefore also extends forward, creating alternative narratives and opens the space for planning how to implement the right of return. (Hastings 2016)
CONCLUSION
The vast size of work in Palestinian oral history compared with the rest of the Arab east suggests the degree to which the Nakba has impelled “ordinary” Palestinians to remember, reflect upon and speak about the historic disaster that separated them from their homeland, ruptured their history and forced them to lead “damaged lives”. Orality is an important part of their struggle against colonialist erasure, displacement, siege, oppression and impoverishment. An important part of the new activism will be campaigning to get Palestinian oral history introduced into history curricula, since the power of the Zionist narrative erases or deforms understanding of the Nakba. This is especially critical now that Israeli state archives are about to be closed, which will restrict research into the production of the Nakba.
Current reflections on Palestinian oral history suggests that we are at a moment of radical transformation in conceptualization and practice. Central to this transformation is the idea that oral history recording should be activist and political rather than academic in its aims and method. The historical context for this change is intensification of Israeli violence, decline in hope of international intervention, and co-optation of the national leadership in its form as the PLO.
There is growing awareness of the role oral history can play in connecting Palestinian communities to each other across the shatat, and to the international solidarity movement. Mobilizing to protect local communities against displacement is central to the new conceptualization, based in awareness that these communities are living archives of resistance histories. An activist praxis of oral history takes community building as an aim through fulfilling needs for localized knowledge.
Cultural activism also implies democratization of oral history practice, as in: (a) giving back oral histories to the communities and individuals that offer them; (b) addressing issues that concern marginal communities; (c) conducting oral history teaching workshops in such communities; (d) mobilizing to establish cultural centres and archives in them; (e) adopting changes in technology, such as more use of visual media to show speakers’ homes and neighbourhoods, or the use of mobile phones for ease of access to testimonies compared with university collections.
NOTES
1Convention pins the mass expulsion of Palestinians to 1948 but in fact it began in 1947 and continued afterwards, particularly in the Nagab (Pappe 2006: 55‒60; Maddrell 1990: 6‒8).
2Its name was changed in 2015 to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial.
4http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/laws_against_Holocaust_denial.
5The OSCE is a mainly European setup that includes Turkey.
6https://en.unesco.org/news/new-report-maps-global-status-holocaust-education-0?language=en.
7“Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of foreign assistance since World War 2. To date, the United States has provided Israel $124 billion dollars … In bilateral assistance” (Sharp 2015). Israel also receives funds from annual defence appropriations.
8“Violence more common in Bible than Quran, text analysis reveals”, Independent 9 February 2016. Osborne used Odin software.
9https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Christian.
10http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism.
11“Natanyahu to Kenya’s Christian Zionists: “We have no better friends in the world than you” (Mandlowitz 2016).
12Exceptionally, an international human rights organization has sited a memorial to Deir Yassin in Geneva (McGowan 2003).
13The fiftieth anniversary in 1998 was exceptionally commemorated in Ramallah, with a special issue of Nakba memories in a local paper. In May 2016, sirens sounding sixty-eight times showed the National Authority defying Israeli diktat.
14An UNRWA teacher complains that Nakba commemorations are made meaningless by the repetition of nationalist songs – “It should be about struggle”: F.M., Shateela, 1 November 2014.
15“Israel bans ‘catastrophe’ term from Arab schools”, Reuters, 22 July 2009.
16The quotation here is from the English translation, published in 1956.
17See interview with Saleh Abdel Jawad in Al-Jana (2002: 30‒34).
18http://palestineremembered.com/MissionStatement.htm. The interviews are drawn explicitly into the realm of activism through a section titled “The Conflict 101”.
19http://www.nakba-archive.org.
20http://www.nakbamuseumproject.com; Blau (2015).
21“It was acts of holding onto and retelling memories, of returning to their villages to retrieve their possessions, of stealing things from Israelis, or engaging in militant actions that helped to keep the tragic realities of Palestinian history from utterly destroying Palestinian community and political life” (Feldman 2006: 40).
22The number of villages destroyed varies. Khalidi (1992) suggests 418 but excludes Bedouin settlements, hamlets and city neighbourhoods. Haaretz gives wider coverage: 601 villages, based on Zochrot mapping: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.668820.
23Nazzal (1978: 3) deviated from oral hist
ory practice in that he did not record his interviews but reconstructed them from notes and memory.
24http://www.aub.edu.lb/ifi/programs/poha/Pages/index.aspx.
25For daily details see Addameer; Adalah; Al-Awda-News; Electronic Intifada; Mazin Qumsiyeh; Mondoweiss.
26Umm Muhammad Sa’d, recorded 21 July 1992 in the Old Peoples’ Home, Sabra.
27http://www.ameinu.net/blog/current-isses/inconceivable-population-transfer-theBedouin-village-of-umm-al-hieran/. See also Amnesty: http://www.amnesty.org.il/en/cat/817.
28Hastings (2016) adds that Attir and Umm al-Hiran are particularly important sites for activism because Palestinian communities of the Naqab do not receive the attention and support that those of the West Bank and Galilee do.
REFERENCES
Abdelhadi, F. (1999) Bibliography of the Oral History of Palestinians: With Emphasis on Women. Ramallah: Idarat al-takhtīt wa-al-tatwīr [in Arabic].
Abdelhadi, F. (2006a) The Roles of Palestinian Women in the 1930s. Al-bīrah: markaz al-mar’ah al-Falastīnīyah lil-abhāth wa-altawthīq; Paris: UNESCO [in Arabic].
Abdelhadi, F. (2006b) The Roles of Palestinian Women in the 1940s. Al-bīrah: markaz al-mar’ah al-Falastīnīyah lil-abhāth wa-altawthīq; Paris: UNESCO [in Arabic].
Abdel Jawad, S. (2007) “Zionist Massacres: The Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the 1948 War”, in E. Benvenisti et al. (eds.), Israel and the Palestinian Refugees. Berlin: Springer.
Abdo, N. (2014 Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System. London: Pluto.
Abdo, N. and R. Lentin, eds. (2002) Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation. Berlin: Berghahn Books.
Al Hardan, A. (2016) Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities. New York: Columbia University Press.
Al-Jana (2002) File on Palestinian Oral History. Beirut: Arab Resource Centre for Popular Arts.
An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba Page 17