An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  Furthermore, the ideological context and limits of the Israeli state and archival documents are very clear. Israeli archives can tell us very little about the narratives of the Palestinian victims of the Nakba or the experience of millions of Palestinian refugees. Also, those of us who have used Israeli archival sources know that there are many files of the Israeli army from 1948 which are still closed and not accessible to the historian or the public. But what are the overall historiographical implications of the debate on 1948? The first point concerns the military historiography of 1948, which tends to dominate Israeli and Western historiographies. The clashes taking place in Palestine during the late Mandatory period have been treated as part of an overall war between the Arab and Israeli armies. Such a paradigm calls for the expertise of military historians (Pappe 2004: 185‒186). Military historians tend to concentrate on the balance of power and military strategy and tactics. They see actions and people as part of the theatre of war, where events and actions are judged on a moral basis very different from that applicable in a non-combatant situation.

  Therefore, conventional writing on the historiography of 1948 is inherently biased and tends to favour military history and the victorious Israeli army. Ilan Pappe and Nur Masalha have long argued that the events of 1948 should be examined within the paradigm of “transfer”, ethnic cleansing and erasure rather than as part of elite military history, written by the victorious conqueror. Unlike the 1937 Peel partition proposal, the UN partition plan of November 1947 did envisage some form of bi-nationalism for Palestine-Israel; the UN certainly did not envisage an exclusive (ethnically cleansed) Jewish state in 1948. This means that the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 by the Israeli army was part of the domestic policies implemented by an Israeli regime vis-à-vis the indigenous citizens of Palestine. The decisive factors in 1948 were ethnic ideology, colonial-settlement policy and demographic strategy, rather than military plans or considerations (Pappe 2004: 186; Masalha 1992, 1997). In Expulsion of the Palestinians (1992), I show that the concept of “transfer” was from the start an integral part of Zionism and that much of the “ethnic cleansing” of the Nakba was not related to the battles taking place between regular armies waging war.

  This chapter explores ways of experiencing and remembering the Nakba, with emphasis on oral accounts and within the context of the powerful oral cultures of Palestine. It concentrates on Palestinian oral histories and narratives of memory. With the history, rights and needs of the Palestinian refugees being excluded from recent Middle East peace-making efforts and with the failure of both the Israeli state and the international community to acknowledge the Nakba, “1948” as an “ethnic cleansing” continues to underpin the Palestine‒Israel conflict. The chapter argues that to write more truthfully about the Nakba is not just to practise a professional historiography; it is also a moral imperative of acknowledgement and redemption. The refugees’ struggle to publicize the truth about the Nakba is a vital way of protecting their rights and keeping the hope for peace with justice alive. Other key themes emphasized here are: (a) oral history projects are a major means of reconstructing the history of the Palestinian refugees and internally displaced Palestinians as seen from the perspective of the primary subjects; (b) as is the case with other marginalized groups, Palestinian oral testimony projects are a vital tool for recovering and preserving the voices of the Palestinian peasants (fallaheen) who for centuries (and until 1948) constituted the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of Palestine.

  Today, accounts from indigenous memory of the traumatic events of 1948 are central to Palestinian society and its collective struggle. By Palestinian society I mean all its three main constituencies: Palestinians inside Israel, Palestinians in the occupied territories and the refugee communities. The Nakba remains a key site of Palestinian collective consciousness and the single most important event that connects all Palestinians to a specific point in time. The collective memory of the Nakba unites all three Palestinians constituencies deeply and emotionally ‒ three constituencies separated by geography and expedient politics; by fragmentation and the colonial boundaries imposed by the Israeli state; by differences derived from different legal and political conditions in Palestine-Israel and host countries.

  With no independent state or state papers, and with the difficulties of establishing or maintaining “public archives” in exile or in Palestine under Israeli occupation, Palestinian and Arab intellectuals continued to produce Nakba memoirs and “archive” the catastrophe in books and articles. As early as 1949 Constantine Zurayk published The Meaning of the Nakba (1956), which was translated into English. This was followed by Palestinian historian and native of Jerusalem ‘Arif Al-‘Arif, who published six volumes in Arabic in the period 1958‒1960, entitled Al-Nakba: The Catastrophe of Jerusalem and the Lost Paradise. Also in the late 1950s and early 1960s Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi published three pioneering articles on the circumstances surrounding the Nakba (Khalidi 1959a, 1959b, 1961). However, with the exception of these three articles, based on written documentation, and an important article by Irish journalist Erskine Childers (1961) in The Spectator (London), entitled “The Other Exodus”, in fact little was published in English about the Nakba during the first two decades following 1948. In 1972 Palestinian author Mustafa Dabbagh began publishing in Arabic his eleven-volume work, entitled Our Country: Palestine, describing all the villages of Palestine during the British Mandate (Dabbagh 1972‒1986). However, with the exception of a few sympathetic books in English on the Palestinian question ‒ books whose emphasis was on the loss of land and property in 1948 and on legal and political issues ‒ these recorded some Palestinian elite voices but never brought out ordinary people’s voices. This almost total silencing of Palestinian people’s voices and the Palestinian Nakba, which was associated with defeat and shame, went largely unchallenged until the 1970s.

  In December 1963 Walid Khalidi went on to co-found (and since then has served as Secretary General) of the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS), established in Beirut as an independent research and publishing centre focusing on the Palestinian problem and the Arab‒Palestine conflict. Under his guidance the IPS produced a long list of publications in both Arabic and English and several important translations of Hebrew documents, texts and books into Arabic. In 1984, the IPS published Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876‒1948, by Walid Khalidi. However, Khalidi will always be best known for his encyclopaedic work on the Palestinian villages occupied and depopulated by Israel in 1948, All That Remains (1992). This work of monumental collective memory includes several hundred photographs and has clearly benefited from the contribution of Palestinian oral historians.

  However, in view of the fact that Israel continues to loot and destroy Palestinian archives, and in the absence of a rich source of contemporary Palestinian documentary records, oral accounts and interviews with Palestinian (internal and external) refugees are a valuable and indeed essential source for constructing a more comprehensible narrative of the experience of ordinary Palestinian refugees and internally displaced Palestinians across the Green Line.

  TYPOLOGY OF PALESTINIAN ORAL HISTORIES AND MEMORIES OF THE NAKBA

  Conventionally memory has been understood in terms of individual versus collective memory. Individual memories are often studied by psychologists, neurologists and oral historians, while collective memory is studied by sociologists and cultural theorists. However, this binary (individual versus collective) fails to account for a whole range of particular memories. By adopting a pluralistic approach to memories and by combining this approach with a knowledge‒power analysis (Foucault 1972, 1980) and with a “history from-below” approach (Guha 1997; Guha and Spivak 1988; Prakash 1994), it should be possible to distinguish between top-down elite “collective memory” and people’s “shared memories”. Oral history “from below” and shared memories are central to historical writing, shared values and the construction of (group) multi-layered, mul
ti-cultural identity.

  All histories are forms of representation of the “past” and “present”. Representations of the Nakba can be categorized as follows: speaking of the actual experiences of the Nakba; speaking about the Nakba; and speaking for and on behalf of the victims of the Nakba. These multiple representations of the Nakba should be kept in mind. Furthermore, broadly speaking, four distinct types of Palestinian oral histories and memories of the Nakba have emerged since 1948. These forms of representation have also contributed to the emergence of the new sub-discipline of Nakba Studies. These forms of representations are:

  a)Personal experiences and individual memory accounts of 1948: These oral accounts of 1948 centre on the “Nakba Generation” and those refugees who experienced the 1948 Nakba first-hand through actual expulsion, dislocation, loss, personal trauma and/or exile.

  b)Collective memory of the Nakba: This nationally constructed macro memory of 1948 is often elite framed and ideologically constructed as a top-down, collective memory.

  c)Shared memories of the Nakba: These group memories of 1948 are often framed “from below” and focus on ordinary Palestinians or marginalized groups of refugees.

  d)Trauma and cultural memories of the Nakba. The traumatic experiences of the Nakba have had a profound impact on the lives of Palestinians over seven decades and across three generations. Cultural memories of the Nakba are often produced by the second and third generation. They include poetry, popular songs, folklore, refugee camp embroidery, dabke (Palestinian folk dance), fiction, films, landscape paintings, traditional storytelling practices and the literature of exile. These diverse and rich forms of oral testimony and archiving memory began in the late 1950s, with examples found in Ghassan Kanafani’s novels (Kanafani 1998, 2000; Kanafani et al. 2004), Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry (2000, 2003) and Ismail Shamout’s paintings. These forms of oral memory paved the way for the emergence of Palestinian academic works on oral histories of the Nakba in the 1970s and 1980s.

  RETHINKING PALESTINIAN COLLECTIVE AND SOCIAL MEMORIES

  The seminal and highly influential work of Maurice Halbwachs (1980) on the formation of “collective memory” focused on the construction of socially and politically framed memory and collective identity. Collective memory has also increasingly become a major interdisciplinary area of investigation in several academic fields. Today the production of collective memory is widely recognized as critical in shaping the way in which people not only learn about and view the past but also construct and enrich their collective identity and human experiences in the present.

  However, Halbwachs himself ‒ a student of Emile Durkheim, who had reformulated sociological positivism as a foundation of social research ‒ like other positivist scholars of his age, conflated “history” with “the past” and sharply contrasted “history”’ with “collective memory”. The poverty of modern positivism derives from its simplistic, reductionist, objectifying thinking. Reality is always complex, multi-layered and multi-dimensional and the human (individual and collective) agency is central to disentangling this complexity. Scientifically driven positivist historians tend to eliminate the human agency and objectify and totalize “historical knowledge”. Furthermore, positivist historians tend to confuse “history” with the “past” and conceptualize history as an accurate “knowledge of the past”, and memory as “knowledge from the past”. This modern positivism has been widely criticized by a range of modern humanist theorists for failing to account for human agency and the living and inner nature of the historical experience. Following this humanist tradition, this chapter argues that the human agency is central to the production of historical knowledge.

  In his seminal work on conscious temporality and “sense of being”, Time and Being (Sein und Zeit), Martin Heidegger ([1927] 2010) argued that the abstract concept of “time” is meaningless. Heidegger emphasized the “sense” and “experience”’ of “being” over other interpretations of conscious existence and argued that specific and concrete ideas form the foundation of our perceptions; working from abstractions or pure theories leads to confusion and obfuscation. Heidegger also advanced the thesis that ontologically the notion of the “past” is only one dimension of a whole phenomenon which we call “time”, and this encompasses the past, present and future. In effect, the Heideggerian methodology encompassed (and linked) the past, present and future and argued that time is only meaningful as it is experienced by human beings. Working from the specific and concrete human experiences of time, Heidegger advanced the idea that time (Greek: Khronos) cannot just be understood quantitatively or chronologically. Meaningful time (Greek: Khairos) has to be experienced concretely and qualitatively. If the “sense of time” is experienced qualitatively and in particular situations by human beings, then understanding and archiving the particular ‘memories’ and concrete human experiences of the past become central to narrating and historicizing. In the particular case of the Palestinian refugees, a true understanding of their trauma and concrete experiences of displacement and exile can only begin by allowing them to speak for themselves, by recovering their own voices and recording their own stories.

  Moreover, rather than applying abstract strategies or a one-dimensional methodology to explaining the history and shared memories of the Nakba, I suggest a multiple approach with special reference to (a) speaking of the experiences of the Nakba and history from within; (b) history from below and recovering the voices of the subaltern, marginalized and refugees; and (c) speaking in solidarity with the victim of the Nakba. This multifaceted approach offers liberating strategies and decolonizing methodologies for the practice of narrating and frees history from the straitjacket of objectivity and abstraction. Furthermore, history from below would also mean that the primary object of historicizing and historical knowledge are to give us insight into the historical phenomena and human experiences of people in the past and in the present, including their thoughts, feelings and desires. Knowledge production and empowerment have always been intertwined (Foucault 1972, 1980) and the production of historical knowledge on Palestine and the Palestinians has always been driven by underlying causes and a mix of material, political and epistemological considerations. Moreover, historians live in the present and their knowledge production affects the future. However, although the primary object of history is narrating and explaining the past, historians are also influenced by social and political considerations in the present. I argue here that being/becoming historical narratives and knowledge production on Palestine and the Palestinians can only work within a pluralistic ontological framework by including human experiences, memories and remembering. Historians work like any other human agents. They produce historical knowledge and meanings about the past in the present and this historical knowledge helps shape the future.

  It is the recovery of the experiences of the Nakba and production of indigenous knowledge on Palestine which link the history and memories of the Nakba to the wider discipline of oral/aural history. Consequently, rather than treating Halbwachs’ socially framed memory within a positivist framework, this chapter argues for a multifaceted approach to representation of “memory” (including individual memories, collective memory, group memories and fictionalized resistance memory) and for treating Halbwachs’ socially framed “collective memory” as only one way of seeing memory. Consequently other types of memories such as oral narratives should be conceptualized ontologically differently and epistemologically contextually. By contextualizing, I mean that historians cannot just proceed from pure theories of history, memory or oral narratives, but need to particularize their methodology and show how in practice a particular methodology can be relevant and effective within a particular context.

  PALESTINIAN COLLECTIVE VERSUS SHARED MEMORIES OF THE NAKBA

  The politics of collective memory can imprison minds and enslave people; but history can also be liberating and empowering. The cynical manipulation of collective memory by powerful and hegemonic elites is often top-down, sile
ncing and exploitative. But collective memory can also be liberating and empowering for oppressed, indigenous and marginalized groups.

  In the Zionist and Israeli settler-colonial collective memory and mega-narrative, Palestine was a semi-deserted “land without a people for a people without a land”; a terra virgina (virgin territory) of hard soil or swamps only made fertile, productive and “blooming” by the genius and hard labour of the European Zionist settlers. European hegemonic movements and settler-colonial ideologies such as political Zionism have always tried to impose their own mega-narrative and memories on the colonized and indigenous. In response in occupied and colonized Palestine ‒ as throughout much of the Third World ‒ shared cultural and indigenous memory projects have played an important role in decolonization, cultural resistance, counter-hegemonic discourses, decolonization processes, liberation and nation-building processes and as a vehicle for victims of colonialism and historical injustice and violence to articulate their experience of suffering.

  Narratives of learning and shared memory have also been part of grassroots democratic initiatives to empower people and bring to life marginalized and counter-narratives that have been suppressed, either by hegemonic discourses or the unwillingness on the part of repressive regimes to acknowledge the past.

  The approach adopted here recognizes that social and cultural shared memory has always been more than simply recollecting or recording of ‘the past’: recollection and “re-membering” serve to create, sustain and nurture collective identity. Individual and group memory should not be treated as dichotomous or constituting oppositional binaries. For both individuals and groups (which can be any group related to tribe, band, ethnicity, gender, class) to “remember” is to learn and form social norms and habits, while incorporating significant memories and experiences of the past in a meaningful way. No experience has shaped Palestinian attitudes and lives since 1948 more than the traumatic events of the 1948 Nakba and the devastating loss of hearth, home and land.