In the case of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, the Nakba ‒ the exodus of the Palestinians and the dismemberment of historic Palestine ‒ has been a key site of collective memory and history that connects all Palestinians to the most traumatic event in Palestinian history. In addition to the terrible suffering inflicted upon the Palestinian people in the process of the establishment of the State of Israel, few of the hundreds of once-thriving communities remained. Not only they have been erased from the Palestinian landscape, but their very names have been removed from contemporary Israeli maps.
Although Palestinian national identity took root long before the 1948 Nakba, indigenous Palestinian memory accounts of the post-Nakba period ‒ responding to the new reality of Palestinian dispersal and the fragmentation of Palestinian society ‒ played a major positive role in the recovery and reconstruction of Palestinian national identity and the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1960s; in recent decades, in particular, there has been an intense and complex relationship between the 1948 Nakba and the preservation, articulation and sustaining of Palestinian national and cultural identity.
Today, with millions of Palestinians still living under Israeli occupation or in exile, the Nakba remains at the heart of indigenous collective memory, national identity and the struggle for self-determination. Also to the millions of dispersed Palestinians living in exile and the shatat, the pre-1948 villages and towns were home, and continue to be poignantly powerful symbols of their personal, national collective identity.
One of the key themes for consideration here is Palestinian cultural memory and the recovery and reconstruction of Palestinian cultural identity in the post-Nakba period; there was always an intense relationship between the 1948 Nakba and the formation of Palestinian national identity, especially from the late 1950s onwards.
While the multi-layered Palestinian national identity existed long before the 1948 Nakba, the collective consciousness of the Nakba played a major role in the reconstruction of Palestinian national and cultural identities and the re-emergence of popular Palestinian nationalism in the 1960s. More crucially, it was the (historically marginalized) Palestinian refugees themselves who played a central role in preserving Palestinian national identity and in setting up the PLO and the guerrilla movements in the 1960s.
In the absence of a Palestinian state, which would have been expected to devote material and cultural resources to collective memory projects, archives and museums, Palestinian refugee communities in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East have actively promoted collective memorialization projects as a form of cultural resistance. Since 1948 Palestinian refugees from individual villages marked “their” Nakba, or the anniversary of the date of the fall of their village.
In the post-1948 period Palestinians maintained the multiple meaning of their Arabic names and the multi-layered Palestinian identity deeply rooted in the land and embedded in ancient sites and place names (toponyms).
At the same time, however, in the post-1948 period new naming traditions and new resistance strategies emerged among the different communities of Palestinians reflecting the various fates suffered by the indigenous population of Palestine. The depopulated and destroyed villages and towns were often kept alive by passing place names down through generations of Palestinian family members. Even inside Israel, those internally displaced refugees regrouped in different localities to create new definitions of kinship structures. Post-Nakba conditions of displacement and dispersal gave rise to circumstances in which a person from the destroyed village of Ruways, for instance, would be given the surname Ruwaysi ‒ someone from Ruways ‒ instead of the customary clan eponym. Village solidarity stood in place of the absent village and dispersed clan members. The name of the original village also replaced the name of the hamula (clan), and the relationship among persons who belonged to the same original village became similar to hamula solidarity. The hamula did not disappear or weaken, but some of its basic functions were transferred to the wider kinship structure and social solidarity based on the original (destroyed) village. For those Palestinians forced into exile outside Palestine, one convention was to name children for the lost but not forgotten site.
FROM MEMORY TO ORAL HISTORY: ORAL ACCOUNTS, PEOPLE’S VOICES AND LIVING PRACTICES
The developments in recent decades in the academic discipline of oral/aural history and individual memories has revolutionized historical writing and the recovering of the past by bringing to light hidden, suppressed or marginalized narratives and voices ‒ marginalized in official documents of state archives. Oral history captures a variety of individual testimonies, people’s lives and living practices. Oral/aural narrative projects have, in fact, brought together academics, archivists and librarians, oral historians, museum professionals, community-based arts practitioners and community-oriented activists. As producers of meaning, oral history projects have become a major catalyst for creative practices and interpretations in history-related fields and for the construction of alternative histories and memories of lost practices. Oral/aural narrative projects, like written documentation and archival material, are never free from factual error and have to be treated critically.
State-supervised archival collections and official documents can be restricted and access to them can be limited to powerful elites or favoured social groups and thus the control of access can reinforce hegemonic ideological discourses. The same state-controlled archives and official collections are often based on (individual and collective) memory; and they can distort, misinform, omit, restrict or even fabricate evidence.
Individual memories are also generally selective and fallible; egos distort and contradictions sometimes go unresolved. However, problems of critical evaluation are not markedly different from those inherent in the use of archival documents, letters, diaries and other primary sources. The scholar must test the evidence in an oral history memoir for internal consistency and, whenever possible, by corroboration from other sources, often including the oral history memoirs of others on the same topic (Starr 1984).
From the 1970s onwards, local historical research and oral history studies began to be considered in a highly positive light by the academy (Allen and Montell 1981), partly following work by scholars such as Luisa Passerini who studied the social history of the Turin working class under Italian fascism (Humphries 2009: 78; Passerini 1998). Since then, and especially in the last four decades, there has been a proliferation of oral history archiving memory projects throughout the world, which promote the collection, preservation and use of recorded memories of the past and people’s voices.
In the UK, the BBC has developed an archive of World War II memories, based on oral histories and written by the public and ordinary people, and BBC Memoryshare, which is described as “a living archive of memory from 1900 to the present day … the majority of content on Memoryshare is created by Memoryshare contributors, who are members of the public”.1 Ordinary people can contribute memories, research events and link to context material relating to any date back to 1 January 1900. As for the WW2 People’s War archive, the BBC asked the public to contribute their memories of World War II to a website between June 2003 and January 2006. This “people’s memory archive” has collected 47,000 stories and 15,000 images ‒ stories not just about air raids, military operations and the armed forces, but also about the concentration camps in Europe created by the Nazis, the roles of women, peaceful resistance and occupation, civilian internment and critical conscientious objectors.
ORAL HISTORIES AND MEMORIES OF THE NAKBA AND HOLOCAUST: DEIR YASSIN AND YAD VA-SHEM
Israeli oral history as a producer of meaning and testimony in the museum and gallery has been of great importance in the recollection and collective memorization and memorialization of the Holocaust. The Israeli state memorial at Yad va-Shem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance institution, is predominantly based on oral history and millions of pages of testimony. Yad va-Shem itself is
situated on the lands of Deir Yassin, as is the city of Jerusalem western (Jewish) cemetery (Davis 2003: 25). The irony of Yad va-Shem and Deir Yassin is breathtaking; any Israelis and foreign visitors to Yad va-Shem go to DeirYassin, and during dedication ceremonies at Yad va-Shem no one ever looks to the north and remembers Deir Yassin (McGowan 1998: 6‒7).
Founded and managed by the Israeli state, Yad va-Shem is completely silent about the atrocities of Deir Yassin, and contains a contain amount of anti-Palestinian propaganda. In essence, Yad va-Shem represents official Israeli “collective memory” for forgetfulness. Together with genuine oral history of the Holocaust, Yad va-Shem was established in 1953, five years after Deir Yassin, by a Knesset act and located in West Jerusalem. According to its website, Yad va-Shem is a vast, sprawling complex of tree-studded walkways leading to museums, exhibits, archives, monuments, sculptures and memorials. It has been entrusted with documenting the history of the Jewish people during the Holocaust period, preserving the memory and story of each of the 6 million victims, and imparting the legacy of the Holocaust to generations to come through its archives, library, school, museums and recognition of the “Righteous Among the Nations”. The archive collection of Yad va-Shem comprises 62 million pages of documents, nearly 267,500 photographs along with thousands of films and videotaped testimonies of survivors. The Hall of Names is a “tribute to the victims by remembering them not as anonymous numbers but as individual human beings”. The “Pages of Testimony” are symbolic gravestones, which record names and biographical data of millions of martyrs, as submitted by family members and friends. To date Yad va-Shem has computerized 3.2 million names of Holocaust victims, compiled from approximately 2 million pages of testimony and various other lists. The collections of Yad va-Shem include tens of thousands of digitalized testimonies.
However, in contrast to the Israeli national memorial at Yad va-Shem and other Holocaust museums (including the Berlin Holocaust Museum and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum), there is no Nakba museum, no Nakba Hall of Names, no Central Database of Nakba Victims’ Names, no tombstones or monuments for the hundreds of Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed and destroyed in 1948. The hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns destroyed in 1948 are still forced out of Israeli public awareness, away from the signposts of memory. What is also chilling is the fact that the Deir Yassin massacre of 9 April 1948 took place within sight of the place which became the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem; only a mile from where Jewish martyrs are memorialized lie the Palestinian martyrs of Deir Yassin whose graves are unknown and unmarked (McGowan 1998: 6‒7).
For Palestinians inside and outside Israel Deir Yassin has remained a potent symbol of collective memory and cultural resistance. But in Israel the ghosts of Deir Yassin, Lubieh, Kafr Bir’im and the hundreds of villages destroyed in 1948 are rendered completely invisible:
The villages that no longer exist were forced out of [Israeli] public awareness, away from the signposts of memory. They received new names ‒ of Jewish settlements ‒ but traces [of their past] were left behind, like the sabr [cactus] bushes or the stones from fences or bricks from the demolished houses. (McGowan 1998: 6‒7)
There are some important recent developments with major implications for the study of Palestinian historical consciousness and Nakba memory. The rise of the new global media and the internet, in particular, has strengthened the role of Palestinian oral/aural histories and personal narratives in shaping Palestinian historical consciousness. In the last decade the internet, in particular, has become one of the most important sites of archiving Palestinian oral histories and personal narratives. Since its creation, the Archive has recorded over 650 video interviews with first-generation refugees in Lebanon about their recollections of 1948. This project was conceived as a collaborative grassroots initiative in which the refugees themselves were encouraged to participate in the process of representing this historical period. The project, which consists of about 1,000 hours of video testimony with refugees from more than 135 villages in pre-1948 Palestine, has its work centred on the twelve official UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) camps in Lebanon. But it has also conducted interviews within unregistered refugee “gatherings”, and with middle class and elite Palestinians living in urban centres in Lebanon. Six duplicate sets of the interviews have been produced, along with a detailed database and search engine.2
PALESTINIAN ORAL/AURAL HISTORIES “FROM BELOW” AND ARCHIVING PEOPLE’S VOICES
In order to understand and appreciate the richness of Palestinian oral/aural histories and social and cultural memories, rather than imposing settler-colonial narratives on the indigenous people of Palestine, a range of voices and multiple narratives of competing memories, the archaeology of a people criss-crossed with individual experiences ‒ including narratives of suffering (mua’ana), survival (baqa’a) and sumud (steadfastness), of courage and resistance born out of anger and revolt against oppression – must be allowed to flourish and be nurtured further. This section suggests that the “history from below” approach, with its emphasis on “speaking of experiences” and the multiplicity of popular memories and people’s voices rather than high politics, decision makers or top-down approaches, can challenge hegemonic discourses or colonial methodologies based on Israeli- or Western-dominated archival sources.
Ilan Pappe makes an important point which centres on the difference between macro- and micro-histories of 1948. The Israeli “new historiography” of 1948 has remained largely macro-historical. This is partly due to the nature of the Israeli archival material. In general, Israeli archival sources give us a sketchy picture of 1948. This means that a detailed description of what happened in the case of each Palestinian village and town remains largely elusive. Often a document produced in 1948 by an Israeli army officer refers briefly to the occupation of a Palestinian village, or to the “purification” of another. Pappe points out that Palestinian oral histories can produce historically accurate accounts of 1948, showing that the same events in 1948 appear in a detailed and graphic form in accounts of memory, often as a tale of expulsion, and sometimes even massacre. Israeli historians who reject Palestinian oral history may conclude there was no massacre until the precise documentary sources assure them otherwise. Avishai Margalit (2003), Alessandro Portelli (1994, 1997, 2006) and others generalize about “memory” and argue that it should be treated like fiction or as knowledge from the past, not knowledge of the past. This approach echoes positivist thinking, contrasts “history” with “memory” and tends to conflate “history” with the “past”. Although “‘collective memory’ is not necessarily knowledge of the past” (quoted in Fierke 2008: 34), oral testimonies ‒ like archival records ‒ are forms of representation of the past. Of course, oral histories may tell us less about events in the past and more about the significance of the events in the present. But written documents are also often the result of a processing of oral testimonies (Pappe 2004: 186). Therefore Palestinian refugee memory accounts could be as authentic as the documented ones. But also the narrative of individual villages and towns in Palestine can only be constructed with the help of Palestinian oral testimonies. Consequently, oral testimony is a crucial methodology for pursuing further research on the Nakba. Although oral testimonies are not a totalizing substitute for archival material, they can supply crucial material for filling gaps and be cross-referenced with archival sources and documentary evidence.
Oral testimony, like written documentation, is never free from factual error and has to be treated critically. Morris (2004: 4) argues that written documents (and Israeli archives) distort far less than interviews with Palestinian refugees. But archival documentations are often based on memory; they can distort, misinform, omit or even fabricate evidence (Humphries 2009: 79‒80). Louis Starr notes that memory is “fallible, ego distorts and contradictions sometimes go unresolved”. Nevertheless:
Problems of evaluation are not markedly different from those inh
erent in the use of letters, diaries, and other primary sources … the scholar must test the evidence in an oral history memoir for internal consistency and, whenever possible, by corroboration from other sources, often including the oral history memoirs of others on the same topic. (Starr 1984: 4‒5)
Palestinian oral culture is a significant framework not only for the construction of an alternative, counter-hegemonic history of the Nakba and memories of the lost historic Palestine but also for an ongoing indigenous life, living Palestinian practices and a sustained human ecology and liberation. In contrast with the hegemonic Israeli heritage-style industry of an exclusively biblical archaeology, with its obsession with assembling archaeological fragments – scattered remnants of masonry, tables, bones, tombs – and officially approved historical and archaeological theme parks of dead monuments and artefacts destined for museums, in recent decades Palestinians have devoted much attention to the “enormously rich sedimentations of village history and oral traditions” as a reminder of the continuity of native life and living practices (Said 2004: 49; Masalha 2008).
As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) has effectively demonstrated, decolonizing methodologies are central to both settler-colonial studies and indigenous studies. In the context of both Zionist (power/archival knowledge) epistemology and indigenous rural and peasant Palestinian society, Palestinian oral/aural histories are a particularly useful decolonizing methodology; throughout much of the twentieth century the majority of the Palestinians lived in villages and were fallaheen; in 1944 66% of the Palestinian population was agrarian with a literacy rate, when last officially estimated, of only 15% (Esber 2003: 22). Their experiences in the fields, in their villages and in exile are largely absent from history-writing and much recent historiography (Issa 2005). Moreover, the Nakba itself, and the political instability and repression faced by the dispersed Palestinian communities since 1948, have also impeded Palestinian research and studies (Khalidi 1997: 89, 98).
An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba Page 3