As is the case with other subaltern groups, Palestinian oral testimony is a vital tool for recovering the voice of the subaltern: peasants, the urban poor, women, refugee camp dwellers and Bedouin tribes. An important feature of the Palestinian oral testimony of the Nakba from the inception has been its popular basis with the direct participation of displaced community (Gluck 2008: 69). Since the mid-1980s this grassroots effort has shown an awareness of the importance of recording the events of the Nakba from the perspective of those previously marginalized in Palestinian elite and male-centred narratives. Although gender (both female and male) imagery and symbols have always been prevalent in Palestinian nationalist discourses (Khalili 2007: 22‒23), the Palestinian National Charter of 1964 (revised in 1968) and the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 1988 had both imagined the Palestinian nation as a male body and masculinized political agency (Massad 2005).
FROM MEMORY TO HISTORY: PERSONAL EXPERIENCES, ORAL HISTORIES AND MEMORIES OF THE NAKBA
Palestinian oral histories of the Nakba should not be conflated with the Israeli “new historiography” of 1948. However, Palestinian oral histories of the Nakba both preceded and were incentivized by the emergence of Israeli revisionist historiography in the mid-to-late 1980s. Yet not until the 1970s did scholarly Palestinian oral history begin to offer a picture of events in the eyes of the refugees. It should be pointed out, though, that these new oral narrative perspectives based extensively on interviews with and testimonies of the refugees began in the early 1970s ‒ before the opening of the Israeli governmental and institutional archives in the late 1970s and at least a decade before the emergence of the Israeli “new historiography” in the mid-to-late 1980s.
In the 1960s and early 1970s the Palestinian collective nationalist resistance discourse about history, as articulated by the PLO, was dominant, effectively eclipsing personal narratives of individual refugees. Typically, this “heroic” nationalist memory was designed to paint an ideal type of history and suppress the darker side of Palestinian history, including accounts of internal infighting and stories about many Palestinian collaborators with Zionism. From the early 1970s, however, the Journal for Palestine Studies, Shuun Filastiniyah, the Centre for Palestine Studies, the Palestinian Research Centre and Arab Studies Quarterly began to publish pioneering articles and books based on individual oral evidence, personal narrative and interviews with ordinary refugees to tell the history of Palestine before and during the Nakba. This included works by Elias Shoufani (1972), Nafiz Nazzal (1974a), Fawzi Qawuqji (1975), Rega-e Busailah (1981), Elias Sanbar (1984), Walid Khalidi (1984) and ‘Ajaj Nuwayhid (1993). In 1978 the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut published Nafiz Nazzal’s, The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee 1948 (1978), based on his doctoral dissertation (1974b), which brought to academic attention important oral accounts of Galilee dispossession as recalled by refugees exiled in Lebanon.
Ironically, Israeli historian Benny Morris (1987: 2), who claims to distrust Palestinian oral evidence on 1948, cited Nazzal’s work repeatedly and extensively (as well as Shoufani’s) in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947‒1949 (Morris 1987). Despite his anti-Palestinian polemics, Morris found Nazzal’s oral evidence research extremely useful in reconstructing several of the Israeli massacres of Palestinians in 1948.
The 1970s and 1980s were two of the most creative and inventive decades in Palestinian history and popular memory. In the 1970s Rosemary Sayigh, an anthropologist based in Lebanon, pioneered a whole new discipline of narrating the subaltern. She began to record and translate conversations with and individual testimonies of Palestinian refugees in the mid-1970s and she made them into a number of articles in Journal of Palestine Studies (1977a, 1977b) and her book Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (1979). Both Sayigh and Nazzal extensively interviewed refugees in Lebanon and drew to academic attention oral accounts, based on personal experiences, of Galilee dispossession as recalled by refugees themselves, thus pioneering new perspectives on the Nakba. However, in the 1970s neither Sayigh ‒ who pioneered working with women in the camps ‒ nor Nazzal theorized oral accounts in their work; later Sayigh recalled: “In my approach to oral history I was simply doing it, using large chunks of what people told me. I didn’t have any idea of what oral history was or about its potential for liberation struggles” (R. Sayigh 1997).
However, this potential for Palestinian liberation and women’s struggles in the seminal works of Sayigh and Nazzal encouraged other oral accounts projects at Birzeit University, initially proposed in 1979 by Sharif Kanaana (1992) and Kamal Abdel Fattah (cited in Jawad 2007). In 1985 the Birzeit University’s Documentation Centre launched a series of monographs on the villages destroyed in 1948. Since 1993 this work has been overseen by Saleh Abdel Jawad (2007: 59‒127; also Gluck 2008: 69).
As time went on, Sayigh, working with the General Union of Palestinian Women and with women in the camps, became more systematic and more “theoretical”.
Until the 1970s Palestinian collective memory of the Nakba was largely divorced from the broader political contexts and class structures which inform and shape them. However, in the last three decades there has been an explosion of contextualized oral history scholarship and popular memory studies in Palestine. Many original works and collections relevant to Palestinian popular memories, women’s liberation struggles, narrative histories and gendered memory have been produced.3 Today Sayigh, and other oral historians working with Palestinian refugees, advocate a fresh examination of Palestinian history from an oral history perspective. They have been working in a field in which there are already dominant male and elite narratives which rely on official documentation and archival material. This “history from below” approach and popular memories rather than high politics or top-down approaches has both powerfully challenged and enriched the written historiography of Palestine.
Moreover, since the late 1990s there has been a remarkable proliferation of Palestinian films, memoirs and archival websites, online archives, oral history projects and several cultural museums and centres across Palestine, all created in the aftermath of the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba. In conjunction with this, several films have since been released, including Edward Said’s In Search of Palestine, Muhammad Bakri’s 1948, Simone Bitton’s film about the poet Mahmoud Darwish, Et la terre comme la langue, and Maryse Gargour’s La Terre Parle Arabe, with which I have been personally and closely involved.
In her book, What it Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood, Palestinian scholar Dina Matar points out that her work on Palestinian popular memory aims to complement, rather than subvert, the top-down approaches prevalent in most modern histories of Palestine and adds to burgeoning oral history and popular memory research on the Palestinian people pioneered by the seminal works of Rosemary Sayigh and Nafiz Nazzal. Sayigh’s highly original contribution to the field of oral testimony has made it possible for the victims, the subaltern, the marginalized and women to challenge Zionist hegemonic and Palestinian elite narratives. In 2002 the editors of a special oral history edition of the Beirut-based Al-Jana (the Harvest, Arab Resource Centre for the Popular Arts) pointed out that individual initiatives were being undertaken even before the 1980s,4 when more projects began to develop with institutional support, especially from NGOs.
From the late 1980s onwards, with the decline of the Palestinian elite discourses, there has been another development in Palestinian historiography, pointing towards a different discourse and a “history from below” approach. This new approach pointed to “people’s past as a source of authenticity”. This approach was given a major boost in the 1990s with the publication of Ted Swedenburg’s seminal work on the great Palestinian rebellion of 1936‒1939: Memories of Revolt: The 1936‒1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (1995). Earlier in 1990 Swedenburg commented on the internal silencing of the Palestinian past and popular memory by both the Palestinian traditional and PLO leaderships:
[The] PLO,
which funded numerous projects in Lebanon during the seventies and early eighties, never supported a study of the [1936‒1939 revolt] based on the testimony of the refugees living in Lebanon. Maybe the resistance movement was hesitant to allow any details about the internal struggle of the thirties to be brought to light because bad feelings persisted in the diaspora community. (Swedenburg 1990: 152‒153; also Swedenburg 1991)
The powerful oral/aural culture of Palestine survived into the post-Nakba period. In the immediate post-catastrophe period the Arab tradition of storytelling in the form of al-hakawati (the storyteller) was deployed as a way of countering Zionist memoricide and toponymicide ‒ the erasure of the material culture of Palestine and Palestinian cultural memory. Al-hakawati is part of a long popular oral tradition in Arab cultures. While both Israeli official and revisionist historiographies have long emphasized Israeli state papers and official documents rather than the people’s voices behind the documents, oral and people’s history is often richer and goes much deeper than the official records. Furthermore, in recent decades, Palestinian oral histories ‒ which are partly inspired by the popular al-hakawati tradition and partly by the oral and cultural traditions of Islam ‒ has attempted to redress the imbalance of the modern historiography and the hegemonic Zionist narrative by developing methodologies for understanding the contexts, objects and meanings of documents, facts and evidence, and generally for exploring the history and voices of the people behind hegemonic Israeli state papers and Zionist official records.
Yet in Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gendered memory, Palestinian scholar Fatma Kassem (2011) shows that in Palestinian oral and verbal traditions (as opposed to male-written official and religious traditions) the storytellers are often women – women who live beneath the official version ‒ who often challenge and sometimes undermine official and patriarchal narratives. Popular storytelling was deployed in the post-1948 period by the Palestinian refugee and internally displaced communities as an “emergency science” and a liberating experience. Individual accounts of struggle and revolt (thawra), displacement and exodus, survival and heroism served as a buffer against national disappearance. Narrative histories, memory and oral accounts have become a key genre of Palestinian historiography – a genre guarding against the “disappearance from history” of the Palestinian people (Sanbar 2001; Masalha 2012).
In recent decades there has been attention to the idea of “history from below” ‒ from the ground up ‒ thus giving more space to the voices and perspectives of the refugees, rather than of policy makers, and also incorporating extensive oral testimony and interviews with the first generation of the Nakba. The vitality and significance of Palestinian oral history “from below” in the reconstruction of the past is central to understanding the Nakba. The most horrific aspects of the Nakba – the dozens of massacres that accompanied the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba, as well as a detailed description of what ethnic cleansing was from the point of view of the one ethnically cleansed ‒ can only be recovered when such a historiographical approach is applied (Pappe 2004, 2006).
Taken as a whole, Palestinian oral accounts and refugee recollections give a good idea of reality. However in the case of the Palestinian Nakba, oral accounts are not merely one choice of methodology. Rather its use can represent a decision as to whether to record any history at all (Esber 2003). Oral accounts are the major means of reconstructing the history of the Palestinian refugees and internally displaced Palestinians as seen from the perspective of primary subjects.
PALESTINIAN WOMEN’S VOICES AND REFUGEE CAMP STORIES
From the early 1980s onwards, and for nearly three decades, Rosemary Sayigh, in particular, has been working with Palestinian women in the refugee camps of Lebanon on oral history projects. In Voices: Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement (2005),5 a digital book with an introduction by Sayigh, you can hear the voices of Palestinian women telling their stories of the loss of home through displacement, refugeedom, deportation, imprisonment, Israeli shelling and siege of refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982 and total transformation of their environment.
The voices of Palestinian women and Palestinian oral accounts from survivors of destroyed villages in the Galilee provided the Lebanese novelist and brilliant narrator Elias Khoury (born in 1948) with material for his 1998 novel Bab al-Shams (Gate of the Sun), which was also turned into a film in 2004. Khoury was highly critical of the traditional male-dominated Palestinian leadership and its role in silencing the Nakba. In the late 1969s Khoury had joined the Fatah, the largest resistance organization within the PLO, and he subsequently worked as a researcher at the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut. Khoury’s Gate of the Sun (translated from Arabic in 2006), an epic retelling of the life of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon since the Nakba, later made into a film, subtly addresses the ideas of memory, truth and storytelling. Khoury had the initial idea of turning stories he heard in refugee camps in Beirut into a memorial narrative in the 1970s, when he worked for the Palestine Research Centre. He spent much of the 1980s gathering thousands of stories before writing Gate of the Sun. The story of love and survival is told by Khaleel, a doctor at a hospital in Shatila refugee camp in Beirut. It involves a dying Palestinian fighter called Yunis and his wife Naheeleh, an internal Palestinian refugee inside Israel, in Galilee, whose relationship forms during secret visits across the Lebanese‒Israeli border to a cave renamed “Bab al-Shams”. The cave is a house, a village and a country, and the only bit of Palestinian territory that has been liberated. The relationship produces a secret nation: a family of seven children who have borne four more Yunises by the end of the book. For Khoury:
Yunis, of course, is a hero. He used to go to Galilee, he used to cross the borders … but in the end we discover that he was nothing, that Naheeleh was this whole story; her relationship with the children, and how she actually defended life. In the refugee camps I met hundreds of women like Naheeleh. Then it’s no more a metaphor. It’s very realistic. (Khoury 1998, 2006)
Khoury was a close friend of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, and had worked very closely with Darwish in the PLO organ Shuun Filastiniyya. Both Darwish and Khoury were very critical of Palestinian elite- and male-dominated narratives and, in Memory for Forgetfulness (1987) and his other poems, Darwish (1987) attacked the record of the PLO leadership during the Lebanese period (1970‒1982) ‒ including the construction of a “state within a state” in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon ‒ and of the Arab leaders during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon for their indifference to the Israeli shelling of Palestinian refugee camps and the suffering of people in Beirut in August 1982. Both Darwish and Khoury challenge Arab indifference and the silencing of the events surrounding the Nakba in Palestinian elite- and male-dominated narratives.
However, Palestinian women continue to be excluded, even within the subaltern narrative and even the relatively more democratic New Global Media. Fatima Kassem (2011), Rema Hammami (2003), Isabelle Humphries and Laleh Khalili (Humphries 2009: 90‒91; Humphries and Khalili 2007; Khalili 2005) have all shown that gender narratives and women’s voices, and their contribution to collective Nakba memory and Palestinian historical consciousness, are doubly marginalized within the generally marginalized Palestinian refugee story. Often women’s memories are silenced because they complicate Palestinian nationalist narratives, an issue that Palestinian subaltern studies have failed to address adequately (Humphries 2009: 90‒91). Despite interviews with women, men are the main protagonists in Michel Khleifi’s Ma’loul [sic] Celebrates Its Destruction and Rachel Leah Jones’ 500 Dunam [sic] on the Moon (Humphries 2009: 90‒91). Clearly, more accounts of memory and oral history research are still needed on the events surrounding the Nakba and the post-trauma period as experienced and remembered not just by particular subaltern groups but by the whole non-elite majority of Palestinian society.
In recent decades, Palestinian filmmakers have produced a number of films and documentaries which have documented an
d examined the oral histories and the memories of the last decades. A number of recent edited collections and books authored by Palestinians also explore the complex narratives of the last seven decades. Documentary films, in particular, have explored concepts of 1948 Palestine, home and exile, identity and its relationship to individual and memories, and exilic cinema and its characteristics, cinematic use of narrative devices and storytelling and the struggle between two opposing narratives: the hegemonic (Zionist) narrative which tries to displace, replace and suppress the narrative of the indigenous people of Palestine. Of course, as Palestinian filmmaker Omar al-Qattan (2007: 191) points out, “There is no single Palestinian memory” of the Nakba; “rather, there are many tangled memories”. Yet understanding the links between the apparently tangled and fragmented memories of 1948 is central to appreciating the significance of the Palestinian experiences of the traumatic events and to comprehending the inner meanings of the Nakba.
RE-MEMBERING AS A REUNITING STRATEGY
The dismemberment of Palestine ‒ a country which had existed for thousands of years – in 1948, the destruction of its ancient cities and villages and the shattering defeat of the Nakba, also resulted in the destruction of the urban notables and the old social, political, cultural and national elites of Palestine; the ethnic cleansing of Palestine effectively emptied the urban hinterlands of the educated and cultural elites of the country. The Palestinian leadership, consisting mainly of urban notables, led by the Arab Higher Committee, the central political organ of the Palestinians in mandatory Palestine, and headed by the conservative leader Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, had been totally discredited in the post-Nakba period (Achcar 2010; Y. Sayigh 1997: 665).
An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba Page 4