An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  As Palestinian sociologist Jamil Hilal pointed out, from the Nakba and until the mid-1960s there was no Palestinian national elite. This vacuum was largely filled by local leaders, mukhtars or tribal leaders (Hilal 2002: 29‒32). Despite this fragmentation and dispersal, in the decade after 1948 Palestinian “marginality” (to use Bell Hooks’ term) became “a site of resistance” (1990). From “below”, popular and refugee-led resistance and “Palestianism was a natural response to al-nakba, but it was the experience of social and political marginality that effectively transformed it from ‘a popular grass-roots patriotism’ into a proto-nationalism in the decade after 1948” (Y. Sayigh 1997: 46).

  In the 1950s the absence of independent Palestinian leadership and representation was much in evidence: from the Nakba and until the establishment of the PLO in the 1960s Palestinians were in effect without formal political representation; they were also without a single territorially based cultural elite.

  To compound things further, on anniversaries of the Nakba and on Israel’s Independence Day (15 May), the Israeli state actively encouraged the so-called “Israeli Arabs” to celebrate the Zionist settler-colonization of Palestine and the destruction of historic Palestine; this strategy scored some successes in the first two decades of the state (Cohen 2010). In Jordan a key priority of the Hashemite regime (which controlled the West Bank and ruled many Palestinians) was to keep the Palestinian refugee camps and Palestinians in the West Bank under close surveillance and prevent Nakba commemoration (Sayigh 1979: 111). Although Israel’s strategy of control, erasure of memory and Nakba denial, through the combination of military rule, repression, fear, segmentation and patronage, looked fairly effective in the 1950s, today it looks as though Israel’s efforts at encouraging the Palestinian citizens to embrace the Zionist ideological discourse of 1948 have largely ended in failure (Cohen 2010).

  Today Palestinians commemorate the Nakba through Ihya‘a Dhikra al-Nakba, with its emphasis on collective togetherness, recovery and reconstitution, while the English term “re-membering” emphasizes group “membership” and re-uniting people. From the 1960s onwards, recovery and re-membering, re-linking and re-uniting the fragmented, exiled and colonized Palestinians through a range of cultural and artistic media and through collective, individual and shared memories of the pre-Nakba and post-Nakba periods, as embodied in fiction, novels, paintings and resistance poetry, was central to consolidating contemporary Palestinian identity. The trauma of the Nakba affected Palestinian national identity and memories in two contradictory ways. On the one hand the Nakba led to the destruction of much of Palestinian society and the dispersal and fragmentation of the Palestinian people. But, from the encounter with and rejection of neighbouring Arab states, the Nakba also led to the crystallization, re-membering and collectivization of a distinct and resistant Palestinian identity (Litvak 2009: 103‒111). While the formation of Palestinian national identity had taken root long before 1948, there is no doubt that the Nakba was a key event in the consolidation and reconstruction of a strong, clearly defined and vital contemporary Palestinian identity (Sayigh 1977a, 1977b).

  INDIGENOUS MEMORIES AND THE CREATION OF A PALESTINE MEMORYSHARE PROJECT

  The production and archiving of Palestinian social history and cultural memories, the documenting of the uprooting of the indigenous people of Palestine and the archiving of refugee voices, experiences and stories about places from their past ‒ that appear in films, recent oral history collections, autobiographies, novels, poetry collections, paintings and memorial books, electronic encyclopaedias, digital archives and refugee camp embroidery projects ‒ focus on both the symbolic and the emotional connections of Palestinians to the land and homeland, and to their former homes and villages (Al-Qalqili 2004). This rich production of oral memory is also the “documentary evidence” that proves their existence and legal right to the land of their ancestors.

  These shared memories, with their affirmative narratives about the land, testify to the intimate and intense experience of everyday life on the land ‒ the names of the valleys, hills, tombs and shrines, streets, beaches, springs and water wells, cultivated fields and vineyards ‒ and the importance of all kinds of trees and other natural elements in visual memories of the past (Masalha 2005, 2012; Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007). In addition, hand-drawn maps marking the places of importance to the villagers, personal documents, personal memories and oral accounts all intertwine to create a larger picture and a collective narrative of life before the Nakba.

  The heritage of the country and memory accounts of historic Palestine testify to the cultural richness and social multiculturalism of the country and the beauty of the countryside, mountains and valleys, religious shrines and historic sites. Memory accounts of Palestine before 1948 reflect the fertility of the land, the beauty of the landscape, the richness and diversity of culture and of village and city lives. One of the most famous Palestinian sites is the Dome of the Rock (Masjid Qubbat As-Sakhrah), located in the centre of a greater Muslim shrine, known as the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) in the Old City of Jerusalem. Completed in 691 AD by the Muslim Umayyad Caliph Abdel Malik, the building is the oldest Islamic shrine in the world and also one of the most beautiful and instantly recognizable buildings.

  People’s history projects are an essential tool for recovering the voice of the subaltern and ordinary people: peasants, the urban poor, refugee camp dwellers, Bedouin tribes, but also women. In Palestinian oral histories, gendered memory and verbal traditions (as opposed to male-written official and religious traditions) the storytellers are often refugee camp women.

  Inspired by the BBC Memoryshare project, this work recommends the creation of a similar digital Memoryshare project in Palestine. This project would encourage ordinary people and people from all walks of life to share, record and upload pre- and post-Nakba stories and memory accounts ‒ old photos, documents, Sharia court records, drawings, maps, recorded voices or videos, or material evidence. This people’s history archiving project can serve as an anchor that connects communities in Palestine and the diaspora. It will be assisted and run by a team of volunteers and archivists based at several universities and cultural and community centres in Palestine.

  In recent years we have seen a considerable expansion of Nakba studies internationally and some of the international programmes have developed oral history projects and archival collections. Several Palestinian digital film and newspaper collections and online archives have also been developed by Palestinian refugee networks and communities based in the diaspora. Two examples of these excellent web-based archives are:

  •the Palestine Poster Project Archive which displays more than 4,500 Palestine-related posters from the late nineteenth century to the present;

  •and the Nakba Archive: a video archive of oral histories of the Nakba, the creation of the Palestinian refugee diaspora displaced during the 1948 Nakba.

  However, the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people, their ongoing plight and trauma, have brought me to the conclusion that there is a need to nurture and establish an interdisciplinary subfield to be called Nakba Studies. This subfield would bring in historians, both literary and theorist, and scholars of trauma studies. It would continue documentation and expression of the embattled popular and cultural memories of Palestine as a liberating scholarly and ethical imperative.

  NOTES

  1http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/memoryshare/about.

  2http://nakba-archive.org/?page_id=954.

  3See Al-Azhari (1996), Yahya (1998), Shoufani (2001), Sa’di (2002), Al-Qalqili (2004), Humphries (2004, 2009), (Issa 2005), Gluck (1994, 2008), Sayigh (2007a, 2007b, 2011), Matar (2011), Humphries and Khalili (2007), Sa’di and Abu-Lughod (2007), Kassem (2011), Masalha (2005, 2008, 2012), Manna’ (2016).

  4http://al-jana.org/programs-activities/active-memory/.

  5al-Mashriq, http://almashriq.hiof.no/palestine/300/301/voices/index.html.

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