An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  15The discomfort of these moments was such that Umm Mahmoud would often entreat her mother not to sing. “Although my parents used to speak a lot about Palestine when we were young, I don’t like hearing these stories now … Sometimes when my mother sings to my children about Bint Jbeil and how families were separated when they came to Lebanon, it makes us cry … These memories are too painful for her and for us” (Allan 2014: 50).

  16“When we look, we are doing something more deliberate than seeing and yet more unguarded than thinking”, observes MacDougall (2006: 7). “We are putting ourselves in a state that is at once one of vacancy and heightened awareness. Our imitative faculties take precedence over judgment and categorization, preparing us for a different kind of knowledge.”

  17Azoulay’s project of recovering potential histories through a close reading of archival photographs is generative for analysing the Nakba Archive. She scrutinizes the gestures, bodily comportment and gaze of Palestinian men and women living under colonial occupation and reminds us that as witnesses to the destruction of Palestinian society, we too are complicit. As viewers, we are called upon to see the politics at work in these images, and to reflect on the power relations they inscribe.

  18Didier Fassin (2007) has recently argued for the need to restore the thick materiality (and contingency) of the past in the present. Exploring how histories of exclusion and oppression are physically and psychically inscribed in AIDS patients in South Africa, Fassin (2007: 177) argues that it is through these gestures and ticks that “the past is embodied in the present but also, more materialistically, that our individual and collective history is embodied in what we are”.

  19Remembrance enacted in bodily dispositions rather than represented in speech recalls Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) theory of habitus.

  20Salih (2017) describes this interweaving of discourse and everyday sensory perception as constitutive of meaning in narratives of 1948 among elderly Palestinian women in the camps in Jordan. Women remember “through the body and what [that] body endured”, writes Salih. “Their ways of narrating … are inscribed in a plot made of ordinary domestic interruptions, affective ties and relations, bodily experiences of place in times of war.”

  21Recounting the hilltop improvisation of “warrior musicians” in Ajloun, Genet (1986: 47) describes these forms of sung poetry as a kind of pre-conceptual cultural knowledge: “The Palestinians were inventing songs that had been as it were forgotten, that they found lying hidden in themselves before they sang them … not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody, cut in a disc of flesh”.

  22The militant preacher and leader of the resistance against the British and Zionists in the 1920s and 1930s.

  23Now one is more likely to hear Dal ‘Ouna sung at Palestinian cultural events, where dabkeh and other peasant traditions symbolize cultural tenacity and nationalist sentiment.

  24The rhythm is instantly recognizable to Palestinians, and listeners will often join in, revealing an instilled visceral attunement ‒ a bodily response to sound and rhythm ‒ that taps into cultural tradition and nationalist practice.

  25Furthermore, because bodily registers of knowing and remembering are invariably bound up with speech they should not be understood as a counterpoint to the verbal.

  26Rancière (2004: xi) writes, “a delimitation of spaces and times, the visible and invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and stakes of politics as a form of experience”.

  REFERENCES

  Allan, D. (2007) “The Politics of Witness: Remembering and Forgetting 1948 in Shatila Camp”, in A. Sa’di and L. Abu-Lughod (eds.), Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Allan, D. (2014) Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Azoulay, A. (2013) “Potential History: Thinking through Violence”, Critical Inquiry 39(3): 548‒574.

  Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of the Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Darwish, M. (2010) A Journal of Ordinary Grief, translated by I. Muhawi. New York: Archipelago Books (first published 1973).

  Desjarlais, R. (1997) Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless. Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press.

  Doumani, B. (1992) “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History”, Journal of Palestine Studies 21(2): 5‒28.

  Doumani, B. (2009) “Archiving Palestine and the Palestinians: The Patrimony of Ihsan Nimr”, Jerusalem Quarterly 36: 3‒12.

  Esmeir, S. (2003) “1948: Law, History, Memory”, Social Text 21(2): 25‒48.

  Fassin, D. (2007) When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  Genet, J. (1986) The Prisoner of Love. New York: New York Review of Books.

  Glissant, É. (1997) The Poetics of Relation, translated by B. Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

  Harris, V. (2002) “The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and the Archive in South Africa”, Archival Science 2: 63‒86.

  Harootunian, H. (2004) “Shadowing History: National Narratives and the Persistence of the Everyday”, Cultural Studies 18(2/3): 181‒200.

  Ingold, T. (1993) “The Temporality of the Landscape”, World Archaeology 25(2): 152‒174.

  Jayyusi, L. (2007) “Iterability, Cumulativity, and Presence: The Relational Figures of Palestinian Memory”, in A. Sa’di and L. Abu-Lughod (eds.), Nakba: 1948 and the Claims of Memory. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Khouri, E. (2012) “Rethinking the Nakba”, Critical Inquiry 38: 1‒18.

  MacDougall, D. (2006) The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

  Murdoch, H.A. (2013) “Édouard Glissant’s Creolized World Vision: From Resistance and Relation to Opacité”, Callaloo 36(4): 875–890.

  Parmenter, B. (1994) Giving Voices to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature. Austin, TX: University of Austin Press.

  Portelli, A. (1991) The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Forms and Meanings of Oral History. Harlan County, KY: SUNY Press.

  Rancière, J. (2001) “Ten Theses on Politics”, Theory & Event, 5(3).

  Rancière, J. (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

  Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

  Said, E. (1984) “Permission to Narrate”, Journal of Palestine Studies 13(3): 27‒48.

  Salih, R. (2017) “Bodies that Walk, Bodies that Talk, Bodies that Love: Palestinian Women Refugees, Affective Memories, and the Politics of the Ordinary”, Antipode 49(3): 742‒760.

  Sayigh, R. (1979) The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries. London: Zed Books.

  Sayigh, R. (1998a) “Gender, Sexuality, and Class in National Narrations: Palestinian Camp Women Tell Their Lives”, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 19(2): 166–185.

  Sayigh, R. (1998b) “Palestinian Camp Women as Tellers of History”, Journal of Palestine Studies 27(2): 42–58.

  Sobchack, V. (1992) The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  Soueif, A. (2003) “Introduction”, in The Prisoner of Love. New York: New York Review of Books.

  Stewart, K. (2011) “Atmosphere Attunements”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29(3): 445‒453.

  Stoler, A.L. (2016) Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  Tamari, S. (2001) Reinterpreting the Historical Records:
The Uses of Palestinian Refugee Archives for Social Science. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies.

  4

  The time of small returns:

  affect and resistance during the Nakba1

  LENA JAYYUSI

  [T]he Nakba is a share of death for a human being (qisma mnil mawt li-bani Adam). It affected us as though it were a share of death, of death, it took half of our lives and left half.2

  Hajja Halima Hassan’s words, both their substance and more significantly the tonality (and gestural stance) with which they are enunciated, communicate a memory still affectively lived in the here and now; they speak of the unhealed scar of events experienced, still painful in the present, a testimony to a traumatic passage never transcended. When people contest memories of events, the contestations are often centred on the details of concrete actions and outcomes (“facts”), but it is the affective and emotional (expression of) memory, whether spoken explicitly or only gestured, that is the marker of the event’s phenomenal significance. It is the affective expression that configures the event’s relational meaning: how it bears on the narrator. Here, Hajja Halima’s words signify a momentous, even cataclysmic, transformation: a death in life.

  Yet in the numerous accounts produced of the events of 1948 in Palestine, which saw the establishment of the Israeli state and the dispossession of the Palestinians as a people, little of this affective and existential reality is manifest: this death in life,3 the actions and agencies that brought it about, and the experiences and losses it represented are all excised or radically occluded. Consider for example the following statement that appears in a review of a book about the history of Israel, a review that whilst highly positive nevertheless picks out significant omissions:

  This is not to say that “Israel: A History” is without flaws. There are curious omissions. Arthur Ruppin, largely forgotten today except for some street names in Israeli cities, was more than just another early Zionist leader, as one would think from reading Shapira’s book.

  Ruppin was the visionary who was the first to articulate the need for a majority of Jews in Eretz Yisrael; was the first to insist that land purchase was crucial to the survival of the Yishuv in Palestine ‒ a “no-brainer” later, but radical when it was first asserted by Ruppin. (Chanes 2013)

  What could “the need for a majority of Jews in Eretz Yisrael” have consisted of as a project? What course of action or policy could possibly produce that outcome? What would it mean, in practice, for that unspoken constituency which is discursively submerged in this text, present but absent, who would thus be transformed into a minority, at best, in the land of their birth? Indeed, in the naturalness and unselfconscious ease with which this proposition is given, and in which the subsequent proposition is also indicated as a “no-brainer”, lies the depth and volume of the radical erasure, not merely of the process and outcomes that were the organic result of such an idea (a “need” for a majority of Jews in a land which held only a Jewish minority), but of the real human cost of the Zionist project. By a trick of syntax, the two propositions together, each perhaps formally correct in its depiction of Ruppin’s position, may construct a particular universe of meanings which occludes how things in the actual world happened: they might suggest to the novice reader that the outcome (a majority of Jews) was produced by “land purchase”, as though it were ever possible for an entire people to sell off its land of habitus, its entire patrimony in life.4 The Palestinians, in this syntactically predicated projection, are here potentially represented as possessing a peculiar lack of affect and reason. Indeed, every time the claim is made that the Jews had bought the land (entitling them to the country), this denial of mundane affect and reason to the Palestinians is implicitly accomplished. This claim is an element in the process of dehumanization of Palestinians in Zionist and pro-Zionist discourse that has increasingly taken place over time.

  ACCOUNTING FOR THE NAKBA

  The silences and structuring figures in Chane’s text above are all too frequent in the standard academic and popular (Western) narratives of the engendering of Israel as a state.5 Too often, these do not stop to question the actual process that unfolded to produce the outcome that emerged at the end of the 1948 war: a country largely (and to all intents and purposes permanently) emptied of most of its indigenous inhabitants within the space of less than a year. Problematic tropes and occlusions also irradiate the accounts of revisionists like Benny Morris (2004).6 In his Introduction to The Origins of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Morris cautions:

  In general, it cannot be stressed too strongly that, while this is not a military history, the events it describes, cumulatively amounting to the Palestinian Arab exodus, occurred in wartime and were a product, direct and indirect, of that war, a war that the Palestinians started. The threat of battle and battle itself were the immediate backdrop to the various components of the exodus. (Morris 2004: 7; italics added)

  The language itself signals the conclusions to be taken away, and transmutes the moral implications of the story. Hayden White’s discussion of the ways that the language of historical narratives prefigures the meaning of the events themselves7 thus finds a potent example in Morris’ account, even as he displays his detailed knowledge of the attacks by Jewish forces and of the evictions of Palestinians from their towns and villages. The moral grammar of “exodus” rather than “expulsion”, which runs through the account and consistently frames his narrative, constructs a specific epistemic and normative space. Yet the process that amounted to “the Nakba” took many months, and involved multiple “waves”, as Morris painfully demonstrates in his book. Moreover, not allowing the Palestinian villagers to return to their homes after the events of 1948 was, after all, not a neutral and docile sequel to “war”. It is in this cumulative context that Pappe (2006) confronts Morris’ paradigm of “war” with that of “ethnic cleansing”.8

  But what of the Palestinian and Arab accounts? Where are they in this? The Palestinian sources were too often ignored as partisan, propagandistic and at best unreliable and untrustworthy. The people who had endured the radical uprooting could not be held to be telling their experience with any authority or authenticity. Thus the uprooting from land and place was compounded with (indeed sealed by) the uprooting and excision from symbolic and communicative space, from historical representation; it was coeval with the denial of “permission” to narrate, as Said (1984) so aptly expressed it. The problem, however, is deeper than the appropriation of the right to narrate: at a fundamental level it resolves into the effacement of both human affect and reason from the figure of the colonial subject: that “they”, the Third World community, could not be trusted to tell it as it was means that they cannot see matters for what they really are, or that the affective narratives they tell could not have real grounds. This involves the implicit non-recognition of the existential and experiential nature of the events of loss of home and country, and the consequent affective and moral trauma; a systematic disjoining of events from consequences and of affect from event that is repeatedly visible in the colonial paradigm. The grounds for intersubjective identification are already unmoored within this position. The story is rigged from the outset.

  Yet when one examines oral histories of the Nakba, one discovers a range of small narratives that embody the resistance to dislocation, to loss of land and home, and the emotional and affective dimensions of that loss: its enormity and its rejection at the same time, each a function of the other. In the affective recounting of the events, we can discern the affective ecology of these events as lived. The stories themselves exhibit a recollection (a narratological rendition) suffused with feeling and emotion, and enable us to locate and perceive an affective subject in the recollected past.

  In part, the affective dimension of the lived, unfolding Nakba can be traced and located within the resistance to dislocation summoned up in the stories, manifest in various actions, ranging from attempts by village communities to fight back to attempted return
s to the original sites. One can also trace a “pattern” of flight which itself confirms that affective tie, the insistence on it and the resistance to its severing. In account after account, it becomes clear how people fled from their homes to the outlying vicinity, trying to maintain a connection with their place of origin. It was not a linear flight, as represented in the many compacted and aggregated accounts (including many Arab accounts), except where it was forced into that form by expulsive forces, as in Lydda.

  In light of these narratives, accounts that refer to the Palestinians as simply fleeing “war” (rather than direct attack or threat of direct attack) are, at best, reductionist and occlude the actual history of the violent encounter between armed Jewish settlers in Palestine and the Palestinian population, struggling to hold on, if not to place, then at least to communal space, to vicinity as a lived affective and phenomenal field. Claims that Palestinians left willingly at the behest of their leaders in order to make it easy to get rid of the Jews reconstruct the Palestinian from the outset as a coldly calculating creature lacking recognizable human emotional lineaments,9 a figure of the colonial imaginary. It is itself a sign of, as well as a move in, the racialization of affect (and thought) in colonial discourses. Whilst (pro-)Zionist narratives speak fluidly of the “attachment” of the Jews to their “ancestral lands”, such that their “return” (2,000 years later) is conceptualized as natural and moral, and affectively consonant with what any normal human being might feel or desire, Palestinians are deprived even of this in the master narratives of the colonial order. The attachment to an imagined ancient past, turned into a potent mobilizer for contemporary conquest, is produced as more real and realistic, more morally justified and entitled, than the attachment to a current lived habitus, and to generationally accrued patterns, networks and rooted relationships.10 In such renditions of the colonial subject we can see the radical nature of the colonial: a stance excising the most commonplace lineaments of the human from the roots.