An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  I was the kind of weirdo who’d say, you see this … there was a village here, here was Saris, here was Colonia … up there [pointing up screen right] was Qastal, this here was Lifta [points screen left] … you walk a few hundred metres and see a village, houses still standing to this day. Abandoned. Holes in the roof [gesturing], but houses and fruit trees. Where did the people go [leaning forward in bodily emphasis of the question]. Then you grow up and the memories which used to be riddles combine with the daily news. You’re in high school, you read about infiltrators, in the 50s … infiltrators, infiltrators [gesturing to signify repetition] ‒ an existential threat to Israel. Who were these infiltrators? [Pause]. The infiltrators were fallaheen [peasants] who ran away or were driven out [gesturing vehemently, tone vehement], and were trying to go back to their homes. And when they realized that they couldn’t get their homes back, they’d sneak in to steal their fruit, some even sneaked in just to see the house [touching finger to eye], not to steal or rob, certainly not to murder. Thousands of them were killed.

  Hanegbi offers this mode of action (temporary or “small” returns) precisely as an embodiment of connection and entitlement. This, in turn, stands as evidence of the forceful and violent dislocation and disconnection imposed on the Palestinian population. These small (and desperate) returns are affective modes of action that express the relationship to lived place, and to its promise and potentialities. In this context they are read and readable as resistant acts.

  The expressions of affect and the descriptions that bespeak and communicate emotions that were felt at past points in time tell a story in themselves, a story that spills beyond the factual details of past events even as it conjures them before our eyes. Listen to the words of Hajja Maliha from Saris,20 describing what they saw on the road as they were fleeing: “I swear by God, by God we saw young men, their hair like an alluring young girl, killed, slain” (“wallahi, wallah, shufna shabab mitl albint al-ghawiya shu‘urhen, maqtulin, madhbuhin”). In the voiced description, the tone, the bodily posture and the image projected, one can detect the sense of shocked tragedy. The emphatic oath that begins the description frames what is to come as something of great magnitude: almost unbelievable were it not true. Whilst there is no single emotion that can be definitively located or identified exogenously, it is an affective environment that is summoned: grief, horror, loss, enormity, shock. Which of these might be identified explicitly by someone, or experienced in that moment, can never be determined from an outside vantage point. What one can do is locate the intersubjective grounds for these kinds of attribution or avowal, and it is precisely these grounds that are offered in the narrative: beautiful young men, whose hair was like that of a beautiful maiden, killed at the roadside. The image draws a contrast between project and outcome: aspiration and end, life and youth on the one hand, and undeserved death and treachery on the other. It is in these contrasts that the grounds for avowing, or attributing, shock, horror or grief lie. This after all is an idiomatic way of expressing horror or sorrow at the death of the young: “shabb mitl al-fulla” (“a young man like a jasmine flower” ‒ meant to convey someone at the peak of beauty and potentiality unexpectedly cut down).

  “Contrasts” contain the very material of tragedy, and can underpin the ironic mode of narration. The contrast between what was then and what is now, between what could or should have been and what in fact transpired, between expectation and outcome, entitlement and fatality, and so on, explicitly or implicitly pervade Palestinian narratives, constituting their affective and moral grammar. The affective dimension of the narratives is nevertheless multi-layered: the affective condition, and the emotions that are alluded to, implied or noted, are represented as being within that past (fear, shock, sorrow), but their expression and marking indexes a present affective condition (regret, guilt, the sense of having been betrayed, the sense of trauma or enormity of the events). These are, of course, read and readable in and through the narration, and are located precisely in the connection between detail given, and the known upshot of the past’s unfolding, now topicalized in a present that is thus rendered as the summation and vanishing point of that past. Past emotions are themselves often the grounds for distinct emotions in the present. In the difference and simultaneous relationship between within-event emotions and post-event emotions, we can mark the affective afterlife of past emotional states and the ways they can become grounds for contemporary action and orientation. In some respects, this is a feature of both trauma and resistance.

  Hajja Halima: “and that was our departure” (“U hadi tal‘etna”). Her expressions, bodily posture, voice, gestures, all express a stance of dramatic irony towards the past. She laughs as she describes how her townsfolk spent time covering the threshed grain before they left the village in which they had taken refuge after leaving Saris: “they were afraid the townsfolk would steal it”. In the laughter, one detects the sentiment, the judgement: how foolish they were, how little they knew what was to be, what was to come; how fixed to the here and now they were, unable to grasp the enormity of what was unfolding; how small their fears and imaginings turned out to be compared to reality. It is in that fixity that the persistence of the expectation of continuity is evidenced, and the grounds that index the sense of the “catastrophic” are made clear.

  As Umm Yusif from Lifta talks to her interlocutor, walking down the path to the village (on one of many subsequent post-Nakba returns to Lifta), she talks of the terror that made people leave their village after the Jewish attacks became serious:

  they killed seven from Lifta, just like this. Then came Deir Yassin and the people left, you know how? Don’t you want to protect your child? Everybody wanted to protect himself. And then people were dispersed, everybody living in a different place, some in Lebanon, some in Amman, and the people were lost.21

  For Umm Yusif, it was the final dispersal, the diaspora into Lebanon and Jordan that constituted the catastrophic moment: a moment when “the people were lost”. Here the sense and meaning and coherence of life (inter-braiding individual self and collective being) are implicated in the idea of continuity and relationality of home and place. The overwhelming mood of her talk is that of the subjunctive: the lament about having made the wrong move, and the lack of foresight in the moment of terror: “A week or two we thought, or a month. I wish they had left us in our homes. Now they are demolished, I wish they had left us in our village”. Umm Yusif says this as she walks through the ruins of Lifta on the slopes of the Jerusalem mountain. It is clear as they walk and talk that most of the houses were not actually demolished, though some of them had been left as semi-ruins (as Hanegbi’s talk above also indicates). Is this discursive slippage, the use of repeated phrases and ideas as a generic representation that stand in for the particular? Or is this talk of the “phenomenal” houses: that is, their living tie to them, their lived entitlement, their continuity? Is she saying that “their” houses were demolished, rather than the houses themselves, gesturing to the deep grammar of relationality that organizes the narrative stance in the everyday?

  We can similarly detect the deep grammar of Hanegbi’s description earlier, of “infiltrators”: “they’d sneak in to steal their fruit”, he says, continuing two seconds later, “not to steal or rob”. Again, clearly the acting of stealing “their [own] fruit” is not phenomenally or morally isomorphic with “stealing” or “robbing”: the apparent contradiction in his words operates only at the surface level. At the deeper level of moral grammar, the two are not identical. This relationality, the relational history of social actors, is part of our routine moral and ethical assessments in mundane life. More than anything, this summons the painful history in which colonial power, stripping people materially of their lands and resources, also needed to strip them of their lived and symbolic relationship to these, and transformed them discursively into “interlopers”, “intruders”, “infiltrators” and “terrorists”.

  The very language of the narratives, and their s
hape, map out an affective landscape, and an economy of expectations and mundane entitlements. In (pro-)Zionist narratives, the language itself, the categories used, efface this entire economy and replace it with a collapsed de-natured geographic universe, gutted of “human” lineaments: these are the colonial tropes, which re-figure the humanity of the landscape of the colony into one that is flat, de-natured, empty of recognizable human life, and fill it in with a substitute text, locating human moments and dimensions only in the colonist’s world.

  AFFECT AND THE IDIOMS OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY

  One of the most salient features in the narratives of 1948 is the subjunctive mood, people voicing the expectation they had at the time that the dislocation from land and home would only be a few weeks, a few months at most. It evidences the depth of the sense of entitlement people had, and their trust that the rightful response to their plight would be finally enacted and implemented. This expectation of a reciprocal orientation to what is seen as patently right and rightful was fractured irremediably in the aftermath of the Nakba, as silence, complicity and betrayal came to be the patterns detected in the modes of action and response they encountered, both regionally and internationally. This repeated refrain or motif in the narratives emerges as an idiom of Palestinian collective memory, articulating and crystallizing a shared affective and corporeal experience and a reciprocal recollection: namely the sense of betrayal, the complete surprise at the outcome, and the idea of an entire world lost and undone. “And the people were lost.”

  This idiom is entangled with another motif, attesting to the unexpected and relatively sudden nature of the Nakba moment and the experience of dislocation: Umm Yusif of Lifta:

  we left with nothing. I tell you, the people here did not take with them anything. We just took the children and left. We were thinking to come back, no? We had the keys with us, I showed them to you, no? We had the keys with us, we were planning to return. We left everything as it was.

  “We left everything as it was”: so many of the accounts reproduce a similar affectively loaded detail and specify its particulars: Hajja Halima from Saris talks of the grain that was left on the threshing floor, others of the grain about to be harvested that was left untouched; Amina Jamal from Balad al-Sheikh (Haifa) reminisces that “our house was stuffed full” (mahshieh hashi); Omar Atalla from Saris says of the moment of departure that “my mum had just freshly baked some bread”. Such quotidian details often striate the narratives, indexing the unexpected character of the initial departure and its contingencies. Umm Ibrahim, also from Saris, remembers the plenty they left behind in their homes:

  Everything remained in them. Everything remained in them, everything … from the cupboards to the beds, from food to drink, the granaries were full of corn flour and corn, the clay pots of olive oil, the sugar, the rice, everything that was in the house, all of it stayed in its place my girl, by God no one carried anything with them … thanks be to God that a woman was able to carry her child, only!22

  This gap between the tableau of an organized life, plentiful in both its concreteness and its continued potentiality (its unfinished trajectory), and its sudden unexpected loss together with the meagre scale of existence left open to them, it is this contrast that is an index of the enormity of the Nakba, the measure of the catastrophe. The Nakba was about an entire life-world upended. That is why this kind of expression is repeated, detailed in various modes, all amounting to the same sentiment in the present. They are not merely expressions of an “idyllic memory” so often produced of the past; they express the affective valency of details as signifiers of a distinct condition that has been undone. These expressions too therefore become affective idioms of collective memory.

  The asymmetry of arms and the inability to withstand the Jewish assault, discussed above, surfaces as another idiom in such memory work. This particular idiom within the narratives condenses and evidences perhaps a blend of regret, guilt and realism that infuses these repeated words: Qasim Darawsheh’s rhetorical question, “What do you want: a rifle to resist an airplane?”, is mirrored in most of the accounts. It may, in part, be an index or symptom of a cumulative yet shared experience over years of being a refugee in other countries: the repeated attacks and accusations levelled at the dispossessed Palestinians (especially in Lebanon) that they had chosen to leave their country, or even that they had “sold it”. The affective tone of the present is saturated with the qualities of the affective landscape of the past; but that landscape of the past is now seen through the eye of the present, a present that has not overcome the troubles of that past and its consequences.

  Emotions (affect in general) are indices of the “moral”: an intersubjectively shared and acknowledged feature of the grammar of the “human” as constituted in daily practice and life. Affect, as an orientation and potentiality, as a relational valency towards the lived outside of oneself, the lived and human environment, and feeling or emotion as an immediate response to that environment and events within it, are deeply embedded in the way that agents and their actions are described, appraised and judged (sometimes deciphered) and thus in the mode of relationality towards these agents (and their actions) that is in turn legitimized or justified. In other words, the very constitution of “intersubjectivity”, and the reciprocity of perspectives that is its implicit scaffolding, is intimately adjoined to, and embedded in, the mutual recognition/ality of affect and emotion. It is not a trivial matter that the worst kind of judgement of a person’s humanity (or lack thereof) is the absence of emotion in the face of great events.

  It is perhaps for that reason that colonial discourses extirpate and excise the emotions of the colonized subject from their accounts, except where they may be represented as having a negative valency. Thus the understanding of the colonial complex needs to pay attention to the constitutions, ascription and avowal of affect, as Laura Anne Stoler’s important work demonstrates so well (see e.g. Stoler 2008a, 2008b). The various significant sites of human action and encounter, such as the reception or infliction of death, pain and loss, are where criterial emotions and sentiments are experienced and displayed. In the violence of colonial practice and policy, it is these sites which must be sanitized: if the victim of violence is perceived as affectless, then the materiality of the violence seems to be placed in doubt: this is the mode through which “violence” becomes seen as anything other than violence.23

  So the colonial subject is made out not to feel the same emotions and affective states, at the same kinds of experiential moments, or ever to the same degree, as the colonizer’s community. They are not affected in the same way. There are, of course, encounters when the colonial power and its spokespersons did not particularly care or need to do this ‒ or inflicted death and pain not as a means but as an end (to set an example or inflict punishment). In the case of the Zionist project, however, “affect” and “emotional need and conditions” were central to the construction of colonial entitlement, indeed to the explicit denial of a colonial nature to the Zionist enterprise.

  BETWEEN FACT AND MEMORY WORK: A METHODOLOGICAL NOTE

  Memory, as we know, is not the simple reflection of the world as it unfolds; it has its absences, its truncations, its cross-overs, its ellipses, its inversions, its conflations and its affective sites. All these represent points of possible interference, and can work to produce an inflected refraction of past events. But they can also signify much of importance in the human experience of events, and in our understanding therefore of the lived stream of those events.24 Whilst oral testimonies, and witnessing, cannot be the final and objective course to particular “truths”, they have irremediably been constituents of the navigational practices of “truth-finding” in various cultures and societies, from the classical world to the modern. What varies extensively, however, is whose memory and/or testimony counts, to what extent, and who makes the call as to whether it counts. As Kurt Danziger (2008: chapter 7) elaborates, which “memories” were trusted, and which were not, depended
on the period and social context: some people’s memory was privileged over others’, some treated as authoritative, others as systematically suspect (women, children). This knot between account, account giver and judgement of legitimacy is, at each point, contingent on the practico-historical standards of the time or the group that has the power to make the call. It necessarily remains open to revision as historical contexts and standards change.

  It is important to note, however, that historical “records” themselves do not offer a pristine reflection of the world as it unfolded either. Are they not also subject to institutional (and state) interests, classifications that bow to particular epistemic and moral frames, to mistakes, blind spots and self-conscious omissions?25 Are historical statistics, for example, not unavoidably an outcome of historically situated classificatory practices: do they not often involve procedures of averaging, discounting or aggregating? Are there not matters to which access is blocked or not available, where lacunae are managed by various remedial practices? In other words, documentary records are themselves outcomes of social practices of one kind or another, rather than transparent indices of an objective truth.

  Both kinds of material are irremediably situated in human and social contexts and trajectories of action. To ignore an entire corpus of testimonies, such as the Palestinian oral histories, is to prejudice (and risk) the outcome of an inquiry. This is precisely Joel Beinin’s critique of Morris’ historiography.26 It is clear that both species of material (where available) are significant for any inquiry into a question of contemporary history (whether autobiographical or collective). Indeed, from the Nuremberg Tribunals to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and others, both kinds of material have been conjointly used, one checked and triangulated against the other. Though oral testimonies and documentary records each oblige a distinct methodology, in both cases the analyst needs to be attentive to the specific issues of their situated production, and to treat them as both topic and resource. Both need to be treated as topic and resource simultaneously, and to be conjointly read through and against the grain at the same time.