An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  Much of the aid raised for victims of the Holocaust is said to have found its way back into Holocaust remembrance funds, with US backing (Finkelstein 2000: 130, 131). When the Polish parliament tried to limit compensation, Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress denounced this as “fundamentally an anti-American act” (Finkelstein 2000: 131). Finkelstein notes further that:

  Apart from Holocaust memorials, fully seventeen states mandate or recommend Holocaust programs in schools, and many colleges and universities have endowed chairs in Holocaust studies. Hardly a week passes without a major Holocaust-related story in the New York Times. (Finkelstein 2000: 143)

  Holocaust museums have been established in as many as thirty countries around the world, and twenty-five in the US alone, seven of them in New York, with the largest in Washington on the national mall.

  American hyper-memorialization of the Holocaust raises questions of motivation: is it designed to keep the eye of censure on Germany for war crimes in World War II, obscuring those committed by the Allies, such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the fire-bombing of Dresden? Or is it to divert attention from genocides against indigenous peoples committed by European colonizers in America and elsewhere? Or to bury slavery and its contemporary sequels in order to avoid real compensation? Whatever the motivation, Holocaust museums in the US and the pedagogic programmes attached to them maintain an idea of Israel’s existence as recompense for unparalleled suffering, as well as creating support for an alliance that costs American taxpayers dearly.7

  The American alliance that protects Israeli violence from censure surely has many components, among them a similar origin in colonial expropriation, and a shared biblical tradition that exhorts its followers to destroy their enemies. The violence of biblical language has been noted by several scholars, for example Masalha (2013: 75). Using text analytics software, Osborne (2016) found the Old Testament to be more than twice as violent as the Quran.8 The term “Judeo-Christianity”, increasingly used since the 1940s to define America’s “civic religion”, differs notably from the previously common term “monotheistic religions” by excluding Islam.9 The US and Israel also share interests in control of Arab oil, exclusion of non-Western influences and prevention of Arab unity. Recent research has put a question to the long-standing idea of US neutrality between Arabs and Israel until the demonstration of Israel’s military superiority in the “Six Day War”, by revealing that Zionist‒US alliance building began before Israel’s establishment (Gendzier 2016).

  A major strategic advantage Zionism possessed in its diplomacy to the West – and even beyond ‒ was the Bible. From the first century AD Christian missionaries carried the Bible to all part of the world. Notions of the “Holy Land” disseminated by Western scholars and travellers helped justify Zionism’s claim to ownership by extracting Palestine from the Arab/Muslim east and attaching it notionally to Europe. Moreover, the “Holy Land” concept was basic to the construction of “Christian Zionism”, precursor to Jewish Zionism and its most important source of international support. The disposition of Protestants in general and evangelists in particular to advocate for Jewish “return” to Palestine is well substantiated (Sharif 1983). Evangelists such as Falwell and Robertson in the US preach strongly for Israel.10 Even in Africa evangelical Christians support Israel.11

  It goes without saying that the Nakba has not been commemorated in the way the Holocaust has. Indeed, a primary factor suppressing the Nakba in the global awareness is the power of Holocaust commemoration. The influence of the global north over education systems worldwide, whether through UN development aid or publishing power, renders full coverage of the Nakba unlikely even in textbooks on the Middle East. The spread of human rights curricula incorporating the Holocaust as a major violation is another factor in the suppression of the Nakba. This linking has universalized Holocaust teaching to an exceptional degree, illustrated in a bizarre attempt to introduce it in UNRWA schools in Gaza in 2009. That this project was under serious consideration by UNRWA’s Gaza field director John Ging is evident from contemporary media reports in which Ging is quoted as saying: “No human-rights curriculum is complete without inclusion of the facts of the Holocaust, and its lessons” (MacIntyre 2009). Given that Gaza is besieged and continually attacked by Israel, and that 43.5% of Gaza’s population is aged under fourteen, this initiative can surely be classified as symbolic violence.

  Silencing the Nakba has had the effect of representing the Jewish takeover of Palestine as a legitimate reward for victimhood rather than as an act of colonialism consciously projected along European lines, and intended to support Western hegemony over the Arab east (Said 1979: 29; Masalha 2012: 34). The power of Holocaust commemoration suppresses not only the Nakba but also the causal connection between the Holocaust and the Nakba, just as a building constructed over another buries the history embodied in the first (Trouillot 1997). Indeed, the siting of Israel’s extensive Holocaust museum, the Yad Vashem, on the lands of Deir Yassin, renders the ruined massacre site invisible to all but those who know of its presence. Yad Vashem is “a vast, sprawling complex of tree-studded walkways leading to museums, exhibits, archives, monuments, sculptures and memorials … 62 mil pp of docs, 267,5000 photos, thousands of films and videotaped testimonies … 3.2 mil names of Holocaust victims” (Masalha 2005: 6, 7). The Kfar Shaul mental hospital established in 1951 covers homes ruined during the massacre. The graves of those who died in Deir Yassin are unknown and unmarked. Forests established by the Jewish National Fund cover the ruins of villages destroyed during 1948 (Pappe 2006: 229‒234).

  The Deir Yassin massacre is not forgotten but the form of its commemoration highlights the contrast in resources between Israel and the Palestinians. The annual gathering of massacre survivors and descendants near the ruins of the village on the anniversary, 8 April, is characteristic of modes of Nakba commemoration.12 These people form one of many Palestinian “communities of mourning” that remember specific tragedies as part of a Nakba that continues and expands. It is through such coming together on commemoration days that Palestinian history is formed, in a highly variable mingling of the personal, familial, local and national.

  Such events punctuate the calendars produced by Palestinian villages, political parties and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) across the diaspora, a form of history-making that binds local communities to the broader frameworks of “people” and “nation”. These calendars give evidence of the way place and political context diversify Nakba commemoration. While the Nakba and other tragedies such as the massacre of Tal al-Za’ter in 1976 were among the main events marked by Fateh calendars during the period of armed struggle, this changed after Oslo, but not everywhere equally: while a third of events on a Fateh-affiliated NGO calendar in Lebanon in 2002 were massacres, Fateh calendars in the West Bank highlighted events connected with state-building, cutting down on massacres (Khalili 2007: 163). Since Oslo, diversity between regions in terms of Nakba remembrance has grown: semi-ignored in areas under the National Authority until the fiftieth anniversary in 1998, when Arafat declared a national Nakba Day, with appropriate political and cultural manifestations;13 followed ritualistically in Lebanon;14 while in Israel young Palestinians are marking the fall of individual villages in 1948 as part of vigorous campaigns of reclamation (Hawari 2014).

  Adding to the variability of Nakba commemoration over time and between diasporic regions is the number of other tragedies that have punctuated Palestinians’ post-1948 history, the massacres and sieges from Deir Yassin to Yarmouk camp, each more immediate in local experience than the original catastrophe. As annual repetition fades Nakba mourning, new technology permits the virtual reconstruction of disaster-stricken communities. In a recent instance, survivors of the Tal al-Za’ter massacre of 1976 in Lebanon have created “afterlives” on Facebook (Yaqub 2015). Segmented by geography, diverse educational systems and political affiliations, and in the absence of a forceful liberation movement, the Palestinians find in local communities the be
st vehicles for transmitting Palestinian history as they experience it.

  Among Israeli measures to silence the Nakba are decrees banning use of the term in school books on pain of withdrawal of state funding (Strickland 2015).15 Police force has been used to remove Nakba Day demonstrators, and to target Zochrot, an Israeli NGO that records Nakba memories (Horowitz 2012). Yet more powerful than Israeli interdicts has been American silencing. As Abu-Lughod and Sa’di point out, “The debilitating factor in the ability to tell their stories and make public their memories is that the powerful nations have not wanted to listen” (Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007: 11). It was not until the 1990s that American university presses began to publish research-based Palestinian studies (e.g. Slyomovics 1989; Peteet 1991; Swedenburg 1995). The 2007 publication of Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, edited by Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, with its use of the hitherto censored term Nakba as its main title, was a breakthrough that marked full “permission to narrate”.

  In relation to the Palestinian Nakba we are faced with a paradox: on the one hand there was rapid understanding that this rupture was of the utmost political seriousness for the Arab region as well as the Palestinians. This awareness generated a large number of political studies, of which the best known is Constantine Zurayk’s Ma’na al-Nakba.16 Zurayk wrote:

  The defeat of the Arabs in Palestine is no simple setback or light, passing evil. It is a disaster in every sense of the word, and one of the harshest of the trials and tribulations with which the Arabs have been afflicted throughout their long history – a history marked by numerous trials and tribulations. (Zurayk 1956: 2)

  Yet on the other hand we find an absence of interest on the part of Palestinian cultural institutions in recording Nakba experience. These post-Nakba institutions were directed by an elite to whom oral history was not only unfamiliar but also suspect in giving voice to the “ignorant”. Moreover, conveying Nakba suffering was not a priority for directors who aimed at convincing the “international community” that support for Israel damaged Western interests in the Middle East. As Mahmoud Issa remarks, the fallaheen:

  are almost totally absent from history writing … Not only men’s voices, but women’s too are absent, neglected and marginalised … the Palestinian nationalist narrative was always an elite narrative; until recently we have only heard the voices of Palestinian elite groups, urban notables and official spokespersons, on the one hand, and Israeli versions of the events and the orthodox Zionist discourse, on the other. (Issa 2005: 180)

  In 1996 Palestinian political scientist/historian Saleh Abdel Jawad, who had trained at Columbia in oral history methods, put forward a plan to record interviews with expulsees from all regions of Palestine. He called it “Race Against Time”. His project was declined by the Institute of Palestine Studies on the grounds of lack of funds.17

  THE CHALLENGE OF PALESTINIAN ORAL HISTORY

  A host of initiatives have partially filled the gap left by the national institutions, notably Birzeit’s “Destroyed Village” series, undertaken by the university’s Centre for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society (CRDPS); Al-Jana’s collection commemorating the Nakba’s fiftieth anniversary (1998); the website PalestineRemembered initiated by Salah Mansour in 2000, with interviews recorded in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Gaza;18 the Nakba archive recorded by Diana Allan and Mahmoud Zeidan in 2002 in Lebanon with over 650 survivors from over 150 villages and towns;19 the Oral History Centre in the Islamic University of Gaza (Catron 2013); the Nakba Museum Project of Memory and Hope (Washington, DC);20 and a still growing number of Palestinian village histories, using oral history in varying degrees (Davis 2011). The absence of a central plan means that regional coverage of the Nakba and the shatat is highly uneven. Palestinians in some parts, for example Lebanon and Jordan, have been intensively recorded, while in others, for example Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States, little or no work has been done, and the histories of these communities remain relatively unknown.

  The Nakba stimulated an intense outpouring of poetic, literary, autobiographical and artistic production in the Arab region, from figures such as Emil Habibi, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darweesh, Samih Kassem, Tawfiq Ziyad, Fawaz Turki, Samira Azzam, Ismail Shammout, Tamam Akhal, Joumana Husseini, Mustafa Hallaj and Suleiman Mansour. The celebrated Lebanese singer Fairooz sang about Jerusalem and the refugees in the mid-1960s, and about Beisan and the hope of return. The anger and grief that was being expressed in poetry, fiction, music and painting found its parallel at the popular level in stories refugees and exiles told to each other. As Abu-Lughod and Sa’di observe: “many Palestinian refugees of the Nakba generation told their stories over and over, to their children and to each other” (Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007: 11), forming, as they remark “dissident memory, counter-memory … a counter history” (Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007: 6). Masalha (2008: 136) comments: “Story telling and oral history was deployed in the post-1948 period by the Palestinian refugee community as an ‘emergency science’”; and Feldman writes that “maintaining a refrain of home” helped Palestinians survive the Nakba.21

  For Salman Natour, a dissident Palestinian citizen of Israel, remembering was an obligation: “If we lose our memory, hyenas will eat us”. Natour wrote his memories in a trilogy, Memory, Travel Over Travel and Waiting, which “move[s] back and forth between fiction, nonfiction and oral history documentation” (Hassan 2016). The memories contained within scattered Palestinian communities eventually became accessible to researchers and NGOs as recording technology became more widely available, leading to studies presenting personal experiences as well as a number of oral history collections. This trend was supported by the rise of academic interest in memory in the 1980s.

  It was in the mid-1980s that an institutional appreciation of oral history developed at Birzeit’s CRDPS, impelled by concern to document the villages destroyed by Israel during 1948.22 The Centre was first directed by anthropologist Sharif Kanaana, recorder of Palestinian folk tales (Muhawi and Kanaana 1989), and later by political scientist Saleh Abdel Jawad. Both scholars used oral testimonies, though in dissimilar ways (Al-Hardan 2016: 44). A similar centre was established at the Islamic University of Gaza in 1998. Rochelle Davis attributes this surge of popular interest in remembrance to the forced evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon to Tunis in 1982, a setback that turned Palestinians towards:

  local and personal resources, memories, personal records, and documents held within their own families and communities. The sudden flourishing of the village books in the later 1980s reflects this fundamental shift in where Palestinians are investing their voices. No longer are they relying on a distant and compromised PLO leadership to represent and define them; rather they are creating elaborate dossiers in the form of village books to tell who they were, who they are today, and why their histories are important. (Davis 2011: 251)

  As a predominantly rural society until 1948 Palestinians possessed a highly developed oral culture, in which all kinds of knowledge – methods of farming, property boundaries, genealogies, proverbs, folk poetry and stories, songs, myths, history ‒ were transmitted orally. Wandering storytellers, the hakawati, kept audiences aware of current as well as past events (Masalha 2008). Although oral history as a method of history-making did not develop in Palestinian research and publishing institutions until many years after their establishment, the first Palestinian oral historian we know of, albeit an amateur, appeared on the cusp of the Nakba. A man called Ibrahim Abu Higleh is recalled by Shafiq Ghabra, a Palestinian resident in Kuwait, as systematically taking notes at Palestinian gatherings on a range of topics, “by listening and recording carefully what is said during gatherings” (Ghabra 1988: 2). Both Abu Higleh and his notes seem to have disappeared without trace, though since his village of origin is known it is not impossible that his work may one day be recovered.

  In the early 1970s, with the PLO in control of the camps in Lebanon, a profes
sional oral historian, Palestinian Nafez Nazzal, carried out a study on the Nakba as part of a doctoral dissertation at Georgetown University under the supervision of Hisham Sharabi. Nazzal interviewed over 100 refugees between Lebanon and Syria, aiming at discovering what had forced them to leave their villages.23 His book, The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee: 1848, was published in 1978 by the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut. In his Foreword, historian Rashid Khalidi remarks that Nazzal’s study “provides irrefutable evidence that the foundations of the state of Israel was accompanied by, and indeed conditional on, the wholesale expulsion of the Palestinian Arab majority of the population from their homes and property” (Nazzal 1978: x).

  Ted Swedenburg and Sonia el-Nimr at Birzeit University were among the first scholars to use oral history methods in Palestinian research (el-Nimr 1990; Swedenburg 1995). Swedenburg (1995) used oral history, as did Bayan al-Hout for her PhD study (1981), and for her later book on the Sabra/Shateela massacre (2004). Sam Bahour (1994) achieved wide coverage of Occupied Palestine and the diaspora in his oral history with the Lynds. Randa Farah used oral history for her PhD, and for a study of identity in al-Baq’a refugee camp (1997). Sherna Berger Gluck (1994) used oral history in Palestine for advocacy. Adel Yahya formed an oral history archive at el-Bireh, and used it to write books on the refugees and camps (Yahya 1999). Faiha Abdulhadi (1999, 2006a, 2006b) has recorded three generations of Palestinian women on their engagement in national struggle. Saleh Abdel Jawad (2007) recorded 450 survivors from eighty-six villages for his study of Nakba massacres. Mustafa Kabha (2013) combined oral with documentary sources in his book on the Palestinians. The life stories of sixteen Palestinians from various backgrounds living in different parts of Occupied Palestine have been recorded and published by Malek and Hoke (2015).