An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  We visit at Tal-Arad, we go there for a tour, all the family of Abu Bader go together there, during the holiday … now they do not allow us to enter the place, the army prevent us from going there … but we go there, even we are not allow to enter the land, and we show our children where we used to be. (Abu Bader)

  Belonging and connection are built on the basis of memory and intimate experience. This belonging is almost “secular”, intimate and interpersonal, resulting in daily practice. Daily rituals and rehearsals through which memory is constructed are part of the spatial practices of belonging and a sense of collectivity. Memory is the most explicit expression of the sense of belonging, connecting the events of the past and childhood experiences with the places in which those events occurred (de Certeau 1988). Yi-Fu (1977) argues that experience is a key component in creating a sense of place, and it should be direct, intimate or bridged through symbols. He identifies three types of experience: intimate familiarity with the place; sensory rituals; and conceptual, visual and spatial interpretation. These experiences structure sensations, mediated by smell, touch and taste, enriching the visual space. De Certeau (1988) adds that the act of walking around the place is a way of making sense of a space, organizing and defining it. This is well illustrated by S. [Alhawaslha], stating “every time we visit our land, I walk barefoot on it” as part of her emotional link to the land.

  “She tells us all the time”: narrating the past

  Bedouin women also revive the past through narration, whether during visits to the ancestral land or at family gatherings. Researchers and Palestinian authors argue that the Arabic language has a variety of expressions by which to tell the story of a homeland and describe the scenery, demographics, sociology and ethnography of Palestinian villages that used to exist before 1948 (Fenster 2007; Ben-Ze’ev 2005; Halbwachs 1992; Slymovics 1998). These women’s voices speak of loss of land, power and home, dislocation and migration, but are not included in official Palestinian nationalism (Slymovics 1998).

  The first thing that women relate in their narrative of the past is how they used to work in the lands: “We used to plough and harvest the land … and with the camel we used to harvest the land … we used to do everything in our hands, we used to plough and harvest in our own hands” (Aburabia).

  These stories mainly consist of descriptions of relationships with the land (Issa 1997) and a sense of collectivity to be found in such relationships:

  I ploughed the land with my own hands, hands ploughed the soil. I used to walk at each one of the soil lines, every path I ploughed with my hands. We were ploughing together ... I ploughed the soil muck and I went there together with them … have you seen this bar? I ploughed it with my own hands, and [that] place that [is] next to the olive tree, ploughed by me.” (S. Alhawaslha)

  After describing how they used to work their lands, they would describe the geographical location of where they used to live: “we lived all our lives in AlJamama” (Alatawna); “We are from Al-Sharia” (Abu Shareb).

  Working the land, ploughing and harvesting it, is their immediate and direct connection to their life on the land, which describe their life in the past, by the direct sense of place in the land. The physical location of the tribal land comes only after that. That is to say, their affinity is directly to the soil itself.

  One of the main ways women convey a sense of place is through re-telling their history to children at family gatherings, as pointed out by the daughter of S. Alhawaslha: “she tells us all the time”. By that she means how her mother used to narrate her past life during their visits to the land and also at every gathering they used to have: “We used to sit near the fire and talk, and she used to tell us about the past, about her life, what she saw [witnessed] from the war, when we used to be small children” (Al Tehee).

  Besides telling their children how they used to live in their lands before 1948, these women’s narratives also revolve around how they were expelled from their land during the 1948 war:

  “The Jewish came and expelled us, the Arabs, we had lands under our ownership, we had land in our ownership, for us, our homeland (Wattan)”. (Abu Queder).

  “They came with weapon to us … And said: leave, you have three days to leave, and warn us like they did with the Arabs from the north (the Galilei) that shot on them, and also on us, and got us out by force, by killing, and threatened us also, and told us: you have three days to leave, and people begun to leave.” (Al Oqbi)

  “After Beer Al Sabe’ was broken [their words for defeated], we went out from the land and the Jewish came in (into our lands). (Abu Amra)

  “…so we escape their, we went out and after they took (take control over) Beer Al Sabea’, we were afraid they will come and kill us here, we overloaded the camels with our belongings and food for our children and we run away”. (Abu Hani)

  For them, passing these narratives of the past and their experience from the war on to their children is significant in shaping their way of thinking and especially by challenging and re-questioning the Israeli story of how they came to Palestine: “She tell us so we know what the Jewish used to do to them and how they used to take from the Arabs, she used to inform us and raise our awareness to this kind of things” (Abu Bader).

  Another way of strengthening their link to their historical lands is by telling the historical names of the villages to their children as a way of reviving the Bedouin past of the place before it became a Jewish settlement, as the historical name is a symbol of their identity (de Certeau 1988). For example, the Jewish city “Dimona” is referred to as “Damna”, the name of the Arab tribal land onwhich the city was built:

  Mother: Now Damna is called Dimona.

  Daughter: We see them live in our place, as we were. [...]

  Daughter: To this day, my mother calls this place Damna.

  Mother: And this is its name! Do you see that well? There was a well; now there are Jews.

  “So they know [and] learn”: the goals of structuring a sense of place

  Bedouin women in the Naqab educate their children on land attachment and territorial identity as a significant factor that defines their link to the place. The practices and language described serve important objectives in constructing a sense of place:

  S. Alhawaslha: They need to know how our life was before, to learn.

  Daughter: She wants to show us, for example, they have lost land … and they feel they don’t feel good with it. [They] have a hard heart.

  Daughter: We need to know, to have knowledge of what happened.

  Mother: One day you will remember, you will grow up and no one will be there ... My father saw his father’s tree. He was the last one [who] saw it in person.

  Baker (1998) adds that the use of narrative was intended to construct a sense of self. Narratives in history rely on a culture that nourishes and moulds them. Thus, as Sayigh (1998, 2007) argues, re-using the memory of Palestine is not only a natural reaction to forced separation, but also a way to pass it on to the children. Thus, the oral history of women has historical significance: it revives the past, and provides insight into how women think and the role of women in the historical process (Gluck 1984; Holland et al. 1998).

  They want [us] to know everything … each had at least two thousand acres to plant … today only one hectare, only one hectare … we were expelled near Laqiya [Bedouin village] which means we cannot go into our lands. Forbidden, we are standing on the sidelines, or stand on the mountain and we are explaining to our children: “Here we used to live.” … It is important for you to know how hard people [have suffered], how they strive to reach a drop of water or bread. (Abu Bader)

  Educating future generations is one of the main objectives behind narrating history, and is intended to strengthen the intergenerational sense of continuity (Issa 1997). In terms of women’s personal testimony, they see their own history as an integral part of the history of the land (Kozma 2003), and both women and men still reconstruct the past for their children. Internal se
lf-images are fed from their historical past, even though they are separated in time and space from their original lands:

  When we enter the land … my mother tells me: “this is the land of your father, and this was our fig” … today when I walk alone I tell my children: “… here, this land was your uncle’s, your cousins were living here [and] … tomorrow my daughter will say [to her children], “that was your grandparents’”. (Al-Tehee)

  Significantly, it appears there is appetite to both tell and hear these stories in the second generation: “We ask her … to tell us about the difficulties in their lives ... we would sit together and ask her to tell us about life in the past, what was and what happened to them, and [she] would tell us things” (Al Tehee).

  For these women, their children need to realize how their reality has been shaped:

  They need to know and get information from me, how this state has been established, and on whose land … this is what I am trying to let them know. (Al Tehee)

  We tell them everything, I tell them about our life in the past, how the Jewish came and expelled us from our lands, and this land is ours, this is our ownership, ours. (Abu Queder)

  They also relate to their previous lives on their historical lands as better than where they live today: “We used to be more happy than now, much more than now, I used to love the past life more” (Alhozayel). “We used to feel better back then…much more comfortable than now” (Abu Bader).

  They also pass their disconnection from the place where they are living today onto their children, as opposed to where they used to live, as they do not feel they are their places:

  “We came to this land, its Al Azazma’s lands [different tribe], and we are living in their lands”. (Abu Amra).

  “This is not our land and we are not in our lands, we used to live in our land where… it used to be our land” (Abu Queder).

  The loss of their lands represents the loss of their values, way of life, social order and meaning: “People forgot their tents, their dignity” (Alhozayel), and “‘The Sheikh’ was the centre of the world … now each one became a Sheikh himself” (Alhozayel), which means that the removal from their lands meant removal from their traditional lifestyle which used to characterize their lives. This is why land is more than a geographical territory; it means way of life that defines Bedouin social order.

  This is why they reject their forced removal from their lands: “This is not our lands; we do not live in our lands” (Abu Queder, originally from Al Shareaa, and removed to Al Zarnouq). “We were expelled and got here, this is Alazazma lands, it’s all their land” (Abu Amra). They live on other Bedouin tribal lands, not on their original land, which explains their feelings of exile and the strangeness of where they live these days.

  CONCLUSION

  The history of the Naqab Bedouin was silenced and excluded from academic and public discourse in Israel. Their exclusion is dual: both from Palestinian discourse, and from the official Zionist historical discourse.

  The “her-story” of Bedouin women and gender discourse in the struggle for land was hidden and unheard: it is being narrated within private spaces, separated from men by women who have internalized the idea of themselves as incapable and lacking the social legitimacy to participate in the narrating of history. Their invisibility (both to Israeli academic research and men in Bedouin society) can lead to the misconception that these voices do not exist and that Arab Bedouin history is represented only by men, who are also responsible for transferring it to future generations.

  My research explores this historic gap, documenting the social history of Bedouin Arab women through ethnographic work with the 1948 generation and their daughters. In doing so, my research aspires to voice their hidden stories, and to examine the impact of the 1948 war and displacement from their lands in shaping their identity in the shadow of loss. Another goal is to analyse the significance of the historic narratives of the female voice and their influence on the Naqab Bedouin struggle, while examining oral history, gender and what enables this history to survive and pass from generation to generation. My research shows the Bedouin’s historical connection to their lands as a key component in their identity, both in the past and at present. This link is expressed through spatial and oral practices such as visiting their lands, narrating the past, passing it on to their children and naming the places in their historical names.

  The historical value of documentation of the feminine discourse lies partly in speaking of the significance of soil. Their voices express how land is not merely a physical territory, but rather the identity of a place that reflects their way of life. As part of the wave of critical studies, my research aims to challenge the construction of Bedouin affinity to place by questioning the grand narratives and asking epistemological questions about how knowledge is produced. It also illustrates how power relations produce and oppress historical discourses; how knowledge discourses and representations are produced in social practices; and the mechanisms that allow specific narratives to thrive while oppressing and marginalizing others. I do this by de-colonizing the research, employing a new terminology that redefines the Bedouin and indigenous knowledge.

  Documenting women’s historical voices provides an alternative to how history has been constructed, especially by the official Zionist historical narrative. By exposing the Bedouin’s links to their land through establishing spatial practices, visiting their lands and narrating the past to their children, they demonstrate their affiliation to the land and the transfer of that affiliation from generation to generation. In these ways women express their opposition to their removal by the Israeli establishment. In addition, this research challenges how knowledge is produced about them as nomadic and passive victims. Their opposition reveals the active nature of these women as they struggle against their dispossession from the Naqab. Finally, the study documents local knowledge of indigenous academic researchers that faithfully express the identities of Bedouin, influencing the struggle for land in representing these voices.

  NOTES

  1The recognized villages were established by the state of Israel at the end of the military regime (after 1967) to concentrate the Bedouin in less territory and control there spatial settlements. Half of the Bedouin move their (approximately 120,000) and the other 120,000 lives in forty-six unrecognized villages lack of elementary services like connection to water, electricity, health, education and welfare services. Meanwhile, eleven villages were recognized within new regional councils: Al-Qassom and Whhat-Al Sahraa. For more details see Svirski and Hason (2005).

  2See for example Begin (2013). See also the implementation team report regulating Bedouin settlement in the Negev as part of government resolution 4411, January 2009 (Begin Report). https://www.acri.org.il/en/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Begin-Report-English-January-2013.pdf.

  3See, for example, Falah, 1989; Shamir, 1996; Yiftachel, 1999; 2006; 2009; Yiftachel et al. 2016; Amara et al. 2012; Noa, 2009; Karplos and Meir, 2013; Meir, 2003, 2007; Nasasra et al 2014; Aburabia, 2013, 2014.

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