An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba

by Doctor Nahla Abdo

  Faiha Abdul Hadi is a writer, poet, research consultant, community activist and lecturer, in addition to having -life-long experience in various aspects of research, oral history, gender and other issues of human interest. She is the founder and the Director General of Al Rowat for Studies and Research. She has published twelve books in addition to various studies and articles. She worked as a Consultant Researcher to the Directorate of Gender Planning and Development in Palestine and UNICEF in Cairo. She is a member of the Palestinian National Council, and the regional coordinator of the women’s organization Peace Women Across the Globe.

  Diana K. Allan is an anthropologist and filmmaker, and an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for the Study of International Development at McGill University. She is the founder and co-director of the Nakba Archive and Lens on Lebanon, and her films include Still Life (2007), Terrace of the Sea (2010). Her ethnography, Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile (2014) won the 2014 Palestine Book Award and the Middle East Section Award at the 2015 American Anthropological Association meeting.

  Safa Abu-Rabi’a is a Palestinian-Bedouin. She is an anthropologist, and a lecturer at Ben Gurion University. Her areas of academic expertise include: anthropology and gender; place identity; feminist discourse in the Arab and Islamic world, and oral history. Her doctoral research focused on the doubly excluded women’s voices of the Nakba generation. Women as active tellers of history were shown to reveal resistance to both the ruling Zionist perspective on the Bedouin and the patriarchal Bedouin assumptions about women. These findings challenge Western feminist perceptions on Arab women as well as the public and academic Israeli discourse, which denies the Bedouin connection to their lands.

  Chandni Desai is a post-doctoral Mellon fellow for the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago working on the “Geographies of Justice” project which explores the meaning of freedom across three geographies: Palestine/Israel, apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, and the US Black Freedom Movement. Chandni received her PhD in Education from the University of Toronto ‒ OISE. Her research investigates the pedagogical role Palestinian cultural producers in exile play in the post-9/11 era in producing resistance culture in the afterlife of the Nakba, from and across settler-colonial states. Through oral history interviews, she links the work of contemporary artists to the radical tradition of Palestinian cultural resistance produced from the 1950s to 1980s to show how the intergenerational transmission of resistance culture influenced third-generation exiles to continue the radical tradition of art and activism in the ongoing struggle for liberation. Her research explores the themes of exile, insurgency, memory, public pedagogy, hip hop pedagogy, spatiality of resistance across settler colonial states, internationalism and solidarity.

  Mona Al-Farra is a physician and a human rights and women’s rights activist in the occupied Gaza Strip. Born in Khan Younis/Gaza, she has dedicated her life to the establishment and development of community-based programmes in the fields of health, culture and education. Dr Al-Farra is the Director of Gaza Projects for the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), the Vice President of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society of the Gaza Strip and a member of the Union of Health Work Committees. Her writings have appeared in The Boston Globe, Le Monde Dipolimatique, The LA Times and The Guardian. She has received two prestigious awards in recognition of her valuable work and contributions to the community in Gaza.

  Lena Jayyusi is Professor of Communication and Media Sciences at Zayed University, UAE. She taught at Wellesley College, the University of Connecticut and Cedar Crest College in Pennsylvania, where she was Chair of the Department of Communication Studies. She has been an Annenberg Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Visiting Professor at the Ecole Haute D’Etudes de Science Sociale in Paris. Her book, Categorization and the Moral Order, was published in French in 2010, and re-issued as a Routledge Revival in 2014. Her publications are interdisciplinary, addressing topics in media and cultural studies, film and visuality, memory and narrative, oral history, and the pragmatics of communication and reasoning.

  Laura Khoury is a Professor of Sociology at Birzeit University. She was the chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department, University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Her publications include: “Walking on the Razor’s Edge Religious Groups and the 2011 Arab Spring” (2014, in Stan Brunn, ed. The Changing World Religion Map); “Palestine as a Woman: Feminizing Resistance” (2013, co-authored, in The Arab World Geographer); “The Dynamics of Negation: Identity Formation among Palestinian Arab College Students inside the Green Line” (2013, co-authored, in Social Identities); “Being While Black: Resistance and the Management of the Self” (2013, in Social Identities); and “Literature as the Voice of Subaltern Arabs: Western Modernity in Arab Thoughts” (2012, in Humanities and Social Sciences Review).

  Nur Masalha is a Palestinian historian and formerly Director of the Centre for Religion and History at St Mary’s University, London. He is currently based at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of many books on Palestine and Israel including Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought 1882‒1948 (1992); A Land Without a People (1997); Imperial Israel and the Palestinians (2000); The Politics of Denial (2003); Catastrophe Remembered (2005); The Bible and Zionism (2007) and The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (2012). He is also Editor of Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies: http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/hls, published by Edinburgh University Press.

  Malaka Mohammed Shwaikh is a Palestinian student from Gaza. She is an award-winning human rights activist, writer, mostly interested in geopolitics. She graduated with a Masters in Global Politics and Law from the University of Sheffield, and is currently a PhD candidate in Palestine Studies at Exeter Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies.

  Amina Qablawi Nasrallah is a Palestinian writer and editor with over two decades of senior editorial and proofing experience. Born in Saffourieh in Galilee in 1954, Amina lived and studied in Nazareth and completed her undergraduate studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1979 she moved to London and for twenty-one years worked as a senior Arabic-language copy-editor and proof-reader for the Asharq Alawsat newspaper and sister publications in London. Amina edited and proof-read Elias Nasralla, Testimonies on the First Century of Palestine (2016) and Saudi Arabia and Alternative History: A Critique of Abdel Rahman Al Monif’s Qunitet (2010).

  Rosemary Sayigh is an oral historian and anthropologist, author of Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (1979); Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon (1994); and the eBook Voices: Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement (2007). She is currently Visiting Lecturer at CAMES, the American University of Beirut.

  Himmat Zubi, a Palestinian researcher and feminist activist, is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She is writing her dissertation on surveillance discipline and urban indigenous people in settler-colonial society. She completed two Master’s degrees, one in Criminology from the Hebrew University and another in Gender Studies, from Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of “Economic Violence against Palestinian Women in the 1948 Era: Internally Displaced Women from the Saffouri Village” (Journal of Palestine Studies, 2013, in Arabic). She has also co-authored Palestinian Women in Israel: Annotated Bibliography: 1948‒2006 (2007), and “Denial at Home, Growing Down: Palestinians in Jaffa” (Journal of Palestine Studies, 2011, in Arabic). She is also a specialist in historical sociology and minority cultures and writes on Palestinians in Israel in general and Palestinian women in particular.

  Hisham Zreiq is a Palestinian independent filmmaker, graphics designer and visual artist based in Germany (since 2001). He started working as a graphic designer and animator in 1991, and produced 3D computer animations and computer graphics (e.g. posters). In March 2001 Hisham moved to live in Germ
any, and continued working with graphic design. In 2006 he began producing/directing film, starting with the documentary The Sons of Eilaboun, which won the Al-Awda Award in Palestine, followed by the short fiction film Just Another Day (2009), a film that deals with Arabs in the Western world after the 11 September 2001 attacks. In 2010/2011 he produced the short film Before you is the Sea, about the Middle East peace process, presented in the form of a love story.

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