An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba Read online

  MORE PRAISE FOR AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE PALESTINIAN NAKBA

  ‘Moving and acutely observed, this timely and necessary anthology is an indispensable addition for all readers concerned with the Israeli colonisation of Palestine.’

  Ronit Lentin, author of Thinking Palestine

  ‘Reveals the full magnificence of Palestinian responses to Israel’s systematic post-1948 programme of memoricide. Abdo and Masalha are here establishing a new interdisciplinary field, Nakba Studies, in which Palestinians become subjects and agents in their own history.’

  John Docker, University of Western Australia

  ‘A landmark intervention, this cross-disciplinary book provides innovative analytical frameworks for studying the persistent erasure of Palestine. This insightful and comprehensive work proposes alternative ways of knowing and telling, rearticulating the Nakba as an ongoing process of dispossession.’

  Ella Shohat, NYU, and author of On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements

  An Oral

  History

  of the

  Palestinian

  Nakba

  Edited by Nahla Abdo

  and Nur Masalha

  An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba was first published in 2018 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK

  www.zedbooks.net

  Editorial Copyright © Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha 2018.

  Copyright in this Collection © Zed Books 2018

  The rights of Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha to be identified as the editors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  Typeset in Adobe Garammond Pro by seagulls.net

  Cover design: Andrew Brash

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-78699-349-6 hb

  ISBN 978-1-78699-351-9 pdf

  ISBN 978-1-78699-352-6 epub

  ISBN 978-1-78699-353-3 mobi

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  NAHLA ABDO AND NUR MASALHA

  Part I: Theorizing the Nakba and oral history

  1.Decolonizing methodology, reclaiming memory: Palestinian oral histories and memories of the Nakba

  NUR MASALHA

  2.Feminism, indigenousness and settler colonialism: oral history, memory and the Nakba

  NAHLA ABDO

  Part II: Between epistemology and ontology: Nakba embodiment

  3.What bodies remember: sensory experience as historical counterpoint in the Nakba Archive

  DIANA ALLAN

  4.The time of small returns: affect and resistance during the Nakba

  LENA JAYYUSI

  Part III: Archiving the Nakba through Palestinian refugee women’s voices

  5.Nakba silencing and the challenge of Palestinian oral history

  ROSEMARY SAYIGH

  6.Shu’fat refugee camp women authenticate an old “Nakba” and frame something “new” while narrating it

  LAURA KHOURY

  7.Gender representation of oral history: Palestinian women narrating the stories of their displacement

  FAIHA ABDUL HADI

  Part IV: The Nakba and 48 Palestinians

  8.The ongoing Nakba: urban Palestinian survival in Haifa

  HIMMAT ZUBI

  9.Saffourieh: a continuous tragedy

  AMINA QABLAWI NASRALLAH

  10.The sons and daughters of Eilaboun

  HISHAM ZREIQ

  11.“This is your father’s land”: Palestinian Bedouin women encounter the Nakba in the Naqab

  SAFA ABU-RABI’A

  Part V: Documenting Nakba narratives from the Gaza Strip and the Shatat

  12.The young do not forget

  MONA AL-FARRA

  13.Gaza remembers: narratives of displacement in Gaza’s oral history

  MALAKA MOHAMMAD SHWAIKH

  14.“Besieging the cultural siege”: mapping narratives of Nakba through Orality and Repertoires of Resistance

  CHANDNI DESAI

  About the contributors

  Acknowledgments

  At the outset, the editors would like to extend a special thanks to Dr Rosemary Sayigh for her central role in initiating this project. Thank you Rosemary for your inspiring scholarship and your unwavering commitment to keeping Palestinian memory alive. Our greatest thanks go to ordinary Palestinian women and men, victims of the Nakba/genocide whose voices, oral histories, narratives and memories and indomitable spirit made this work possible and without whom this project would not have seen the light. Our thanks also go the anonymous reviewers of this collection and to the editors at Zed Books for their generosity, patience and practical advice. Finally, and most importantly, our thanks go to all the authors/contributors whose extraordinary insights and passions enabled this collective project to come to fruition.

  Introduction

  NAHLA ABDO AND NUR MASALHA

  Oral history challenges the artificiality of the academic separation of the disciplines or, in Sherna Gluck’s words, “the academic division of knowledge” (Gluck 1991: 3).

  This collective work uses oral history, personal memories, narratives and interviews to study, analyse and represent the Palestinian Nakba/genocide, before, during and after the establishment of the Israeli settler-colonial state in 1948. The multiplicity of disciplines and approaches presented in this book cover the complexity, and poignancy, of the Palestinian Nakba, reproducing in the process its historical and lived implications in a new light. Almost all authors in this volume attest to the resilience of the Nakba as experience and memory and its rootedness in the existential life of Palestinians. This rootedness defies all Israeli and international efforts at silencing the Nakba for the past seventy years. All authors in this book see the Nakba as a process and not as an event. Still, the memories and narratives of the specific calamities and horror inflicted on the Palestinians during the months of the establishment of the state of Israel have carved and continue to carve a deep space in the memory of those who lived it and the generations that followed.

  Part I theorizes the Nakba and oral history from two different, yet complementary perspectives. Nur Masalha provides a conceptual, analytical and critical framework for Palestinian oral history and memories of the Nakba. His chapter explores the role of individual, social and collective memories in shaping individual and national identity in Palestine. Applying social memory theory and cross-disciplinary and decolonizing methodologies to the knowledge‒power nexus in Palestine, the chapter challenges settler-colonial histories and critiques the manipulation of collective memory by hegemonic elites and top-down nationalist approaches.

  Nahla Abdo theorizes the Nakba as genocide. She critiques existing feminist approaches to the marginalized, and specifically the colonized, insisting on the need to apply historically and culturally specific concepts to our methodologies. She contributes to the development of anti-colonial feminist analysis suitable for understanding indigenousness and the settler-colonial state. Land and genocide, this chapter contends, need to be placed at the centre of feminist analysis of the marginalized, colonized indigenous analysis.

  Part II analyses the close relationship between what women knew and experienced during the Nakba, and focuses on the intimate relation and direct impact this knowledge has on indigenous bodies.

  Diana Allan’s chapter explores t
he interweavings of affect and intellect in interviews recorded with Palestinian elders in Lebanon for the Nakba Archive. She examines the role that sensory and embodied experience play in recollection and in the narration of oral histories, and the forms of knowledge carried in embodied gestures, tone and the senses. Rather than viewing the sensuous simply as narrative embellishment, Allan considers what might be gained from re-centring the body as the locus of historical study, allowing for more diverse and non-coercive forms of remembering and knowledge creation.

  Lena Jayyusi addresses the themes and idioms of Palestinian memory narratives of the Nakba, exploring the sites and features of affect, connectedness and resistance, both then and now. In this chapter special attention is placed on how the Palestinian population was struggling to hold on, if not to place, then at least to communal space, to vicinity as a lived affective and phenomenal field.

  Part III archives the Nakba through Palestinian refugee women’s voices. These voices cover various areas, including Shu’fat refugee camp in the West Bank, refugees in Jordan and refugees in Lebanon. Rosemary Sayigh establishes the centrality of oral transmission of family and community histories that enabled and continues to enable the Palestinian people to assert their existence in the face of Zionist settler-colonial and international silencing.

  Laura Khoury analyses the process of self-reflexive awareness that women undergo when they narrate the Nakba, contributing to the movement of writing history from below. Based on collective memories of elderly Palestinian women refugees in Shu’fat refugee camp, Khoury offers an indigenous feminist reading of the memorization of the Nakba by Palestinian women as they transmit some of the past, both consciously and subconsciously, to the present, creating continuity and transcending the present. Under scrutiny here, Khoury asserts, is what was not disrupted: something “old” that transformed into something “new”; new in its effect or its use, new in terms of formulating new activism and situating it in the present.

  Faiha Abdel-Hadi’s chapter presents Palestinian women’s narrations of their displacement during 1948. The chapter focuses on the challenges these women faced and the agency and resistance they presented against such challenges. Women’s testimonies uncover the vital role they played in the political, social and economic life in Palestine and the diaspora.

  Part IV documents Nakba stories and memories, based on specific cases of cities and villages in 1948 Palestine. Chapters in this part use a multiplicity of methods, including oral history, interviews, personal memories and Zionist archives.

  Himmat Zubi adds to this collection the perspective of Haifa (urban) Palestinian memories of the Nakba. She utilizes oral history testimonies to bring to life Haifa women’s daily experiences as they re-live the Nakba. Zubi establishes the importance of Palestinian city life and the role that urban Palestinians played before and during the Nakba, and examines the ongoing consequences of the Nakba for Haifa residents.

  Amina Qablawi Nasrallah uses personal memory to draw on the experience of her grandmother and narrates the tale of her family and community during and after the Nakba. Particularly poignant in Qablawi’s chapter is the murder of her father by Zionist settlers in her own village, Saffouryeh. Hisham Zreik uses oral history of fellow men and women and records their experiences during and after the Nakba. The author used this oral history research in his documentary film “The Sons of Eilaboun” (2007).

  Safa Abu-Rabi’a presents voices of Naqab Bedouin women from the 1948 generation and their daughters, and highlights their collective resistance to ongoing displacement, reflecting on how women re-tell Naqab history and reclaim their terrain. Through oral and spatial practices, these stories establish a territorial identity and sense of belonging to the place among their children, and educate them to be owners of the land across the seventy-year gap.

  Part V documents Nakba narratives from the Gaza Strip and the shatat (refugeeism/exile).

  Using personal memory and some interviews, Mona Al-Farra reflects on the Nakba, providing a vivid picture of the events. She uses her own experience during the devastating 2014 Israeli war on Gaza as a backdrop for highlighting the continuous Nakba in Gaza. The author reflects on her late mother’s experiences and memory of the Nakba and Palestinian women’s resistance.

  Malaka Mohammad surveys some of the oral history projects in Gaza, centring on the work of the Oral History Centre in Gaza and on the youth projects of the Tamer Institute for Community Education.

  Chandni Desai’s chapter outlines how the Israeli/Zionist settler-colonial project engaged in the systematic erasure of the material culture of Palestine, with a specific focus on toponymicide. She argues that Palestinian cultural producers (past and present) disrupt and reconfigure Zionist toponomy and national settler-colonial mythologies of land and belonging, by producing counter-hegemonic and anti-colonial narratives of the al-Nakba and its afterlife through “resistance culture” (thaqafat al-muqawama).

  PART I

  Theorizing the Nakba and oral history

  1

  Decolonizing methodology, reclaiming memory:

  Palestinian oral histories and memories of the Nakba

  NUR MASALHA

  No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself … Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way … Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk. (Hooks 1990: 241‒243)

  2017 is a year of “fateful anniversaries” for the Palestinians: (a) it is the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, when an imperialist power, Britain, denied the indigenous people of Palestine the right to self-determination and nurtured a European settler-colonialist movement; (b) it is seventy years since the Nakba, which began in late 1947, when the majority of Palestinians were driven out from their homeland; (c) it is fifty years since the military occupation of the remainder of Palestine in 1967. Of the three events, the Nakba was the worst catastrophe that ever befell the Palestinians. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine (Masalha 1992, 1997, 2012; Pappe 2006) and the traumatic rupture of 1948 are central to both the Palestinian society of today and Palestinian history and collective identity.

  Erasing Palestine and appropriating its material and cultural heritage has been fundamental to Zionist colonial practices before, during and since the Nakba. In 1948 the Israeli state appropriated for itself immovable Palestinian material assets and personal possessions including schools, rich private libraries, books, pictures, private papers, historical documents and manuscripts, furniture, churches, mosques, shrines, historic public buildings, archaeological sites and artefacts, urban residential quarters, transport infrastructure, seaports and airports, police stations, prisons and railways (Khalidi 1992; Masalha 2012). The appropriation of Palestinian records, documentation and cultural heritage by the Israeli state has made it possible for Israeli historians (“old and new”) to claim that there is no Arab documentation on 1948 of the sort historians must rely on (Morris 1994: 42‒43).

  Conventionally history has been written by the powerful, the conqueror, the colonizer; the discipline of history has long been a tool of dominant elites used to reinforce hegemonic narratives and existing power relations. Clearly there is a need for articulating new counter-hegemonic narratives and devising new liberationist and decolonization strategies in Palestine. The disciplines of history and memory should be a site of hope, liberation and decolonization. To write more truthfully about the Palestinian Nakba is not merely to practise professional historiography, it is also a profoundly moral act of liberation and a struggle for truth, justice, equality, return (both mental and physical return) and a better future.

  In recent decades two distinct historiographical approaches concerning the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem have evolved. Recent debates on 1948 tell us something about the historian’s method, power and the meaning of the “historical do
cument” (Pappe 2004). Methodologically, many historians have displayed a bias towards archival sources; Israeli revisionist historians, in particular, believe they are both ideologically and empirically impartial (Masalha 2007: 286), and that the only reliable sources for the reconstruction of the 1948 war are in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) archives and official documents. This bias towards high politics and “archives” has contributed to silencing the Palestinian past. The silencing of the Nakba by mainstream historians in Israel and the West follows the pattern given by Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History:

  Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history …). (Trouillot 1995: 26)

  Not surprisingly, Israeli historians (old and new) have long emphasized and indeed privileged Israeli state papers and official documents and downgraded the voices of the indigenous people of Palestine. By contrast, in recent decades Palestinian oral histories have attempted to redress the imbalance of the modern historiography, by developing methodologies for understanding the contexts, objectives, power and meanings of documents. Oral histories are not just about facts and evidence but also ways of exploring subtle narratives and voices of the people who are silenced in state papers and official documents. Indeed, oral histories revolutionized our “historical knowledge” methodologies by appreciating the “shadows” and by bringing to light hidden, suppressed or marginalized narratives. Oral histories have, in fact, brought together academics, historians, filmmakers, artists, archivists and librarians, novelists, indigenous activists, museum professionals and community-based arts practitioners. As producers of knowledge and meaning, oral histories have become a major catalyst for new creative practices and interpretations in history-related fields and on the construction of alternative histories and the recovery of memories of lost practices.