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Remembering the Palestinian Nakba: Commemoration, Oral History and Narratives of Memory
Abstract
This year Palestinians commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nakba – the most traumatic catastrophe that ever befell them. The rupture of 1948 and the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Nakba are central to both the Palestinian society of today and Palestinian social history and collective identity. This article explores ways of remembering and commemorating the Nakba. It deals with the issue within the context of Palestinian oral history, ‘social history from below’, narratives of memory and the formation of collective identity. With the history, rights and needs of the Palestinian refugees being excluded from recent Middle East peacemaking efforts and with the failure of both the Israeli state and the international community to acknowledge the Nakba, ‘1948’ as an ‘ethnic cleansing’ continues to underpin the Palestine-Israel conflict. This article argues that to write more truthfully about the Nakba is not just to practice a professional historiography; it is also a moral imperative of acknowledgement and redemption. The struggles of the refugees to publicise the truth about the Nakba is a vital way of protecting the refugees’ rights and keeping the hope for peace with justice alive.
... Yet, the displacement of 700,000 indigenous Palestinians in the aftermath of the war and the destruction of their homes brought forth a new victim nation to history (Manna', 2013). In Palestinian collective memory, the war is known as a catastrophe, Nakba in Arabic, marking the beginning of the collective Palestinian trauma and statelessness and shaping their national identity (Nabulsi, 2006;Nur, 2008). As this war made collective victimhood central to the identity of two nations claiming the same territories, the teaching of the War of Independence or Nakba can be treated as a fracture point in identity discourse within the state curriculum. ...
The paper posits that studies of othering can benefit from expanding their analysis beyond discursive oppositions between groups. By integrating Hegelian and postcolonial perspectives, it develops an analytical framework to examine othering as a multistage process. The paper applies this framework to the geopolitically and historically different contexts of Israel and Russia and argues that both nations employ similar tactics at various stages of othering to construct images of their opponents. Furthermore, it argues that analysing each stage of othering in Israel and Russia separately, yet within the outlined framework, provides nuances into the social and political externalities of othering on the perceived opponent.
... This year Palestinians mark the 74th anniversary of the al-Nakba, the most devastating tragedy ever befallen them. The 1948 rupture and the ethnic cleansing that followed the Nakba are central to the Palestinian master narrative and collective identity of today (Nur, 2008). Hence, our research takes a qualitative approach to analyze ways of remembering and recounting al-Nakba that could potentially produce transgenerational trauma, as well as remembrance or storytelling practices that foster collective resilience and the skills for survival among three generations of Palestinian refugees who are subject to settlercolonial violence and structural racism. ...
Background: Palestinian people have endured collective dispossession and social suffering for 74 years from the socalled
Al-Nakba (Palestinian catastrophe).
Aims: The present exploratory work sought to analyze experiences of settler-colonial violence over three generations
of Palestinian refugees.
Methods: Forty-five participants (Mage = 44.45; range 13–85) were recruited via snowball sampling and interviewed
to explore their understanding of transgenerational and collective trauma. Interviews were analyzed through thematic
content analysis, resulting in four emerging themes distributed among the three generations.
Results: The four themes encompassed (1) The impact of Al-Nakba, (2) Hardships, challenges, and quality of life, (3)
Coping strategies, and (4) Dreams and hopes for the future. The results have been discussed using local idioms of
distress and resilience.
Conclusions: The Palestinian experience of transgenerational trauma and resilience depicts a portrait of extreme
trauma and endurance that cannot be reduced to the mere nosographic collection of Western-informed psychiatric
symptoms. Instead, a human rights approach to Palestinian social suffering is most recommended.
... Simultaneous public ral lies and protests would also be held in the West Bank, Gaza, and the diaspora with Pales tinians displaying family photographs and house keys, symbols of loss and dispossession (Davis 2017). Nur Masalha (2008) documents the post-Oslo growth of Nakba commemorations marking a new patriotism and transformation in Nakba memory, from suffering and shame to valorization of the "right to the return" and the reclamation of Palestinian cultural practices and identity. Such commemorative practice was shaped by shifting political strategies and diverging audiences (Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria) but also filtered through the needs and experiences of local Palestinian communities. ...
The sociology of the Middle East has been an expanding field of inquiry since the aftermath of WWII when phenomena as diverse as urbanization, internal and international migration, and peasant societies attracted the attention of scholars working on the region. The Middle East became central in key sociological debates on modernization theory and the critical responses. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East connects this historical trajectory with the emergence of the sociology of Islam, inspired by Max Weber. It explores how within the global community, the Middle East has become a terrain of heightened concern within the post-Cold War context, where the promising rise of civic (and often religiously-inspired) sociopolitical movements in the 1980s and 1990s has been slowly overwhelmed by the affirmation of jihadist networks, authoritarian states, and complex supranational security apparatuses. This foundational volume starts by engaging in a critical examination of the field itself, starting with a historical sociology of the making of the idea itself of the Middle East and linking it with the legacy of colonialism and the evolving dynamics of global power. In repurposing the sociology of the Middle East within a growing interdisciplinary multifield, the Handbook develops the critical argument that the exploration of social dynamics in the Middle East cannot be disjoined from the analysis of culture and politics. By connecting the vexed state-society relations in the region with movements of transformation and the affirmation of rights and creativity in the public arenas, it provides a comprehensive perspective to investigate longstanding regional and new transregional and global dynamics and their impact on the life of people in the region.
... "The basis for the creation of the state of Israel is that it was created for the Jewish people, " Tzipi Livni told Palestinian negotiators, and "your state will be the answer to all Palestinians including refugees. " 26 According to Livni therefore, only a future Palestinian state, not Israel, will be responsible for the issue of Palestinian refugees. Such a state would offer them a country to "return" to, and in the process, wash Israel's hands clean of its past crimes. ...
... "The basis for the creation of the state of Israel is that it was created for the Jewish people, " Tzipi Livni told Palestinian negotiators, and "your state will be the answer to all Palestinians including refugees. " 26 According to Livni therefore, only a future Palestinian state, not Israel, will be responsible for the issue of Palestinian refugees. Such a state would offer them a country to "return" to, and in the process, wash Israel's hands clean of its past crimes. ...
The quest for an inclusive and independent state has been at the center of the Palestinian national struggle for a very long time. This book critically explores the meaning of Palestinian statehood and the challenges that face alternative models to it. Giving prominence to a young set of diverse Palestinian scholars, this groundbreaking book shows how notions of citizenship, sovereignty, and nationhood are being rethought within the broader context of decolonization. Bringing forth critical and multifaceted engagements with what modern Palestinian self-determination entails, Rethinking Statehood sets the terms of debate for the future of Palestine beyond partition.
... In this respect, by virtue of its antiquity, the story of Mulabbis as narrated by its former inhabitants may also offer us a glimpse at future trends of cultural recollection of the Nakba. 91 In the coming decades, the Nakba, too, will cease to be recounted as a lived experience. Six generations after the loss of their village, Mulabbis is no longer envisaged as a concrete locality (which it indeed was), but rather as idealized lost homeland, and a relational signifier of patrimony for the descendants of its inhabitants. ...
Mulabbis was the first Arab village whose lands were acquired by Jews for settlement purposes (1878), and is counted among the earliest villages to be fully depopulated due to Zionist settlement during the Late Ottoman period. However, the history of Mulabbis, or of any of the other villages depopulated at that time, has not been discussed in any depth. By adopting oral history as its socio-cultural prism, this paper identifies the residents of the village, descendants of Abu Hamed al-Masri, and explores their historical narratives as recounted by elders of the family within the context of settler colonialism in Palestine. As an oral history of a village depopulated in the Late Ottoman period, the story of Mulabbis may offer us a glimpse at future trends of cultural recollection of the Nakba: it is an idealized lost homeland, and a relational signifier of patrimony for the descendants of its inhabitants.
... Simultaneous public ral lies and protests would also be held in the West Bank, Gaza, and the diaspora with Pales tinians displaying family photographs and house keys, symbols of loss and dispossession (Davis 2017). Nur Masalha (2008) documents the post-Oslo growth of Nakba commemorations marking a new patriotism and transformation in Nakba memory, from suffering and shame to valorization of the "right to the return" and the reclamation of Palestinian cultural practices and identity. Such commemorative practice was shaped by shifting political strategies and diverging audiences (Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria) but also filtered through the needs and experiences of local Palestinian communities. ...
The Arab uprisings may have contributed to a newly “sectarianized” Middle East, yet more broadly this must be recognized as part of resurgent identity politics in which state exclusion, repression, and violence occur across ethnic, religious, and political divides. The mobilization of ethnic identities—the creation of distinct collectivities based on narratives of common descent—is as evident in nationalist diatribes throughout the region as it is in minority rights campaigns for equality or cultural autonomy. Ethnic identity formation requires both mnemonic discourses and specific sites in which social memories, imaginaries, and practices can be embedded and collectively performed. This chapter examines how geographies of violence—sites of historic trauma, loss, and displacement—are reappropriated through commemorative practice and martyr memorialization, which help shape contemporary ethnic narratives of identity and resistance. From Kurds in Irbil to Copts in Egypt to Palestinians inside Israel, each community attests to spatial exclusion and violence and finds ways of inhabiting and reimaging past trauma, to shape historical narratives and contemporary political expediencies. This chapter explores some of the key scholarship around this theme before examining the growing proliferation of martyr museums in the region.
... Since 1948, communities are enduring constant and cyclical traumatic experiences that are pervasive of the individual and collective narratives as well. Some traumatic events are transmitted generationally under the umbrella of the Palestinian catastrophe (the Al-Nakbha), while passing through popular uprisings (I and II Intifadas), until the today siege on Gaza and periodical attacks by the Israeli defence force, individual lives are undermined by traumatic and violent episodes (Nur, 2008). Individual memories are the source of collective memories, and both are biased by different factors such as gender, political ideas, religion (Sayigh, 1998) or media technology (Allan, 2005). ...
In the present study, we investigated the characteristics of memories concerning both traumatic events (war-related memories) and positive life events (happy memories) in a group of Palestinian students who were victims of war and military violence. An ad hoc questionnaire was developed to explore differences in how the traumatic and happy events were recalled, both in relation to the actual events experienced and in relation to their phenomenological features in autobiographical memory. Traumatic memories were observed to be richer in sensory characteristics, more vivid, and generally more detailed; the emotions associated with traumatic episodes were more intense and played a key role in recall, as did recurrent thoughts and discussion of events and post-event autobiographical memories. In sum, traumatic memories are more complex than non-traumatic ones given their more sensory and analogical nature, which can also undermine accuracy of recall. The clinical implications of these findings and possible directions for future research are discussed.
... From the Palestinian side, the Nakba (the great tragedy and failure to stop expulsion of Arabs at the hands of the Zionists) continues to justify a strong ingroup defense against the 'other' (Israeli Zionists) which subjected the ingroup to a shameful status. [63] The shame in this instance is a failure to be strong enough to stop the tragedy that befell those who shared the ingroup identity. Radicalizing narratives thus attempt to capitalize on this open sore by stating that a stronger, more self-sufficient Palestinian effort is required to atone for this past failure. ...
This exploratory article provides a conceptual framework for explaining how shame is used by terrorist organizations in their recruitment and radicalization strategies. Shame is a universal emotion, experienced across all cultures, and as such presents scholars with a platform for easy cross-cultural comparisons of radicalization phenomena. Terrorist use of entitative identities to divide society into adherents and apostates, particularly in the study of religious extremists like jihadist entities, provides a verdant ground of understanding how organizations move people into higher states of radicalization, and potentially enticing them to engage in terrorism. However, as an aversive emotion, shame's taboo status has, it is suggested here, led scholars to overlook its role in past studies of radicalization. This article postulates that emotions and identity are an integral aspect of the social self, and because of shame's regulatory power over social identity and norm adherence, it should be at the core of the study of radicalization processes.
... Dans le contexte des camps de réfugiés au Liban, Rosemary Sayigh (1979) compte parmi les premiers chercheurs à reconnaitre la valeur sociologique et historique des témoignages palestiniens sur leur histoire et leur vécu. En amenant les préoccupations des Palestiniens, leurs perceptions et leur expérience au centre du récit, les auteures se situent dans la continuité de la démarche de certains historiens de la Palestine (Nazzal, 1978 ;Sayigh, 1979 ;Kanaana, 1985-87 ;Swedenburg, 1990 ;Masalha, 2008) Les auteures ont également fait preuve d'originalité en restituant, sous forme d'extraits de notes de terrains, de chroniques et d'une analyse critique sur les conditions d'enquête, leurs ressentis, réflexions et émotions produites par la situation d'enquête. Ce choix rappelle que les matériaux ethnographiques portent les traces de la subjectivité de l'enquêteur, qui loin d'occuper une position utopique d'extériorité à son objet d'étude, participe en tant que sujet à la construction des données collectées (Crapanzano, 1980 ;Clifford, 1983 ;Rabinow, 1988). ...
... For example, whereas the fact of boarding schools existence in the history of Native Americans is undisputed, a contemporary narrative explains that the forced removal of children from their families caused the loss of traditional parenting practices among many communities and families, thereby harming the parenting ability of subsequent generations which partially explains behavioral health disparities (Evans-Campbell, Walters, Pearson, & Campbell, 2012). Similarly, without disputing the veracity of the Jewish Holocaust or Palestinian Nakba, we can identify contemporary historical trauma narratives that link these past injustices to present-day social and health conditions-each cultural group views the Holocaust or the Nakba respectively as a great tragedy to befall their people with continued ramifications in contemporary life (Barel et al., 2010;Masalha, 2008). The ways in which people and cultures represent and respond to past traumas become more central than an examination of the facts when we consider historical trauma as narrative. ...
Parto dos conceitos de “cidadania invisível” e “amor revolucionário” para pensar a ação política dos Panteras Negras de Israel no início dos anos de 1970. Os referidos conceitos permitem-me compreender como estes condenados do Sionismo conseguiram resgatar propostas que perturbaram a historiografia sionista e, consequentemente, a sua hegemonia política e socioeconómica. A partir da sua luta, os Panteras Negras de Israel propuseram novos imaginários para uma r/existência política não-sionista e futuros alternativos a um projeto político-ideológico que tomou a “permissão para narrar” a história judaica, como algo homogéneo, desde finais do século XIX.
Chapter title: Palestinian Nationality and "Jewish" Nationality: From the Lausanne Treaty to Today.
The central premise of the chapter is that applying international nationality law to the conflict over territorial claims confirms that Palestinians possess a defined nationality that remains valid and legally cognizable today. As a legal matter, Palestinian nationality is not negated by the claim of a Jewish state in Israel, or by an extraterritorial claim to Israel by Jews elsewhere in the world. In order to understand the difference between Israeli, Jewish and Palestinian national status, it is critical to appreciate that the international law of nationality operates to protect a fundamental connection between peoples and their lands of origin—it is the territorial and direct ‘bloodline’ connection, not a religious connection, that determines national rights. This chapter analyzes the key norms of international nationality law, and applies them to the relevant legal instruments affecting the conflict over rights to territory in Palestine. It examines not only the application of the norms to this conflict, but also how (and whether) instruments such as the British Mandate, the Balfour Declaration and the main relevant United Nations Resolutions affected the claims of Jews and those of Palestinians to national status in the territory. In essence, this short excursus into the legal and historical background to the conflicting claims of self-determination to and in Palestine illustrates how ‘getting the law right’ paves the way for a different and more equitable shared future in the same land for Jews and Palestinians living there, and those who have the right to return there.
Bringing together a vivid array of analog and non-traditional sources, including colonial archives, newspaper reports, literature, oral histories, and interviews, Buried in the Red Dirt tells a story of life, death, reproduction and missing bodies and experiences during and since the British colonial period in Palestine. Using transnational feminist reading practices of existing and new archives, the book moves beyond authorized frames of collective pain and heroism. Looking at their day-to-day lives, where Palestinians suffered most from poverty, illness, and high rates of infant and child mortality, Frances Hasso's book shows how ideologically and practically, racism and eugenics shaped British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine in different ways, especially informing health policies. She examines Palestinian anti-reproductive desires and practices, before and after 1948, critically engaging with demographic scholarship that has seen Zionist commitments to Jewish reproduction projected onto Palestinians. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
It was the stated belief of Zionist leaders that Palestinians expelled from Palestine in 1948 would forget their country within one or two generations. This has not happened and it is therefore a question for research through what relationships and social processes memories of the original land, and the way of life within it, have been produced and reproduced over more than seventy years. This paper is based on interviews as well as participant observation in two camps, Shateela and Bourj al-Barajneh near Beirut (Lebanon), augmented by email interviews with a wider range of Palestinian subjects, both geographically and socially.
Oral history is a critically important record; it serves to oppose the historical erasure imposed by the colonisers. It also archives real experience and history where other records are absent, and, for those reasons, it has become a burgeoning area of study. This research aims to explore and analyse oral history projects in the Gaza Strip.
A striking feature of Palestinian oral history projects is the extensive use that interviewees make of direct speech to communicate their memories—especially those born before the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. They do so irrespective of whether or not they participated in or actually heard the dialogues they wish to convey. This article seeks to characterize and explain this phenomenon. In the interviews conducted by the author—an Arabic-speaking Jew—as well as in other projects, this mode of speech is marked by ease of transition from character to character and between different points in time. It clearly gives pleasure to those engaged in the act of remembering, and it grades readily into a theatrical performance in which tone of speech and the quality of the acting become the main thing. This form of discourse sprang up from the soil of a rural oral culture and still flourishes as a prop for supporting memory, a vessel for collecting and disseminating stories, and a technique for expressing identification with significant figures from the past.
In this article I interrogate what is lost in war and displacement through the affective memories of Palestinian refugee women who remember through their body and what their body has endured. I reflect on how bodies and spaces connect and disconnect at violent junctures, and on the vital forces vulnerability and precariousness ignite in displacement. Throughout the geography of separations and shifting shelters, refugee women engaged in place-making, transforming the transience enforced by their continuous evictions into the permanence of home, not as a static identity-place-nation, but as a site of dynamic affective, social relations and connections. Read through Michael Hardt's metaphor of “social muscles”, as bodily and emotional drives that blur the boundaries of intimate and social spaces, affective memories can serve as a political horizon that redesigns, in Arendtian terms, the love for the nation as love for concrete relations and for existing in the world.
Throughout the history of European imperialism the grand narratives of the Bible have been used to justify settler-colonialism. The Zionist Bible explores the ways in which modern political Zionism and Israeli militarism have used the Bible - notably the Book of Joshua and its description of the entry of the Israelites into the Promised Land - as an agent of oppression and to support settler-colonialism in Palestine. The rise of messianic Zionism in the late 1960s saw the beginnings of a Jewish theology of zealotocracy, based on the militant land traditions of the Bible and justifying the destruction of the previous inhabitants. The Zionist Bible examines how the birth and growth of the State of Israel has been shaped by this Zionist reading of the Bible, how it has refashioned Israeli-Jewish collective memory, erased and renamed Palestinian topography, and how critical responses to this reading have challenged both Jewish and Palestinian nationalism.
In many ways, the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 is typical of the total military conflicts that characterized the first half of the twentieth century. However, in addition to the military course of the war, and its formative and revolutionary ramifications, this war was also notable for the social mobilization of the Israeli population.
Cartography, place-naming and state-sponsored explorations were central to the modern European conquest of the earth, empire building and settlercolonisation projects. Scholars often assume that place names provide clues to the historical and cultural heritage of places and regions. This article uses social memory theory to analyse the cultural politics of place-naming in Israel. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ study of the construction of social memory by the Latin Crusaders and Christian medieval pilgrims, the article shows Zionists’ toponymic strategies in Palestine, their superimposition of Biblical and Talmudic toponyms was designed to erase the indigenous Palestinian and Arabo-Islamic heritage of the land. In the pre-Nakba period Zionist toponymic schemes utilised nineteenth century Western explorations of Biblical ‘names’ and ‘places’ and appropriated Palestinian toponyms. Following the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, the Israeli state, now in control of 78 percent of the land, accelerated its toponymic project and pursued methods whose main features were memoricide and erasure. Continuing into the post-1967 occupation, these colonial methods threaten the destruction of the diverse historical cultural heritage of the land.
Historians too often construct frameworks and methodologies which obfuscate social, economic and political oppression. This article explores new historical methodologies that can represent oppressed and marginalised groups in Palestine. In particular the article focuses on the role of indigenous history and memory in critical learning and shaping individual and collective identity in Palestine. It further argues that Palestinian memories 'from below' since the Nakba have played a major positive role in the recovery from the traumatic catastrophe and the reconstruction of Palestinian identity. The article critiques the manipulation of collective memory by social, political and economic elites and top-down nationalist approaches. It argues that reconfigured popular memories can be liberating and empowering for embattled Palestinians. The article also calls for the establishment of an interdisciplinary subfield of Nakba Studies that would bring together historians, social memory and cultural theorists, postcolonial scholars and scholars of trauma studies with the aim of documenting and studying the embattled social memory of Palestine as a site of lifelong learning and empowerment.
Ever since the 1948 Palestinian Nakba a bitter controversy has raged over its causes and circumstances. While the Palestinian refugees have maintained that they were driven into flight, Israeli historians claimed that the refugees either left of their own accord, or were ordered to do so by their own leaders. This essay explores the emergence of an Israeli revisionist historiography in the late 1980s which challenged the official Zionist narrative of 1948. Today the 'new historians' are bitterly divided and at each other's throats. The essay assesses the impact of the 'new historians' on history writing and power relations in Palestine-Israel, situating the phenomenon within the wider debates on knowledge and power. It locates 'new history' discourse within the multiple crises of Zionism and the recurring patterns of critical liberal Zionist writing. It further argues that, although the terms of the debate in Western academia have been altered under the impact of this development, both the 'new history' narrative and 'Post-Zionism' have remained marginal in Israel. Rather than developing a post-colonial discourse or decolonising methodologies, the 'new historians' have reflected contradictory currents within the Israeli settler colonial society. Also, ominously, their most influential author, Benny Morris, has reframed the 'new history' narrative within a neo-colonialist discourse and the 'clash of civilisations' thesis. Justifying old and neo-colonialist ideas on 'transfer' and ethnic cleansing, Morris (echoing calls by neo-Zionist Israeli politicians) threatens the Palestinians with another Nakba.
This article coins a new expression: 'civil liberation theology' in Palestine. Astonishingly while feminist, black and post-colonial theologies of liberation have flourished in the West, there is little discussion of indigenous and decolonising perspectives or civil and secular-humanist reflections on liberation theology. Inspired by the works of Palestinian visual artist Naji Al-Ali and public intellectual Edward Said, the article brings into the debate on theologies of liberation in Palestine-Israel a neglected subject: an egalitarian, none-denominational theology rooted in decolonising methodologies. This civil liberation theology attempts to address the questions: how can exile be overcome? How can history be transcended and decolonised? And how can indigenous memory be reclaimed? The article brings into focus indigenous, humanist and non-religious ways of thinking on which Edward Said and Naji Al-Ali (in his famous figurative character Handhala) insisted. This civil liberation theology also draws on contrapuntal methodologies and critical indigenous and non-denominational theologies in 'historic Palestine' -progressive, creative and liberative theologies which occupy multiple sites of liberation and can be made relevant not only to people of faith (Muslims, Jews, Christians) but also to secular-humanists.
This paper explores the value and role of critical notions of space in the current impasse in Palestine‐Israel through a case study on two films and their creative use of space. The main aim of the paper is to illustrate that it is useful for geographers to use analyses of performance in order to theorise space in more hopeful ways, particularly in areas of conflict, by stressing the importance of space as open‐ended and performative. Through a discussion of two films, one by Elia Suleiman and the other by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, the paper argues that space, if imagined as dynamic, in‐between and potentially connecting Palestinians and Israelis, can be transformative and have a positive role to play in interrogating us/them relationships, power inequalities and Othering in the region. The paper highlights the value of using third space and performance to help create a spatial politics of affect, which may in turn lead to changing perceptions of the Other in conflict regions. Therefore, the paper makes a contribution, not only to the geographical literature on how space is appropriated and constructed in Palestine‐Israel, but also to geographical work on hope, film and performance.
The purpose of this article is to further explore the potential for Palestinian oral history to be used as a source for understanding the past. It examines existing directions in this field and highlights new approaches based on a discussion of an oral history project conducted by the author of this paper - a Jewish Israeli - in the Upper Galilee between the years 2006 and 2011. The article sharply illustrates the necessity and the urgency of recording Palestinian oral history with regard to the period that preceded the 1948 war, especially where written sources are lacking. It demonstrates the richness of oral history among Palestinians in Israel and exemplifies its ability to capture a vivid picture of a segment of Palestinian rural life before the Nakba. Methodologically, the article emphasizes the significance of cross-checking non-dependent oral sources as well as cross-checking oral sources against written testimonies as a means of striving for the truth and as a useful way of examining the reliability of oral sources.
Why are humans fated to remember and forget? For Plato, it is because we are wounded by our memory of a previous existence, namely the Platonic “realm of ideas,” to which we forever long to return. In the social sciences, especially history and anthropology, burgeoning cross-disciplinary methodologies and approaches have emerged to study the ways in which humanity remembers and forgets; “cultural memory studies” and the “anthropology of memory” constitute a contemporary realm of ideas concerned with discursive contestations over memory and history. The books under review here, all of which relate to the study of collective memory in Lebanon or Israel/Palestine, have recourse to French theories, despite time lags due to delayed English translation. Foundational writers of a field loosely grouped under the rubric “memory studies” include French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, whose Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) and posthumously published La mémoire collective (1950) both appeared in English in 1980, under confusingly similar titles. The English-language publication of Halbwachs’ corpus on the individual in relation to “collective memory” coincidentally corresponded with the American Psychiatric Association's 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition , in which categories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) extended collective memory into collective traumatic memory, through the notion that “Post-traumatic disorder is fundamentally a disorder of memory.” Another seminal thinker in this field is Pierre Nora, especially the multivolume, multiauthored essays produced under his direction entitled Les Lieux de mémoire , which appeared in French between 1984 and 1992.
Israel Studies 7.2 (2002) 175-198
THE 1948 WAR RESULTED IN Al-Nakbah—the immense catastrophe—for the Palestinian people and changed their life beyond recognition. First and foremost, Al-Nakbah engendered the dispersion [Shatat]. Between 77 and 83 percent of the Palestinians who lived in the part of Palestine that later became Israel—i.e., 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine—were turned into refugees. Thus, for Palestinians, Al-Nakbah represents, among many other things, the loss of the homeland, the disintegration of society, the frustration of national aspirations, and the beginning of a hasty process of destruction of their culture. Rabinowitz has observed that Palestinian identity hinges on the experience of dispossession and exile [Ghurba] as well as mis-recognition international of Palestinian rights and suffering. In a similar vein, Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian historian, essayist, and novelist, argues that:
The absence and the disappearance to which Sanbar refers was not absolute, however. It has been possible to partly reconstruct the past and regain some of its representations because enough material and fertile memories managed to elude the shattering experience of the society's disintegration and the stifling international silence. Referring to such historical experiences, Kracauer, the German cultural scholar, writes: "There are always holes in the wall for us to evade and the improbable to slip in." Of the surviving material that somehow evaded destruction is the rich collection of photographs that composes the "hard data" about the Palestinians and their society in a number of photography books that will be discussed later.
Following the pioneering works of Anderson, Said, and Hobsbawm and Ranger, social scientists have begun locating identity in the inter-subjective realm, where belonging to an imagined community is constantly reproduced and bolstered through invented traditions, commemorations, the construction of national museums, and the creation of national cultural canons and national heroes. In the following, I suggest that, in addition to these top-down processes, which aim at the nationalization of the mass of a population, there are bottom-up processes, which are generated through localized experiences and sentiments. Dispersed and lacking national institutions, archives, and documents, Palestinians have had to resort to different venues of identity reconstruction. Similar to various Third World peoples who have experienced centuries of colonization, the question of identity among Palestinians has become intimately connected to the "restoration of the individual's subjectivity" ; that is, a national narrative has been constructed through life stories, documents, and viewpoints of individuals. Kracauer argues that history, similar to the reality it aspires to represent, is a configuration of segments. In line with that, Al-Nakbah is, in the final analysis, about the tragic fate of the men and women whose lives had been shattered, and about their descendants, who continue to suffer its consequences. Random life stories told by individuals, however, cannot create a national narrative with which a whole community can identify unless these stories are located within what Pierre Nora has termed "sites of memory." For Nora,
Nora's concept of "site of memory" is, I believe, an indispensable tool for understanding the way in which Al-Nakbah has become a constitutive element of Palestinian identity. Al-Nakbah is a Palestinian event and a site of Palestinian collective memory; it connects all Palestinians to a specific point in time that...
There was a village in Palestine called Ein Houd, whose people traced their ancestry back to one of Saladin's generals who was granted the territory as a reward for his prowess in battle. By the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, all the inhabitants of Ein Houd had been dispersed or exiled or had gone into hiding, although their old stone homes were not destroyed. In 1953 the Israeli government established an artists' cooperative community in the houses of the village, now renamed Ein Hod. In the meantime, the Arab inhabitants of Ein Houd moved two kilometers up a neighboring mountain and illegally built a new village. They could not afford to build in stone, and the mountainous terrain prevented them from using the layout of traditional Palestinian villages. That seemed unimportant at the time, because the Palestinians considered it to be only temporary, a place to live until they could go home. The Palestinians have not gone home. The two villages-Jewish Ein Hod and the new Arab Ein Houd-continue to exist in complex and dynamic opposition. The Object of Memory explores the ways in which the people of Ein Houd and Ein Hod remember and reconstruct their past in light of their present-and their present in light of their past. Honorable Mention, 1999 Perkins Book Prize, Society for the Study of Narrative
The peasant is a central figure in West-Bank Palestinian expressive culture and historiography. This paper explores how the signifier of the peasant is used to construct a sense of a unified Palestinian nation for the purposes of the struggle against Israeli colonial policies, and how, at the same time, the peasant's unifying function works ideologically to cover over significant differences within Palestinian society.
The ongoing denial of rights to homes and land for Palestinian refugees holding Israeli citizenship is one of the starkest examples of ethnic discrimination within the State of Israel. Internally displaced Palestinians in the Galilee are not recognised internationally as refugees, unlike family and friends forced beyond the borders. This essay examines the evolution of official and unofficial Israeli policy towards the internally displaced, and discusses the changing refugee focus, a focus moving from the basic struggle to survive to community activism and frames the issue of the internally displaced as part of the wider national campaign for the right of return.
The event described and commented on here occurred within the State of Israel, a week after the state came into being (22-23 May 1948). Although the Tantura Case is a significant chapter in the history of Israel/Palestine there is virtually no detailed reference to it in the works of Israeli or Palestinian historians, or of any other historian. Nevertheless, the Tantura events were also a subject of heated legal and public debate in Israel throughout 2001. The public controversy still generates strong passions. This article provides not only a description of the event and the controversy, and its ongoing social implications, but also discusses its impact on fundamental questions of historiography, such as the question of the nature and hierarchy of sources, as well as the scope and limits of the historian's imagination. It also poses even higher questions, namely those which impinge upon a historian's objectivity and moral obligations.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25.1 (2005) 30-45
Even in the absence of a state whose prerogatives, prerequisites, and material resources often define the form and content of commemorative monuments, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have actively promoted monument building and memorializing. On the basis of their provenance and use, Palestinian places of mourning and memory include those lacking monuments as well as quotidian memory places, nationalist memorials, and commemorative sites appropriated by other political actors. Places that mark death and mourning for Palestinians contain both transcendental and temporal meanings; they are at times sanctified and at other times instrumentalized, and sometimes both concurrently. These places have become sites of political and interpretative contention, and various Palestinian and non-Palestinian actors have struggled over their function, meaning, and use.
In this article, I do not simply look at elite or official Palestinian commemoration, but rather, following Julie Peteet and Rosemary Sayigh, I emphasize the narratives and practices of the camp refugees themselves. Furthermore, I join discussions about collective memory and commemoration by bringing together studies of state-centric/nationalist memorializing and examinations of popular or counterhegemonic commemorative practices. My aim is to show the polysemic nature of commemorative practices that arise out of relations of power. These practices issue not only from resource-rich institutions but also from popular sources, in the course of political claim making. Because of the contentious history of the Palestinian presence in Lebanon, Palestinian political groups often commemorate memorialized deaths as "heroic sacrifices" in the cause of the nation; at other times, the refugees see these memorials as a sign of the "collective suffering" of the community or as the private losses of Palestinian families. Thus Palestinian burial places, memorial grounds, and monuments are "perceived, conceived and lived" as multivalent and tangible embodiments of the competing political narratives Palestinians tell about themselves and their national(ist) history. These narratives, whether heroic or tragic, arise out of and in response to particular political contexts and social relations, and they are subject to contestation and challenge both from within and from without. The heroic narratives are mobilizing nationalist rhetorics that constitute the community as the deliberate and self-sacrificing agents of its own fate, that fate being a fully realized and territorialized nation-state. Narratives of pain and suffering, on the other hand, tap into an international discourse of human rights and are deployed to compete against other disadvantaged and dispossessed communities for the attention of international human rights institutions. But these latter narratives also work on a smaller scale, where a history of suffering legitimizes claims of the refugees to membership in the national polity, thus revealing the rifts and fissures within the body of the "nation" itself.
In 1948 some 726,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from Palestine, around 110,000 of whom eventually settled in Lebanon. The number of Palestinian refugees now registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Lebanon stands just under 380,000, half of whom live in twelve refugee camps administered by the UNRWA. The Palestinian presence in Lebanon has been the focus of political contention for more than a half century and particularly since the emergence of the Palestinian national movement in the late 1960s. Before 1982, when the refugee camps of Lebanon were at the heart of the Palestinian national movement and the primary base of Palestinian armed struggle against Israel, "official" memorials commemorated sacrifice and heroism in the cause of the nation. During the Lebanese civil war (1975–91), Palestinians were at the very center of the conflict, and throughout these years, out of the monotony of ever-accumulating deaths, they seized on nationalist narratives about "exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars, and holocausts," all of which gave meaning and legitimacy to the struggle. Since...
This paper examines representations of "self" embodied in the life histories of women members of a Palestinian refugee camp community in Lebanon. Stereotypes of "self" are inherently ambivalent (Guttman 1988) as sites of both subjection and resistance. This ambivalence is strongly exemplified around the Palestinian refugee identity (to submit or to resist?); and again, though in different terms, for women members of refugee communities. (In camps, gender conservatism was multi-sourced, forming a link with Palestine, a boundary differentiating Palestinians from the "host" population, and resistance to coercive change.) The Palestinian resistance movement, like other twentieth-century anti-colonialist national movements, rigidified gender "tradition" as a key element of cultural nationalism, while political and economic mobilization gave women new scope for action and for "voice." The life stories of women of Shatila camp, recorded soon after its destruction during the "Battle of the Camps" (1995â98), reveal "self" stereotypes that express historic continuity with Palestine as well as the specificity of Lebanon as diaspora region, characterized by PLO autonomy from 1970 to 1982, and high levels of violence against camp Palestinians in particular. Analysis of the "self" stereotypes [End Page 86]
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32.1 (2001) 159-160
Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948. By Meron Benvenisti (trans. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta) (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000) 366 pp. $35.00
Benvenisti has written a provocative but compassionate book with two purposes that appear to contradict each other. First, he traces the process by which war and expulsion transformed the map of Arab Palestine into the map of modern Israel. Then he advances the case that there is still sufficient historical and physical space for both peoples to share their homeland, even though the Palestinian homeland is physically unrecognizable today.
Benvenisti concentrates his research on the part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948, where an Arab landscape was entirely replaced by a Jewish landscape. When Palestinians claim the right to return to Palestine, they mean, first and foremost, Israel, and not the West Bank and Gaza.
Geographers will find illuminating those sections of the book that focus on toponymistics, or the assignment of geographical names. Even before the end of the British Mandate, Zionist geographers, including Benvenisti's father, had begun to attach Hebrew names to Arab sites. This effort accelerated after Israel's establishment in 1948, as various Israeli commissions undertook to make permanent the facts of war. In this way, the map of Arab Palestine was systematically transformed into a modern Israeli map. Benvenisti estimates that 9,000 villages, ruins, and flora and fauna of Palestine, all with Arabic names, were systematically renamed in Hebrew.
Most controversial was the physical takeover of sites sacred to Muslims. Benvenisti points out that even though this activity was nothing new in history, it was the first time "since the end of the Middle Ages [that] the civilized world witnessed the wholesale appropriation of the sacred sites of a defeated religious community by members of the victorious one" (273). Benvenisti is also aware that history is partially invented. For instance, while Jews destroyed many Muslim sites and shrines, they saved and adopted as their own some sites and shrines that Muslims had accepted as originally Jewish even though the Jews had never claimed them as their own.
Benvenisti views the transformation of Palestine's geographical nomenclature as part of the Zionist effort to eliminate everything Arab from Palestine. The question for him, as for other Israeli scholars, is whether Zionist policy during the 1948 war and its aftermath consisted of a premeditated effort to drive the Arabs out of Palestine. He argues that the first part of that war does not reveal an unambiguous plan of "ethnic cleansing." In the crucial month following Israel's declaration of independence on May 15, 1948, however, Israeli leaders established a clear policy that was designed to prevent Palestinians from returning to their land and "to make their abandoned land available for Zionist settlement" (143).
Benvenisti observes that Palestinian claims to their former homes and villages serve to unite the Jewish community against an enemy viewed as trying to destroy Israel. Much more divisive and upsetting for the Jewish community, he argues, are the efforts of Arab citizens of Israel to commemorate their past and celebrate Palestinian nationhood by restoring the revered sites and holy places that Jews had destroyed. Such efforts by these Israeli citizens, who constitute one-fifth of the total Israeli population, produce guilt and embarrassment for some Jews and rage in others. Benvenisti does not conceal his antipathy toward the latter, who willfully ignore their history vis-à-vis the Palestinians.
Benvenisti comes close to proposing a bi-national state. Some prominent Jews living in Palestine during the British mandate had promoted this idea, and it also attracted some Palestinians on the left, mainly in the Communist party. Three generations later, Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals are touting it once again. Although the difficulties of establishing a viable Palestinian state, coupled with a high Arab birth rate in Israel, may eventually result in a de facto bi-national solution, few on either side of the divide would find it an acceptable solution today.
Philip S. KhouryMassachusetts Institute of Technology
1. In...
The article presents the case of the Palestinians as a prism through which the question of political uses of history can be addressed. The claim is that 1948, the year of the Nakba, a key date in the history of the Palestinian people, was a rupture in the continuity of historical space and time in Palestinian history. The article discusses the formation of the Palestinian national identity, both in relation to the Nakba, and to the Palestinian exile and demonstrates the intense and formative relationship between the Nakba and formation of Palestinian national identity. History, to the extent that served as a buffer to guard against disappearance, became an 'emergency science' among Palestinians. The article draws attention to certain historical approaches that have evolved in the last decades, and points to key genres of historiography, and their relation to the notion of 'disappearance from history' of the Palestinian people.
History, we are often taught, is driven by vast social, political, and economic forces. But each political event, each war, each clash in the streets or at the picket lines, is experienced by individuals. It is this profound bond between public history and personal struggle, Alessandro Portelli contends, that gives oral history its significance and its power. In The Battle of Valle Giulia—the title comes from an Italian student protest of the 1960s—Portelli reflects on how to connect personal memories with history, how to fittingly collect and represent the complexity of memory. Crossing cultures, classes, and generations, he records the private and singular experiences of Italian steelworkers and Kentucky coal miners, veterans and refugees of World War II, soldiers who fought in Vietnam, Italian resistance fighters and Nazis, and members of student movements from Berkeley to Rome. By listening to those whom others presume are "without historical memory"—such as youthful protesters, or the rural Tuscan women who saw every father, son, and brother killed by Nazi soldiers—Portelli clarifies the process by which narratives come into being as oral history, and he illustrates the differences and distances between story-telling and history-telling. Portelli's articulate discussion of dialogue, representation, narrative and genre link historical analysis with literary and linguistic theory and with the concerns of contemporary anthropology.
Archaeology in Israel is truly a national obsession, a practice through which national identityâand national rightsâhave long been asserted. But how and why did archaeology emerge as such a pervasive force there? How can the practices of archaeology help answer those questions? In this stirring book, Nadia Abu El-Haj addresses these questions and specifies for the first time the relationship between national ideology, colonial settlement, and the production of historical knowledge. She analyzes particular instances of history, artifacts, and landscapes in the making to show how archaeology helped not only to legitimize cultural and political visions but, far more powerfully, to reshape them. Moreover, she places Israeli archaeology in the context of the broader discipline to determine what unites the field across its disparate local traditions and locations. Boldly uncovering an Israel in which science and politics are mutually constituted, this book shows the ongoing role that archaeology plays in defining the past, present, and future of Palestine and Israel.
PIP
This analysis is pursued in the framework of an interrelated multidimensional model which includes 5 main components: 1) dimensions of adjustment, 2) range of adjustment, 3) levels of adjustment, 4) typology of aggregate adjustment, and 5) indicators of mobility and variation in the refugee adjustment. Arab internal refugees in Israel, including their characteristics and patterns of adjustment in the host communities as well as in Israeli society, are studied. Social, psychological, and socioeconomic adjustments are separated out and show the importance of the linkage between adjustment patterns at both the communal and the societal levels. The findings indicate that processes of adjustment at the communal and the societal levels are not necessarily conjunctive and symmetric. At the societal level, socioeconomic adjustment occurs relatively more rapidly than social adjustment. At the communal level, inter-marriage with locals lags behind friendship relationships and mutual visits. Psychological adjustment rates in between these 2. Cultural and linguistic compatibility with the host community are crucial positive factors for refugee adjustment. Cultural, linguistic, and national compatibility with the host community may have paradoxically indirect negative effects on the refugee psychological adjustment. High background compatibility generates high expectations among the refugees, which may be easily transferred into alienation, when faced with a different situation than expected; the greater the gap between the expected and the actual, the more the alienation.
The Secret Visitations of Memory’ in Sa’di and Abu-LughodAyn Bayt ‘Alma’: Palestinian Refugee Camp, A Study in the Sociology of the Camps (Jerusalem: PASSIA-Palestinian Academic Society for International Affairs
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The Uprooted Palestinian Refugees Inside Israel
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UNRWA Archives on Palestinian Refugees Reinterpreting the Historical Record, The Uses of Palestinian Refugee Archives for Social Science Research and Policy Analysis
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The Internally Displaced: Refugees in Their Homeland (Cairo: Centre of Human Rights Studies
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