The Nakba, one of the major historical events in the twentieth century, has not only changed the way Gaza looks, but has also transformed Palestinians’ lives dramatically. Palestine, which prior to the Nakba was part of Greater Syria, lived a completely different experience than today, especially in terms of freedom of movement. Rajab al-Tom, a refugee from Bir al-Sabe’, was forced to leave during the Nakba. He told Middle East Eye (Hajjaj 2015), “I was living in Jabalia city, in the northern Gaza Strip, shopping from Magdala. In the winter, I travelled to Bir al-Sabe’ ... in the summer, I used to travel to Haifa”. Travelling from one city to another was easy: “There were no borders between the cities of Palestine or other neighbouring states”, al-Tom said (in Hajjaj 2015).
With time, and technological development throughout the world, one would think that refugees’ lives might have been affected positively. This has happened in some ways. However, more restrictions have also been imposed that none of the technological developments seems to lessen. In his youth, al-Tom used to travel throughout Palestine and Syria on a camel. Now, Palestinians in Gaza can use neither camels nor flights, with Israel and Egypt imposing restrictions on their freedom of movement. Delving more into the situation in Gaza, the restriction of movement is one major issue that affects all Palestinians in different ways, whether it is for someone who wants to pursue education, or those who need special medical care. Almost permanently closed checkpoints, or hours of waiting in the heat at the Rafah Egyptian crossing or the Erez Israeli checkpoint, were not the case before the 1948 calamity. As al-Tom told al-Monitor, he would travel on foot throughout Palestine without the need for any permit; there were no Israeli soldiers or checkpoints to humiliate and obstruct the Palestinian people (Hajjaj 2015).
Al-Tom’s story is one of many. An estimated 75‒80% of historic Palestine’s indigenous people were forced to leave their homes. Some were forced into neighbouring countries such as Jordan, and others ended up internally exiled, as is the case with 67% of the Gazan population nowadays, leaving Gaza with the highest proportion of refugees in the world. The most recent estimates put the Palestinians displaced inside and globally at nearly 8 million, almost 66% of the Palestinian worldwide population of 11.2 million, making them the largest and longest-standing community of refugees globally, according to a survey by Resource Centre for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights (BADIL 2012), a Palestinian refugee advocacy group with a consultative status with United Nations Economic and Social Council (UN ECOSOC). These refugees pass their stories from one generation to another as elders tell their children and grandchildren the story of their homelands. And here lies the importance of recording these stories of al-Tom and others which clearly show that history in Palestine, unlike other places where one’s story is usually written by the victors and occupiers, is still remembered by the old and passed on to many younger people (Hajjaj 2015).
Other than al-Tom’s account, the story of eighty-nine-year-old Sadia Tartori from al-Faluja village, nearly thirty kilometres north of Gaza City, across the current border with Israel, is a further example. She was ten years old when forced to leave her home, and recalls her childhood well, especially the Jewish neighbour who used to give her sweets when her mother went to buy jewellery from his store. Prior to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in general harmony. “We were simple farmers and workers who had no need to hold a gun. But [in] the Nakba, groups of Jews started to attack us on our own lands, threatening to kill us if we would not leave. Palestinians defended themselves but what can a stick or a knife do against a gun?” She was her mother’s only daughter, and her father planted a tree sapling named after her. The events of the Nakba took her innocence away. It took her long effort to recall and reflect on these tough memories. “I saw young men digging holes in the ground and hiding beneath the earth so they would not get killed”, Sadia recollected (Hajjaj 2015).
As the events of the 1948 Nakba started, Sadia and her mother collected all their gold to carry with them, but, as she recalled, “My father said that it would be a matter of days until we returned. We hid the gold in a jug and buried it. A few days later, I found myself in the Gaza Strip as a refugee. I knew then that I had lost my home”. Sadia’s family was not alone in thinking that they would return very soon: thousands shared similar thoughts. “I arrived in Gaza as many people did, without anything but the clothes I was wearing.” It was difficult, and rather useless, to transfer everything from old homes to new ones, as they thought this situation would be temporary. They also knew, like many of the others, that they had extended families who would accommodate them in Gaza. But having a family does not mean not having to search for ways to survive. In Sadia’s words, “My mother and I used to go to Khan Younis city in the southern Gaza Strip to get milk and one meal per person each day from the UN. My brothers became fishermen, and grief took my father” (Hajjaj 2015).
Al-Tom’s and Tartori’s accounts are clear examples of how investing in oral history preserves the memory of national trauma that is barely recorded elsewhere. These attempts to record the stories of the old, usually by the younger generation, show clearly that Palestinians’ memories are still present in daily conversations and that the younger generations, as well as the older ones, maintain and preserve these stories. The next section explores further these attempts to preserve Palestinian oral history, with its success and failure.
PRESERVING PALESTINIAN ORAL HISTORY: SUCCESS AND FAILURE
The study of Palestinian refugees in Gaza is not a matter of dead stories of the past; their memory cannot be erased from Palestinian history. This memory, which is focused on the Nakba, is not only about the contemporary history of Palestinians turning into refugees, but it is also about their hope for the future, for return and freedom – a hope that nobody can deny them, not even the Israeli state with its constant efforts to erase Palestinian memories (Abdo 2014: 69‒70), the latest attempt being when the Israel State Archive announced restricted access to documents related to confiscated Palestinian property (The Nakba Files 2016). In this context, Masalha uses the concept of “cultural genocide” to re-emphasize the erasure of Palestinian physical culture, buildings, streets and homes, and the destruction of about 600 villages and towns and other Palestinian historic sites. This is why recording Nakba stories is more urgent than ever. Oral history can amplify the community struggle in Gaza, to defend against the Palestinians’ displacement by documenting the daily struggle, demonstrations, legal actions and expression of traditions, providing a space for a counter-narrative, and strengthening Palestinians fragmented as a community both within and outside Palestine, by centring the Palestinian struggle around commonality and the sharing of displacement experiences (Hastings 2016). In Gaza, oral history is about narrating not only stories from the Nakba of 1948, but also the continuing Israeli displacement through its non-stop aggression on Gaza, which has left thousands losing their lives and properties.
In Gaza, researchers are determined to document Nakba memories directly from the words of those refugees who lived through it and are currently in Gaza. It is important that such attempts to preserve Palestinian history are growing daily. These projects include the Oral History Centre of the Arts Faculty in the Islamic University of Gaza, where academics and students have been observing and documenting oral history. The Centre was opened in 1998 following an initiative by the faculty members, supported by the university, to emphasize the importance of oral history and to invest time and effort in documenting historical events in Palestine, making sure that heritage, suffering, resistance and endurance are all documented. It is one of the Centre’s main goals to record the historical events of the Nakba in 1948, the migration of refugees to Gaza, and their lives since then. Their current archive has been built from scratch, as there is no systematic reference centre for such information in the Gaza Strip, as Nermin Habib, a researcher in the Centre, has noted. It goes beyond displacement research to include Palestine regions
, folklore, politics, culture and so on. “We are trying our best to maintain our Palestinian identity and Palestinian heritage and traditions, like food and dress, after the Nakba”, said Habib. “We seek to document the history of the Palestinian people and the main events that have shaped the Palestinian cause” (Catron 2013).
To shed more light on the OHC, I talked to Professor Ryad Shahin, the current head of the Centre and a regional coordinator for the Oral History Network. Professor Shahin emphasized the importance of oral history in the Palestinian context. “It is a source of historical information that is indispensable for the researcher. It enriches contemporary historical, economic, political, military and socio-cultural studies that are scarce in the written sources.” For him, oral history material also constitutes historical documents and preliminary records that contain information that is not preserved in official documents. Its importance is especially highlighted in the absence of public voices (the voices of ordinary people) who have been marginalized from history and who have never had their opinions, experiences and observations, or even participation in certain events, taken into consideration.
Shahin managed to interview hundreds of Palestinian refugees who fled their homes and came to Gaza. He has also encouraged his students to work on oral history projects, an initiative to build on his work for the younger generation. He has pointed out that the Nakba was a crucial year for the Palestinians interviewed, turning them from landowners to beggars, due to the oppression of Israeli occupation. For him, oral history can provide a platform to support these communities that are defending themselves against displacement, with residents and allies organizing their defence against displacement, as in the case of neighbours and friends gathering on the roofs of those whose houses were threatened with attack by Israeli planes. Some have appealed such cases, especially those that lead to casualties, in the Israeli and international court system, despite the fact that such cases are mostly rejected in Israeli courts.
So far, the Centre has recorded over 1,200 audio interviews with different groups in Gaza on various topics, all relevant to the history of Palestinian society. These include the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, the rise of the Islamic movement in Gaza, and the 2012 Israeli attack on Gaza, along with other incidents. The Centre has also held several training courses on oral history, to teach students and academics how to use oral history to document Palestinian events. Some of these courses took place outside Gaza, such as in Ramallah and in Amman.
The Centre’s plan is to do a series of studies that orally document the history of Palestine since 1948, conducting video interviews with leading historical figures, producing a documentary film about Palestinian history, using the global information network to publicize the materials available in the Centre, translating them into different foreign languages, and using advanced information technology to maintain oral narratives about Palestine.
Given the common fallacies spread in the Western world about the Palestinian narrative, Shahin emphasized the urgent need to start an extensive project to document the Nakba and life thereafter in Gaza, noting that many of those who lived through this historic event in Palestine are passing away, and others find it hard to remember the Nakba: they may not be highly educated, or may by now have failing memories. This is in addition to the fact that some could be scattered in different areas in the world, which may prove detrimental to the Palestinian cause. This documentation, if done, could be used to establish the rights of Palestinian refugees in their lands, in all international forums and courts. Shahin later added that there are recent efforts in the East, as well as the West, to document records of those who have been displaced.
This section shows that the efforts by the Islamic University of Gaza’s Oral History Project provide hope amid the Israelis’ continuous attempts to erase Palestinian history. The next section looks into the emergence of new narratives, mainly led by Palestinian youth in Gaza, to further reinforce the Palestinian narrative amongst the young generation.
EMERGENCE OF NEW NARRATIVES
Since its establishment, the Israeli government has attempted to erase the memory of the Nakba from the Israeli Jewish consciousness and from Western public discourse, as well as official media. This has been largely implemented through the destruction of Palestinian villages and towns, replacing them with Jewish settlements or by planting trees and turning these villages into resorts; for example, Canada Park is built on the ruins of the three villages of Yalu, Imwas and Beit-Nuba (Cook 2009). Such policies and practices could also be one reason for the historical amnesia that has predominated in Western literature on Palestinian resistance. This amnesia was highlighted by Shahin during my interview with him, in addition to the fact that Palestinian narratives have long been excluded from the discussion of Palestine by much of Western academia as well as mainstream film, art, music and news media institutions (Abdo 2014).
In this context, Shahin notes that as Israeli narratives are the predominant ones in the West, such as the false claim that Palestine was a land without a people, the Palestinians have started documenting their own narratives in an attempt to counter the Israeli falsehoods and media-oriented onslaught. He attributed the delays in documenting Nakba events to the horror embodied in the destruction of over 600 Palestinian villages, in addition to the killings and attacks on humans and animals, and destruction of written documents, archives and libraries that existed at the time, which shocked the Palestinians and the Arabs, especially because they were unable to do much to prevent it (in Svirsky 2012: 59). In the same framework, Shahin added that the Arab world has been against the Palestinians leaving their lands and has raised the issue with the outside world. He noted that the Palestinians have been subjected to war at home and abroad, where the displaced and expelled Palestinians did not find anyone to welcome them in the Arab world. It took them some time to take stock and start writing their own history, but if they did not do so, who would do it for them? Shahin added that the narrative was confined to official correspondence between Britain and America on the one hand and Britain and the Zionist organizations on the other, and that is problematic; the displaced Palestinians have suffered hardships, but no attention has been paid to their case. This history and memory of the Nakba, and the ongoing Israeli settler-colonial rule over the Palestinians, are what old and new imperialism, as well as orientalist feminists, have overlooked and continued to overlook.
Over time, Shahin notes, the importance of oral history has been increasing, but the previous omission of the Palestinian-related narrative has undoubtedly impacted on public knowledge concerning Palestinian struggles against Israeli settler-colonialism, limiting, in turn, greater public discussion on the question of Palestine. Until the 1980s, the Israeli version of the events of 1948, which lays all the blame for the war on the Arabs, has gone largely unchallenged outside of the Arab world. In a lecture delivered by Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH), he argued, “This is a nationalist version of history and, as such, it is simplistic, selective, and self-serving. It is, essentially, the propaganda of the victors. It presented the victors as victims, and it blamed the real victims – the Palestinians – for their own misfortunes” (2003 MIFTAH).
One main source of information nowadays on narratives of the Nakba is that of the youth involved in research. Palestinian youths are an integral part of oral history projects, and this has undoubtedly contributed to the development of a new genre of literature. Palestinian history of the Nakba, of national and anti-colonial resistance, is sometimes written from a youth perspective, helped by other writers, as in the case of the Tamer Institute for Community Education, explained in the next section. This history being brought back to life from this perspective will undoubtedly serve as a future rebuttal to the Western perspective of Palestine as a land without people. This is also important to counter imperialist arguments on the topic of Palestine. For Abdo, all imperialism seem
s to have the same outcomes regarding Palestine, but the new one is more sophisticated, creating a new epistemology for framing world peace, conflict and resistance, and creating what it perceives to be “democratic” regimes that need to accept imperial interests. This imperialism also means the control of the vast majority of the world by a few US-based organizations.
It is not that the Palestinians chose this situation; it was forced on them. Their leadership has gone through many rounds of peaceful “negotiations”, “agreements”, “dialogues” and “deals” that they have entered into and accepted, all of which have failed to produce any resolution to the Palestinian problem (Abdo 2014: 75). This brought them to new methods of resistance, lately that of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Eyad El-Sarraj is a pioneering Palestinian psychiatrist born in Bir al-Sabe’ in Palestine in 1944, to a Palestinian Arab Muslim family. He arrived along with his family in the Gaza Strip in 1948, and observed these feelings of despair in 2005:
An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba Page 36
