1

Palestinian Historiography between History and Memory

Jihane Sfeir

DRAFT: Not for quotation

Summary

The history of Palestine and of its people has long been marginalized to the benefit of the

dominant Israeli historical account. Even though this history has been absent from the global

account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it has nevertheless been central in the Arab

historiography. This article reflects on the stages of construction of the historical narrative,

made in parallel of the conflict and around the memory of the founding event which is the

1948-Nakba. It aims at recounting the various interpretations of the Palestinian history

elaborated outside of the original territory, based on non-Palestinian sources and passed on

by the memory of a people which had been scattered in diaspora.

Contrary to the more recent history of Israel, the history of Palestine falls within the scope of a

long temporality and of a unified space: the Arab middle-east, ruled by the Ottomans and

afterwards, under European domination. But this historical space-time explodes in 1948 after

the « Catastrophe » or « Nakba » which marks the scattering of the Palestinians, the birth of the

Israeli State and the drowning of the Palestinian arab State.

Based on the study of a wide collection of works in Arabic, this article paper on the changes in

the historiography at every key steps of the national construction of the Palestinian People. This

is less about making an exhaustive assessment of Palestinian historiography than appraising the

way it was and is still elaborated. I intend to see, in this paper, how the issues raised by history

and memory create a historiography which lies within the framework of a permanent present.

To which it is necessary to add the traumatic consequences of the Nakba whose shock waves

have been transmitted through the memory from generation to generation1.

As a starting point, I shall focus on the big steps of the construction of the Palestinian national

history. Then, I will analyze the importance of oral history in the production of a collective

memory based on a founding event: the 1948-Nakba.

1) The stages of construction of Palestinian historiography

1 On this subject : SA’DI Ahmad et ABU-LUGHOD Lila, (ed.) Nakba, Palestine, 1948 and the Claims of Memory,

Columbia University Press, New York, 2007, PICAUDOU Nadine Territoires Palestiniens de mémoire,

Karthala-IFPO, Paris, 2006.

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Like every historical account, the building of the Palestinian national history starts with a

political moment which marks the beginning of the Nations. In the case of Palestine, it is the

20th

century with the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, the rising of Arab Nationalism and

the European cultural, economical and political penetration. During the first half of the 20th

century, Palestinian history is written in the context of the Arab and Jewish conflict, in the

boundaries of Palestine under British Mandate. After 1948, it is thought in the context of the

Israeli-Arab conflict and written in exile. The period after 1948 is characterized by the

scattering of Palestinian intellectuals who elaborate history from their places of exile, be they

close (Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq or Jordan) or far away (Europe or America). This category

of historians, supported by the Palestinian National Movement, contributed to the creation of

research facilities and publishing firms. Throughout the years of exile, the stages of

construction of the Palestinian national history match those of the conflict with Israel: the 6-

days war of 1967, the 1982-invasion of Lebanon, the 1987-Intifada and, in 1993, the signing

of the peace agreements in Oslo...

1.1. A historical account marked by Arab nationalism

The period stretching from the end of the 19th century to 1948 is a key moment in the

construction of the Arab national conscience in general, of the Palestinian conscience in

particular. It starts with the Nahda (cultural rebirth) and goes until 1948 and the deportation,

the Nakba (the Catastrophe). During the Ottoman period, the historiography of Mandatory

Palestine is condensed in travelers’ accounts, biographic traditions and cities’ chronicles. The

historical writings of this period describe the society of large urban areas (Jerusalem,

Nazareth, Jaffa, Haifa or Nablus) and tell the relations between the various social, religious,

clannish or family groups2.

With the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the birth of the Arab nationalist movement and

the creation of British Palestine, the historians link Palestine’s history to the fate of the Arab

States in the concept of unified Umma (understood as Arab Nation). The belonging to this

Arab Nation completes the historiographic discourse which disproves the promise of

establishment of a Jewish home. It is about claiming and fighting for the Arab identity of the

territory against its denial by the British Mandate and the Zionist movement. The historical

2 Among them, we can name Najm eldîn al Ghazzi, Mohammad Amîn al-Mohébbi, Khalil al Marâdi, or Abdel

Razzak al-Bitar. These writers are quoted in the book of MANNA’ Adel, 'a`lâm Filastin fi awakher al `ahd al

`othmani (1800-1918) ( The Elites of Palestine at the end of the Ottoman Period), Beyrouth, Mu'assassat al

dirasat al-filastiniyya, [1986] 1995, pp. 1-10.

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account conveys a political message meant to arouse the feeling of unity of the Christian and

Muslim Arab community in the face of the foreign threat. This historiography is abundantly

documented and asserts its objectivity since it relies on Arab and Western archives3. The 1936

revolt and the clash between the Arab and Jewish communities of Palestine is a key event for

the constitution of this historigraphic movement4. It is a crucial moment in the history of the

Arabs of Palestine, in which the peasants play a major part in the fighting against the Zionist

movement on the one hand and the mandatory authorities on the other hand. One last

characteristic of the Palestinian historiography of the Mandate period is its elaboration among

a society not yet dismantled, where history is seen through the eyes of individuals from

privileged places (Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Nablus or Nazareth). Thus, most of the Arab

historians of Palestine stem from the urban nobility and their interpretation of the national

event is structured by their belonging to a class, a clan, a family. They are chroniclers, legal

experts, biographers, nationalists but they are not historians; their concern is to record their

society, their everyday life, their struggle against Zionism. Their accounts legitimate the

belonging of their people to this land and call for the creation of an Arab State in Palestine5.

1.2. The reconstitution of the national account in exile

In 1948, the cost of war is heavy: for the first time since their constitution as Nation-States,

the recently independent Arab countries have entered into a conflict which has ended by their

defeat and the beginning of a life of wandering for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

The 1948-deportation has deeply disturbed the perception of Palestinian « geography »; from

this moment on, history moves towards the legitimization of the existence of the Arab

Palestine and its people. Arif al-'Arif’s book, Al Nakba6, presents a detailed chronicle of the

year 1948 on a “national” scale. It is a historical chronicle which endeavours to describe the

places of memory of the Palestinian people: Palestine exists through its folklore inheritance,

its villages and its cities. Its geography clearly draws the outlines of a territory including the

entire mandatory Palestine. Al-‘Arif, who writes from Lebanon, aims at registering the places

3KHALIDI Tarif, « Historiographie palestinienne : 1900-1948 », Revue des études palestiniennes, 8, 1983, pp. 53-

70. 4 The Arab revolt (1936-1939), refers to the uprising of the Palestinian Arabs against the Jewish immigration and

in favour of the creation of an independent State.. 5 See ANTONIUS Georges, The Arab awakening , Londres, Hamish Hamilton, 1938 ; AL-SIFRI Issa, Filastîn al-

'arabiyya bayn al-intidâb wa al- suhyuniyya ( Arab Palestine between Mandate and Zionism), Jaffa, Maktabat

Filastîn al-Jadîda, 1937 ; HAYKAL Yussuf, al-Qadiyya al-Filastiniyya (the Palestinian cause), Jaffa, Matba'at al-

Fajr, 1937 ; BSISU, Sa’di Naqd wa tahlil (Critics and analysis), Jérusalem, al-Matba'at al-Tijariyya, 1945 ;

ABCARIUS Michael, Palestine through the fog of propaganda, Londres, Hutchinson, 1946. 6 'Arif al-`Arif, al-Nakba, 1947-1952 (Le désastre, 1947-1952), Beyrouth, al Maktaba al-'Asriya, 1956-1960,

6 vols, réédition en trois volumes, Mouassassat al Dirassat al filastiniyye, Beyrouth, 2013.

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of memory so as to preserve the Palestinian territorial entity as well as its very existence.

The historiographic genre of the chronicle is at its peak in Al-'Arif’s work, yet it is also its

swansong: the writings of post-1948 historians are mostly analyses of the causes of the defeat.

From then on, writing history has become an intellectual and ideological commitment which

unveils the secrets of the collaboration with the enemy of such or such Arab leader. The

Palestinian intellectual debate of this time is dominated by theories of conspiracy and treason;

where historians have become the investigators of the Nakba.

During the 1950s, Palestine’s history makes a step back and the scattering of the Palestinian

intellectuals in the various host countries lead to a new form of writing, the writing of exile

marked by a deep feeling of injustice7. The Arab nationalism transforms and integrates the

Palestinian issue in its discourse; from then on it is the primary demand of the Arab world

face to the international community, hence becoming the aim of unity of the Arab nation. It

highlights a global Arab perception of the Palestinian issue.

The first years of exile deeply transform the Palestinian national identity: deported and

scattered, Arabs of Palestine are from this moment Palestinian refugees. Deprived of a land,

their identity is built in the refugee camps (mukhayyam) which become place of resistance and

symbol of the Palestinian struggle during the 1970s.

1.3. The revolutionary account of the 1960s’ and 1970’s

Twenty years after the Nakba, the time has come to fight and struggle. In these years, the

exile is paradoxically a stimulating experience for the writing of a militant history, which will

gather the Arab intellectuals around the Palestinian cause. As Enzo Traverso puts it: ‘In exile,

the borders between the scholar and the militant become porous, instable’. In the Palestinian

case, these frontiers are very porous and unsettled. The historian/ militant nourishes himself of

the Palestinian revolution so as to produce an ideological and nationalist history. Here, the

exile is an asset which makes the appropriation of the story of the defeated easier and

inevitably leads to a status of « citizens of the world »8.

The 1967 defeat affects the whole Arab region of the Middle- East. It is necessary to

underline the crucial political fact that is the emergence of a new Palestinian leadership after

the defeat. The presence of the armed groups of the Palestinian resistance influences the

7 For examples see Muhammad ‘IZZAT DARWAZA, Hawla al haraka al-‘arabiyya al haditha (About the

modern Arab movement), Saïda, al-Maktaba al-‘Asriyya, 1950 or Constantine ZUREIK, Ma‘na al-Nakba

Beyrouth, Dâr al‘ilm lil malayîn, 1948. 8 Ibid, p. 230.

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writings and toughens the stances. The first consequence of the takeover by the Palestinian

political movement is the return to a Palestinian view of the Palestinian issue. It involves a

new Pan-Arab dimension: ‘Palestine is the path to Unity’9, not the contrary. Furthermore, the

Palestinian researchers and historians, who are influenced by Marxist theories, seize these

analytical tools to review history. This re-reading of Palestine’s history leads to politicized

writings in which the tone is mostly militant. In the light of this re-reading, two major aspects

need pointing out: the resistant ‘peasant’ becomes the main character of the fight to get the

land back whereas the accusation of treason addressed to the Arab countries – which was

typical of the texts written after 1948- loses its importance. This is also the time of the

emergence of a new Palestinian intellectual class. Knowledge is no longer the sole property of

the notables; the new Palestinian thinkers are refugees, taught in the UNRWA schools, who

receive university grants from countries allied to the Palestinian cause (mostly former Soviet

Republics). This new kind of revolutionary thinkers offers a progressive view of Palestinian

history and pleads the cause of the deprived in the name of all the refugees10

.

In the mid-1960s, political parties start supporting research facilities in which a whole

generation of Palestinian and Arab researchers would be taught. Sponsored by political parties

(P.L.O., P.F.L.P., the Ba’ath Party…), new publishers have a determining influence on the

thinking of the time. They offer a platform of exchange, of diffusion and training to all the

researchers willing to work on Palestine and its people. Thus, the Beirut-based Centre for

Palestinian Research of the P.L.O would produce monographs, chronologies, statistics, essays

about Palestine and Israel. In parallel, the Institute for Palestinian Studies is created in Beirut

in 1963 and focuses on issues related to the Israeli-Arab conflict and the Palestinian cause.

1.4 The importance of the Institute for Palestinian Studies

After Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the scientific activity of the researchers published in

Beirut slowed down. The exiled researchers in far-off and non-Arab countries took over.

9SANBAR Elias,« Le vécu et l'écrit : historiens réfugiés de Palestine », Revue des études palestiniennes, 1, 1981,

p. 68. 10

See The Arab resistance in Palestine), Beirut, P.L.O’s Research centre, 1974 ; AYYOUB Samir, al-Bina`al

tabaqi lilfalstinyîn fi loubnân (The class structure of the Palestinians), Beirut, Publications of the Arab University

of Beirut, 1978 ; KANAFANI Ghassan, « Thawrat 1936-1939 fi Filastin » in Chou'un filastiniyyah (Palestinian

Affairs), nº 6, january 1972. KAYYALI Abdel Wahab, Tarîkh falastîn al-hadith (Modern history of Palestine),

Beyrouth, al-Mouassassa al-'arabiyya liltibâ'a wal nachr, 1970 ; KHALLA Kamel, Falasîtn wal-intidâb al barîtâni

(Palestine and the British Mandate), Beirut, P.L.O’s Research centre , 1974 ; MUNDUS Hani, al-'Amal wal

'oummâl fi moukhayyam tall el-za'tar (Labour and workers in the camp of Tal el-Zaatar), Beirut, P.L.O’s

Research centre, 1974 ; ; YASSÎN ‘Abdel Qader, Târîkh al tabaqa al’âmila al filastiniyya, 1918-1948 ( History of

the Palestinian working class, 1918-1948), Beirut, P.L.O’s Research centre, 1980.

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Willing to produce work intended for a Western academic audience, influenced and taught by

European or American universities, these historians in exile are concerned about searching

sources, official archives, inventories listing the facts precisely. The contemporary

historiography of Palestine appears as an exhaustive enumeration of all the events. It is based

on a flawless documentary research which cannot be criticized since almost all the sources

used are Western or Zionist. For them11

, the strength of their papers lies in the objectivity and

the seriousness of a scientific approach. Theses historians from the Institute for Palestinian

Studies complete the work of the researchers from the Centre for Palestinian Research by

consolidating the bases of a Palestinian historiography from which the militant tone

disappears.

As the years go by, the Institute for Palestinian Studies has become the privileged platform of

exchanges for the historians in exile and for those living in Palestine, thanks to the creation of

branches in Washington in 1976, in Paris in 1981 and in Ramallah in 1995 with the Institute

for Jerusalem Studies, which was moved to Jerusalem in 2000.

University research and teaching in history opened to the exiled researchers after the signing

of the Oslo agreements in 1993 and the return of the Palestinian leadership to the West Bank

and to Gaza. It is mainly the work of the University of Birzeit, which focuses on the history of

the villages depopulated and destroyed after 1948. We shall get back to this mainly oral

history in detail. The work of the Palestinian universities also reveals a historical movement

focusing on Ottoman sources which rediscovers Palestinian history through the archives of

the waqfs, private archives or legal documents from the courts of justice12

. This current is part

of the Ottoman Turn realized by the Arab historical research movement of the 1990s. It

rediscovers the wealth of the Ottoman period, which was, for long, deliberately ignored by the

11

Among them: KHALIDI Walid, Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians, 1876-

1948, Institute for Palestine Studies, Beyrouth,1984 réédition 2010; KHALIDI Walid, All That Remains: The

Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, Institute for Palestine Studies, Beyrouth,1992,

réédition, 2006 ; SANBAR Elias,Palestine 1948. L'expulsion, Paris, Les Livres de la Revue d'études

palestiniennes, 1985. TAMARI Salim, Ihsan's War: The Intimate Life of an Ottoman Soldier, Institute for

Palestine Studies, Beyrouth, 2008 ; NASSAR Issam, Photographing Jerusalem: The Image of the City in

Nineteenth-Century Photography, Boulder: East European Monographs, 1997 ; KHALIDI Rashid, Palestinian

Identity: The construction of Modern National Consciousness, Columbia University Press, 1997 ; DOUMANI

Beshara, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. 12

See for instance MANNA `Adel, Tarikh Filastin fi awakher al `ahd al `othmani (1700-1918) ( History of

Palestine at the end of the Ottoman era), Beyrouth, Mu'assassat al dirassat al-filastiniyya, 1999. ; SROOR Musa,

Fondations pieuses en mouvement. De la transformation du statut de propriété des biens waqfs à Jérusalem

(1858-1917) , IFPO-IREMAM, Paris, Beyrouth, 2010 ; al-JU’BEH Nazmi et BISHARA Khaldoun, Ramallah

‘imâra wa târikh, (Ramallah, architecture et histoire), RIWAQ/Moussasat al dirassat al maqdissyat, Ramallah,

2002.

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nationalist historians13

.

The 1990s are also marked by the double celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the creation

of the Israeli State and of the 1948-deportation. This anniversary establishes a rite

commemorating the memory of the founding events of a State for some and the Nakba for

others.

The Nakba celebrated around 15 May is a chronological landmark which commemorates the

national moment that is the uprooting. Besides, it is in exile and more precisely in the refugee

camps, that the Palestinian geographic and historical space rebuilds itself/is rebuilt. The

refugees become the legitimate holders of the painful memory of the uprooting: zâkirat al

iqtila’. So as to remember ‘Palestine’ from before the Catastrophe, the

historians/anthropologists call to mind the refugee’s memory to tell the Nakba. The latter

almost becomes the exclusive spokesman of the exiled Palestinian nation and the authorized

guardian of the memory of the Nakba. His testimony is recorded, registered and analysed. It

changes into the living archive of the collective memory of 194814

. This testimony occupies a

major place in the Palestinian historical account related to the deportation15.

2) The memory of 1948 and the place of orality in the Palestinian history

Returning to the deportation and explaining the events leading to the scattering of the

Palestinian people is the line of research of oral historians, be they in exile or inside. Through

their work, these historians/anthropologists do not only try to understand the deportation or to

condemn it. They also intend to analyze it and reconstitute a collective memory ‘so we will

not to forget’16

. They work individually, in groups, for universities or for associations and

NGOs. Their aim is to rebuild the memory of destroyed villages through accounts of the

exodus, which was presented as voluntary by the Israeli historiography until the publication of

13

DOUMANI, Beshara, « Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine : Writing Palestinians into History », Journal of

Palestine Studies, 21 n°2, (Winter), p. 5-28. Voir aussi l’article de Candice Raymond dans le même dossier. 14

SFEIR Jihane, « Le désastre et l'exode, al-Nakba /al-Hijra. Imaginaire collectif et souvenir individuel de

l’expulsion de 1948 », in PICAUDOU Nadine (dir.), Territoires palestiniens de mémoire, IFPO/ Karthala,

Beyrouth/ Paris, 2006, pp. 37-59. 15

On this topic read : PICAUDOU Nadine, « Discours de mémoire : formes, sens, usages » in PICAUDOU, N. (dir.),

Territoires Palestiniens. op.cit. p..17-33, SA’DI Ahmad H. et ABU-LUGHOD Lila, (ed.) Nakba, Palestine, 1948

and the Claims of Memory, Columbia University Press, New York, 2007, SAYIGH Rosemary, Too Many

Enemies, Zed Book, Londres, 1994, « The History of Palestinian Oral history : Individual Vitality and

Institutionnal Paralysis », al-Jana English, n° 2, Beyrouth, May 2002, p. 2-4 et 64-66. 16

I borrow this phrase from Walid Khalidi Kay la nansa : qura Filastin al-lati dammarataha Isra’îl sanat 1948

wa-asmâ shuhadâiha ( So as not to forget : the names of villages destroyed by Israel and the names of their

martyrsAfin) ; Mouassassat al dirassat al-filastiniyya, Beyrouth, 1998.

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the work of the new Israeli historians17

. In this book, he confirms the existence of an ethnic

cleansing plan, the “plan Dalet”, which was denounced by Erskine Childers and Walid

Khalidi in the 1960s. At the time, Childers had consulted the archives of the BBC and Khalidi

those of FBIS in order to contradict the propaganda alleging that the Arabs fled after

broadcast calls18

. Even though I will not enlarge upon the work of the new Israeli historians, it

confirms the thesis of a plan consisting in emptying the Palestinian villages to destroy them

afterward. Their research show that the villagers left in a climate of violence; Deir Yassîn’s

massacre would only be an episode of it19

. Resorting to oral history as a discipline is crucial to

the reconstitution of the memory of this founding event.

2.1. The place of the ‘oral archive’ in the Palestinian history

For Rosemary Sayigh, the reasons explaining the necessity of oral testimony to narrate 1948

are both circumstantial and cultural. The circumstantial reasons are those of the exile which

dragged the Palestinian intelligentsia away from its historical environment, scattered and

separated from the masses of refugees. They are also linked to the looting of the archives of

the Centre for Palestine Research in Beirut and to the dynamiting of its buildings by the

Israeli army in 1982. The cultural reasons result from the will to break a historiographical

tradition which considers the written document (mainly Zionist or Western archives) as the

only legitimate source and in which professional historians are the only ones allowed

elaborating the historical account20. For this anthropologist pioneer in the Palestinian oral

history, it is crucial to record the refugees’ testimonies to go beyond the writing of the

authorized national history. The women are requested to testify because they are the

privileged spokespersons of an alternative history. They can tell a shameful history which had

been kept quiet and which the men are unable to speak of21

. The latters did not manage to tell

the uprooting, the departure and the exile because they felt guilty. Two generations have

passed before their speech was freed and became archive.

17

MORRIS Benny, The Birth of the Palesitnian Refugee Problem, Cambridge, 1987. 18

KHALIDI Walid, « Plan Dalet: Master plan for the conquest of Palestine », Journal of Palestine Studies, vol.

18, n° 1, « Palestine 1948 », 1988, pp. 4-33. 19

PAPPE Ilan, Le Nettoyage ethnique de la Palestine, Fayard, Paris, 2008 20

SAYIGH Rosemary, Too Many Enemies, op. cit., pp. 4-5. 21

PETEET Julie, Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement, Columbia University

Press, New York, 1991 ; SAYIGH Rosemary « Palestinian Camp Women as Tellers of History », Journal of

Palestine Studies, n°27, 1998 ; « Researching Gender in a Palestinian Camp: Political, Theoretical and

Methodological Issues » in Deniz Kandiyoti (ed.) Gendering the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives, I.B.

Tauris, Londres, 1996, pp.145-167

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2.2. « Race against time »

In the 1980s, operations to collect testimonies and accounts about 1948 are initiated by

universities, research centers, independent researchers and NGOs in the Palestinian territories

and in exile; they increase in the 1990s until they reach their peak in 1998 which is the year of

the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba.

The most ambitious project was lead by the University of Birzeit under the impulse of the

geographer Kamal Abdel Fattah and the anthropologist Sharif Kanaana. In 1983, they produce

a first cartography of the destroyed villages22 based on oral testimonies. The objective is to

publish monographs and to register the acts of violence against the inhabitants of these

villages now depopulated. Their work was interrupted by the closing of the university

between 1988 and 1993 during the first intifada. But they started again under the direction of

the historian Saleh Abd el Jawad, with the prospect of collecting information to establish the

facts related to the departure of hundreds of thousands Palestinians in 194823. The project gave

rise to twenty-seven village monographs whose starting points were the oral archives

published in Arabic by the University of Birzeit. Most of the monographs appear in Walid

Khalidi’s book entitled « All that remains »24. After this campaign, Saleh Abdel Jawad

launches a new project to collect the testimonies of the survivors in 1995, significantly

entitled « A Race against Time ». Twenty-seven monographs are completed and a

cartography of the depopulated Palestinian localities. In total, Saleh Abdel Jawad counts 531

cities and villages which were emptied of their original inhabitants.

This initiative has been copied and several operations to collect accounts of the 1948-

uprooting (al-iqtila’) are lead in the Palestinian territories and in the exile. Some are

supervised by NGOs (Badil, Shaml, ARCPA…), others by research centers (Institute for

Jerusalem studies, Institute for Palestine Studies). The stories of the lives stemming from the

audio recordings are published in Arabic, in Hebrew and in English in books, newspapers, on

videos and on the internet. Simultaneously, several monographs are produced in exile, in the

refugee camps. These monographs are often published at the author’s expense. They aimed at

integrating, mapping and including the past through oral accounts25.

22

SLYOMOVICS Suzanne, « The Rape of Qula a Destroyed Palestinian Village », in A. SA’DI, & L. ABU-LUGHOD

(Ed.) Nakba: Palestine, 1948 op.cit., pp. 27-28. 23

PICAUDOU Nadine, « 1948 dans l’historiographie arabe et palestinienne », Online encyclopedia of Mass

Violence, Science Po., Février 2010, http://www.massviolence.org/IMG/pdf/1948-dans-l-historiographie-arabe-

et-palestinienne.pdf 24

KHALIDI Walid, All That Remains: op.cit. 25

ROCHELLE Davis, « Mapping the past, recreating the homeland : memories of village places in pre-1948

Palestine », in A. SA’DI, & L. ABU-LUGHOD (Ed.) Nakba: Palestine, 1948 op.cit., pp. 53-75.

10

The accumulation of this kind of sources and the increase in the amateur and professional

recordings revealed a « fever for archives » spreading among the Palestinians26 as Beshara

Doumani points it. In Ramallah, Haifa, Beirut, Damascus or Amman, testimonies are

recorded, private archives (photographs, deeds of property, letters…) are collected. The

embroideries are rediscovered, the old popular songs from the Palestinian folklore are

recorded and files on old housed and destroyed villages are established. Part of this material is

available on the internet.

2.3. Palestine 2.0

With the development of the new technologies, several historical Palestinian institutions put

online recorded and filmed interviews and historical archives like films or illustrations. I will

focus in this paper on three main websites dedicated to the Palestinian historian: ‘Palestine

Remembered’27

, ‘Voices: Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement’28

and ‘The Nakba

Archive’29

.

‘Palestine Remembered’ is launched from the United States by Salah Mansour in 2000. The

website is presented as the first online portal offering the recordings of testimonies about

Palestine from before 1948 and the Nakba. It provides a collection of interviews made in

Jordan, Syria and Lebanon as well as an introduction to Palestinian History, archives,

pictures, maps and contributions from the web-users. Individual contributions are indeed

welcomed and the website gives technical and methodological advice for the recording of

testimonies. In this perspective, Palestine Remembered lists the audio and video testimonies

of the Palestinians from the cities and villages of the mandatory Palestine who are now

displaced in the Arab world or in the territories. The recorded accounts are sorted in

geographical districts of the mandatory Palestine and then in cities and villages. The website

regularly uploads recordings about Palestine before 1948, about the culture, the songs, and the

folklore but also about the resistance and, of course, about the Nakba. The goal of all this

being to compile the greatest number of audio and video documents so as to create the most

complete database of the Palestinian memory in order to oppose the historical hegemonic

Israeli discourse claiming, that Palestine is a land without people and that the few inhabitants

flew voluntarily in 1948.

26

DOUMANI Beshara, « Rediscovering Ottoman ... op. cit. 27

www.palestineremembered.com 28

http://almashriq.hiof.no/palestine/300/301/voices/index.html 29

www.nakba-archive.org

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The second website, ‘Voices: Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement’ was launched by

Rosemary Sayigh in June 2007. It is actually an e-Book which gathers 70 interviews made by

the anthropologist in Gaza, in the West Bank and in Jerusalem, between 1999 and 2000. She

aims at giving the floor to the Palestinian women, who tell the history of the exile through

their own experience. The recordings are not transcribed; R.Sayigh wanted to share her oral

archives with the public by illustrating every recording with photographs shot on the ground.

Sayigh’s main objective is to show that ‘women have represented the essential Palestinian

force, able to survive poverty, exile and oppression. They have not ceased to be the very

example of courage, tenacity and humour… They pack their belongings and they move in a

new environment’30

. Entirely dedicated to women, this website distinguished itself from the

first one by the austerity of its content, by its gendered approach to the Palestinian issue and

by the method used. Furthermore, the researcher is the only one leading the recordings.

The third website,www.nakba-archive.org, is one of the most ambitious and successfully

completed projects about the memory of 1948. Contrary to the first one, it only offers ten

minutes extracts from interviews of Palestinian narrating 1948, the extracts are subtitled in

English. The complete interviews are recorded on 1,100 DVDs; one DVD in Arabic with

English subtitles summarizes hundreds of hours of recordings by a presentation of the most

striking testimonies. The collection of DVDs and the promotion film are on sale on the

website.

The Nakba Archive is a project led jointly by Diana K. Allan who is an anthropologist

affiliated to Harvard University and by Mahmoud Zeidan, a Palestinian film-maker born in

the camp of Eyn el Héloueh (Lebanon). The project was launched in 2002 and gathers 650

accounts of first generation refugees living in Lebanese camps and coming from 150 cities

and villages of the Palestine under the British Mandate. For Diana K. Allan, ‘the personal

histories’ recorded as accounts and testimonies represent an unsaid history, often dwarfed by

a dominant nationalist historiographic account and totally denied by the Zionist account of the

events31. The way the refugees are filmed reminds of the way the accounts of the Shoah were

put into images. The framing, the presentation of the persons interviewed, the outlines of the

30

Rosemary Sayigh’s interview online http://www.w4.org/en/voices/oral-historian-rosemary-sayigh-records-

palestines-her-story-voices-palestinian-women-narrate- 31

ALLAN Diana K., « The role of oral History in archiving the Nakba », al-Majdal : Oral History - Uncovering

Palestinian Memory (Winter 2007). Available online http://badil.org/fr/al-majdal/itemlist/category/38-issue32.

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narrative and the proceedings of the discourses on the deportation are a reminder of the will to

tell the Nakba in the fashion of the filmed archives of the Holocaust32. The events taking place

before or after the Nakba are minored compared to the essential tale of the Nakba. The intent

is to break the chronology in order to create archives with pure present: the Nakba continues

in the camps and inside the Palestinian territories well after 1948. The historical event

changes into an everyday reality which reflects the precarious condition of the refugees and

the reality of the Israeli politics of colonization and separation33

.

This brief presentation casts a light on the importance of the testimony in the

Palestinian history. The recorded accounts – ‘living’ archives- are at the heart of the oral

history pertaining the sanctified memory of the Nakba,. The Palestinian history based on

these testimonies, fits into a spirit of militancy in favour of the conservation, the

perpetuation and the transfer of the memory of a people scattered in diaspora, with its

common history and its different experiences.

May it be selective, exclusive and sometimes not sufficient, the Palestinian individual or

collective memory remains nonetheless the only legitimate tool to re-establish all the

constituent elements of the Nakba, this key moment determining/influencing the Palestinian

historiography. This founding moment for the writing and the memory gathers the Palestinian

community of the territories and of the exile. It is a traumatic event, a negative which will

influence the account of the Palestinian history but also the very lives of the Palestinians.

Contrary to their neighbours who obtained their independence and built their State and their

national history on a victory, the Palestinians build themselves on this defeat. Because of the

absence of a State and, the conveyors of construction and transmission of a national history

are multiple.. The historians change into the operators of this reification of the past. Its

interpretation becomes a demand of acknowledgment of an ethnic cleansing and of a people’s

uninterrupted struggle for a historical recognition. Today, the main concern of the Palestinian

historians and researchers is to collect Palestinian sources exclusively so as to rebuild a past

denied for a long time and absent from the hegemonic Israeli account. Last year Bir Zeit

University launched two projects to preserve and promote Palestinian Heritage and Archives.

The recognition on November 2012 Palestine as a state observer in the UN, paved the way to

32

MAECK Julie, Montrer la Shoah à la télévision de 1960 à nos jours, ed. INA/Nouveau Monde, Paris 2009. 33

Elias Khoury, « Rethinking the Nakba », Critical Inquiry, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 250-266

13

the building of a Palestinian state, thus a possible national unity