Description

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In 2018, Palestinians mark the seventieth anniversary of the Nakba, a mass eviction that saw more than 70,000 people uprooted and forced to flee their homes in the early days of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even today, the bitterness and trauma of the Nakba remains raw, and it has become the pivotal event both in the shaping of Palestinian identity and in galvanizing their resistance to occupation.

Efforts at preserving the memory of the Nakba have resulted in an unparalleled body of rich oral testimony, with which historians and other scholars have been able to tell the story of this epochal event through the voices of the Palestinians who lived it. This multidisciplinary collection uses oral history as a means of uncovering new insights both into Palestinian experiences of the Nakba and into the wider dynamics of the ongoing conflict. In drawing together Palestinian accounts from 1948 with those of the present day, the book also confronts the idea of the Nakba as an event consigned to the past, instead revealing it to be an ongoing process aimed at the erasure of Palestinian history and memory.

About the Author

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Nahla Abdo is professor of sociology at Carleton University, Canada. She has previously worked as a consultant on gender and women’s rights for the United Nations, the European Union, and the Palestinian Ministry for Women’s Affairs. Her previous books include Captive Revolution and Women in Israel: Gender, Race and Citizenship, the latter published by Zed. Nur Masalha is a Palestinian historian and a member of the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS, University of London. His previous books include The Palestine Nakba and The Bible and Zionism, both published by Zed.

Praise For…

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“Apart from its prestige as an academic work that stays authentic to the voice of the Palestinian people, the book is also home to a simple truth . . . ‘I am Palestinian, and I do not have another land.’”
— Middle East Monitor

“A wide-ranging collection by leading oral historians, its moving first person narratives confirm the reparative force of listening to voices which have been silenced in the ongoing colonization of Palestine.”
— Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University

“An impressive collection and a very significant contribution to the scholarly work on the oral history of the Nakba.”
— Ilan Pappé, coeditor of Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid

“A passionate and ambitious work of politically engaged scholarship that positions itself as an actor in the fight to change the world. This is cultural activism at its best.”
— Ahdaf Soueif, author of Cairo: My City, Our Revolution

“A landmark intervention, this cross-disciplinary book provides innovative analytical frameworks for studying the persistent erasure of Palestine. This insightful and comprehensive work proposes alternative ways of knowing and telling, rearticulating the Nakba as an ongoing process of dispossession.”
— Ella Shohat, NYU, and author of On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements