Voices of the Nakba: A Living History of Palestine

Diana Allan’s edited volume Voices of the Nakba: A Living History of Palestine is an emotive collection of chapters that demonstrate how Palestinians continue to be living conduits of their own history. Each chapter is followed by raw transcripts of interviews conducted by Allan and Mahmoud Zeidan in the early 2000s. For the last decade, a huge project involving the digitization of these interviews and many others has taken place at the American University of Beirut. The database is called the Palestinian Oral History Archive (https://libraries.aub.edu.lb/poha/). It is now possible to trawl through over one thousand hours of audio-visual recordings in the database. This book offers an analysis and contextualization of a selection of these interviews from various scholars working on Palestinian history. Beautifully woven together, these chapters highlight the enduring importance of oral history in the Palestinian struggle against erasure. Indeed, oral history has long played a key role in the Palestinian historical narrative, but it took a more prominent role following the 1948 Nakba. Palestinian historian Nur Masalha’s well-known description of oral history as an “emergency science” explains how it has been used to substitute much of the material forms of knowledge that have been consecutively destroyed or looted by the Zionist settler-colonial project.1 Inevitably, this emergency science developed as a bottom-up body of knowledge to challenge the hegemonic Zionist narrative. As Salman Abu Sitta explains in chapter 8, this is a narrative that claims Palestine prior to 1948 was terra nullius: a land without a people. Yet Palestinians themselves are evidence of the fallacy of that statement. Thousands of their recorded testimonies tell us of a vibrant Palestinian society that existed before the Zionist occupation and a people in the throes of national awakening, thus showing the importance of oral history to the Palestinian narrative and how it cannot be understated. While oral history is the oldest form of historical record, written documentation is still favored as more authoritative and legitimate. Contemporary oral history scholarship has challenged this notion, asserting that oral sources must not be marginalized given that they have the potential to produce a more social history or “a history built around people.”2 For a long time, the written record was only concerned with political narratives and histories divided chronologically according to reigns and dynasties. Documentation of ordinary people prior to the latter half of the twentieth century was limited to registers of births, deaths, and marriages, in other words, empirical and legal statistics. Other documents based on oral accounts, such as diaries and letters, were few and far between during this period.3 The latter half of the twentieth century saw the popularization of oral history, particularly following the invention of the portable tape recorder. In a seminal article RECENT BOOKS