PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 14

native Jerusalem: ‘I recently applied for a visa at the Israeli embassy in Jordan to go and visit
my nephew in Jerusalem, but it was turned down. I do not understand; how could an 89-year-
old Palestinian woman, 1.4 metres tall and weighing 38 kilos, possibly pose a threat to Israel?’
Nevertheless, since 1948, the “absentees” have been making their presence felt, even if it
is physically impossible. The 19 stories offered here illustrate different ways of being present,
of counting, of making oneself heard and of having some weight. In the face of erasure –
imposed through terror, through the destruction of their villages, 2 by being uncounted
during population censuses, by being deprived of their right of residence – in the face of
the confiscation of their property and their marginalization in the dominant historiography
on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 11 men and eight women tell their stories of 1948. They
retrace the effects of this historic cataclysm and the different strategies for survival, perse-
verance, creativity and resistance that they deployed.
These 19 stories obviously cannot cover all of the experiences Palestinians lived through in
1948, but they give a fairly representative idea. From Gaza to Nazareth, the narrators come
from towns and villages in different parts of historical Palestine. Today, some live in refugee
camps, others in towns and cities in the region or much further afield. They come from dif-
ferent social classes, different professions and represent various degrees of social and political
engagement. Some of the stories emanate from public figures such as the Latin Patriarch of
Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah and the intellectuals Ilham Abughazaleh and Feissal Darraj, but
the majority of the testimonies are those of people who have left no written traces of their
experiences. It is thanks to the passionate work of the team of editors that their voices can
be heard. This book can thus be seen as a response to the call made some ten years ago by
Ahmad Sa’id and Lila Abu Lughod to make it possible for ‘Palestinian stories to slip through
the wall of the dominating history of 1948 and open it up to factual and moral questioning.’ 3
These very personal stories deal with themes that are often combined: the land and root-
edness, creativity and resistance, and finally, the space of the possible.
The collapse of a world
Over and above these themes, these texts evoke the terror, the wrenching and the intense
sense of loss experienced by these men and women, the majority of whom were still children
during the war of 1948. Depicted by Israel as the war of independence; it has been the sub-
ject of many books and special editions of journals; yet until recently, the Palestinian per-
spective remained marginal. It is in the details of the tragedy afflicting the Palestinians that
we find the reasons for its name: Al Nakba – the catastrophe. Fear of death, violence, the loss
of loved ones, separation, exile, of being deprived of one’s home and all means of subsistence,
all of those fears are part of the moment when the world of the Palestinians falls apart.
2. Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory, Zed
Books, 2012 and Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford, Oneworld Publications, 2006. See also the
monographs on destroyed villages published in the 1980s and 1990s by the Birzeit Center for Research and Docu-
mentation of Palestinian Society (CRDPS) directed by Sharif Kanaana and Salah Abd Al Jawad, and the book by
Walid Khalidi, All that Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, Washington
DC, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
3.  A. H. Sa’di and L. Abu Lughod (eds), Nakba: Palestine, 1948 and the Claims of Memory, New York, Columbia
University Press, 2007, p. 23. We should point out here several recent initiatives in the field of Palestinian oral history,
including the “Palestinian Oral History Project” of the American University of Beirut (AUB) and the “Testimonies on
the Displacement of the Palestinians in 1948” project which led to the publication of Living Memories, edited by Faiha
Abdulhadi, Ramallah 2017.
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Memories of 1948