Voices of the Nakba

A Living History of Palestine

Afterword by Rosemary Sayigh Edited by Diana Allan

Publication date:

20 September 2021

Publisher

Pluto Press

ISBN-13: 9780745342931

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021***

During the 1948 war more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. The legacy of the Nakba - which translates to ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe’ - lays bare the violence of the ongoing Palestinian plight.

Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices of the people who lived through it.

The interviews, with commentary from leading scholars of Palestine and the Middle East, offer a vivid journey into the history, politics and culture of Palestine, defining Palestinian popular memory on its own terms in all its plurality and complexity.

List of Figures
Map of Palestine
Acknowledgements
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Foreword by Mahmoud Zeidan
Introduction: Past Continuous by Diana Allan
PART I: Life in Pre-1948 Palestine
1. Village Life in Palestine - Rochelle Davis
2. Of Forests and Trees: City Life in 1930s Palestine - Sherene Seikaly
3. The Margin and the Centre in Narrating Pre-1948 Palestine - Amirah Silmi
4. Mandated Memory: The Schooling of Palestine in Nicola Ziadeh’s and Anis Sayigh’s Pre-1948 Recollections - Dyala Hamzah
PART II: The British Mandate and Palestinian and Arab Resistance
5. Motivations and Tensions of Palestinian Police Service under British Rule - Alex Winder
6. Storying the Great Arab Revolt: Narratives of Resistance During 1936–39 - Jacob Norris
7. Songs of Resistance - Ted Swedenburg
PART III: War and Ethnic Cleansing
8. The Roots of the Nakba - Salman Abu Sitta
9. Four Villages, Four Stories: Ethnic Cleansing Massacres in al-Jalil - Saleh Abdel Jawad
10. Remembering the Fight - Laila Parsons
PART IV: Flight and Exile
11. The Dispossession of Lydda - Lena Jayyusi
12. Scars of the Mind: Trauma, Gender and Counter-Memories of the Nakba - Ruba Salih
13. The Politics of Listening - Cynthia Kreichati
Afterword: Oral History in Palestinian Studies by Rosemary Sayigh
Contributors and Translators
Glossary
Notes
Index

'Through the pages of this book the reader can hear, feel, experience and understand more about the Nakba than by reading any other book on the subject'