Researching Palestine
Project48
- Project48
"Project48 provides educational material, eyewitness testimonies, images, videos and artifacts that bring to life the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe” in Arabic), its generational impact, and the struggle for return of Palestinian refugees. The Nakba refers to the expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel as a Jewish majority country on land that had a two-thirds majority Palestinian Arab population. The Nakba is present-tense, as the displacement of Palestinians and the destruction of Palestinian life has been ongoing for over a century.
Project48 was created to center Palestinians in the telling of their own history, to raise the voices of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees whose stories have been silenced or denied, the steadfast Palestinians who were able to remain, as an oppressed minority, “strangers in their own homeland,” and to those living under Israeli occupation who “teach life” each day, living for over half a century without their basic human rights."
Resources on the Nakba
Nakba by Call Number: DS126.9 .N35 2007ISBN: 9780231135788Publication Date: 2007For outside observers, current events in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are seldom related to the collective memory of ordinary Palestinians. But for Palestinians themselves, the iniquities of the present are experienced as a continuous replay of the injustice of the past. By focusing on memories of the Nakba or "catastrophe" of 1948, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed to create the state of Israel, the contributors to this volume illuminate the contemporary Palestinian experience and clarify the moral claims they make for justice and redress.
Nakba and Survival by Call Number: DS113.7 .M26813 2022ISBN: 0520389360Publication Date: 2022Beginning in 1948, Israeli paramilitary forces began violently displacing Palestinian Arabs from Palestine. Nakba and Survival tells the stories of Palestinians in Haifa and the Galilee during, and in the decade after, mass dispossession. Manna uses oral histories and Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries, and memories to meticulously reconstruct the social history of the Palestinians who remained and returned to become Israeli citizens. This book focuses in particular on the Galilee, using the story of Manna's own family and their village Majd al-Krum after the establishment of Israel to shed light on the cruelties faced by survivors of the military regime.
An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba by Call Number: DS126.954 .O73 2018ISBN: 9781786993496Publication Date: 2018In 2018, Palestinians mark the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, when over 750,000 people were 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 galvanising the resistance to occupation. Unearthing an unparalleled body of rich oral testimony, An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba tells the story of this epochal event through the voices of the Palestinians who lived it, uncovering remarkable new insights both into Palestinian experiences of the Nakba and into the wider dynamics of the ongoing conflict.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Call Number: DS119.7 .P28882 2006ISBN: 9781851684670Publication Date: 2006Since the Holocaust, it has been almost impossible to hide large-scale crimes against humanity. In our communicative world, few modern catastrophes are concealed from the public eye. And yet, Ilan Pappe unveils, one such crime has been erased from the global public memory: the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948. But why is it denied, and by whom? The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine offers an investigation of this mystery.
The Holocaust and the Nakba by Call Number: DS119.7 .S3819413 2018ISBN: 9780231182966Publication Date: 2018In this groundbreaking book, leading Arab and Jewish intellectuals examine how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba are interlinked without blurring fundamental differences between them. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive historical global contexts of nationalism and colonialism, The Holocaust and the Nakba explores the historical, political, and cultural intersections between them. The majority of the contributors argue that these intersections are embedded in cultural imaginations, colonial and asymmetrical power relations, realities, and structures. Focusing on them paves the way for a new political, historical, and moral grammar that enables a joint Arab-Jewish dwelling and supports historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine. This book does not seek to draw a parallel or comparison between the Holocaust and Nakba or to merely inaugurate a "dialogue" between them.
Voices of the Nakba : a living history of Palestine by Call Number: EbookISBN: 0745342728Publication Date: 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"
Nakba and Survival by Call Number: EbookISBN: 0520389379Publication Date: 2022Beginning in 1948, Israeli paramilitary forces began violently displacing Palestinian Arabs from Palestine. Nakba and Survival tells the stories of Palestinians in Haifa and the Galilee during, and in the decade after, mass dispossession. Manna uses oral histories and Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries, and memories to meticulously reconstruct the social history of the Palestinians who remained and returned to become Israeli citizens. This book focuses in particular on the Galilee, using the story of Manna's own family and their village Majd al-Krum after the establishment of Israel to shed light on the cruelties faced by survivors of the military regime.
The Palestine Nakba by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9781848139725Publication Date: 20122012 marks the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba - the most traumatic catastrophe that ever befell Palestinians. This book explores new ways of remembering and commemorating the Nakba. In the context of Palestinian oral history, it explores 'social history from below', subaltern narratives of memory and the formation of collective identity. Masalha argues that to write more truthfully about the Nakba is not just to practise a professional historiography but an ethical imperative. The struggles of ordinary refugees to recover and publicly assert the truth about the Nakba is a vital way of protecting their rights and keeping the hope for peace with justice alive. This book is essential for understanding the place of the Palestine Nakba at the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the vital role of memory in narratives of truth and reconciliation.
Colonizing Palestine : the Zionist left and the making of the Palestinian Nakba by Call Number: EbookISBN: 1503636291Publication Date: 2023Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades.
Under the Nakba Tree by Call Number: EbookISBN: 9781771992053Publication Date: 2022Mowafa Said Househ's family fled Palestine in 1948 and arrived in Canada in the 1970s. He spent his childhood in Edmonton, Alberta, where he grew up as a visible minority and a Muslim whose family had a deeply fractured history. In the year 2000, when Mowafa visited his family's homeland of Palestine at the beginning of the Second Intifada, he witnessed the effects of prolonged conflict and occupation. It was those observations and that experience that inspired him not only to tell his story but to realize many of the intergenerational and colonial traumas that he shares with the Indigenous people of Turtle Island. His moving memoir depicts the lives of those who live on occupied land and the struggles that define them.
- Al Nakba [videorecording] : the Palestinian catastrophe, 1948 byCall Number: DVD DS126.954 .A4 1998Publication Date: 1998A documentary on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, 'Al Nakba' tackles the tragic events surrounding the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. It tells how and why 750,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees by the end of the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Arab and Israeli eye witnesses together with Professor Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University, who is the leading international authority on this subject, describe what happened rather than what successive generations of Israeli and Arab propagandists have said happened.
We Cannot Go There Now, My Dear (2014 Documentary Film)
(The embedded video is a 45-second preview of this documentary, please CLICK HERE to access entire film. Available to UMass Amherst members.)
"We Cannot Go There Now, My Dear" highlights the story of Palestinian refugees that have been living in Syria since they had been forced to flee Palestine in 1948. As the Syrian crisis intensifies, they alongside the Syrians have been affected by the war. Their story, however, is more complex. By fleeing Syria and seeking refuge in Lebanon they are becoming a special category of refugees: they are refugees twice over.As Palestinians they are not entirely welcome in Lebanon. As refugees,their travel documents are not recognized.As Palestinians, this is the second time they lose everything and find themselves once more homeless and stateless.
Directed by Carol Mansour, Produced by Muna Khalidi, Forward Film Productions (Beirut, Bayrut: Forward Film Productions, 2014), 43 minutes
