Palestinian Culture And The Nakba

The Nakba not only resulted in the loss of the homeland, but also caused the dispersal and ruin of entire Palestinian communities. Even though the term Nakba refers to a singular historic event, the consequence of 1948 has symptomatically become part of Palestinian identity, and the element that demarcates who the Palestinian is. Palestinian exile and loss have evolved into cultural symbols that at once help define the person and allow the person to remember the loss. Although accounts of the Palestinians’ experience of the expulsion from the land are similar, the emblems that provoke these particular memories differ. Certain mementos, memories or objects help in commemorating the homeland. This book looks at the icons, narratives and symbols that have become synonymous with Palestinian identity and culture and which have, in the absence of a homeland, become a source of memory. It discusses how these icons have come into being and how they have evolved into sites of power which help to keep the story and identity of the Palestinians alive. The book looks at examples from Palestinian caricature, film, literature, poetry and painting, to see how these works ignite memories of the homeland and help to reinforce the diasporic identity. It also argues that the creators of these narratives or emblems have themselves become cultural icons within the collective Palestinian recollection. By introducing the Nakba as a lived experience, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Middle East Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature and Media Studies.

Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination explores the cultural memory of al-Nakba (1948 Israeli independence, or The Catastrophe as it is known in Palestine) and its significance to the modern Palestinian imagination. Ihab Saloul addresses central concepts to debates over identity such as nostalgia and trauma, notions of home and forced travel, and geopolitical continuity of loss of place. Through an integrated method of close narrative and discursive analysis of diverse literary texts, films, and personal narratives, this study offers an analytical account of the preservation of cultural optimism in the face of the ongoing catastrophe, as well as the ways in which aesthetics and politics intersect in contemporary Palestinian culture.

2012 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.

The Palestinians have been at the center of Middle Eastern and world history for nearly a century. The core issues of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are still the ones that emerged in 1948, after what Palestinians term al-Nakba, the destruction of historical Palestine and the dispossession and expulsion of its people. At the center of this vortex of politics, diplomacy, oppression, resistance, and struggle are the Palestinians. The Palestinians are an ancient Arab people, with both Islamic and Christian adherents, and their traditional culture and present way of life under difficult conditions are greatly illuminated for students and general readers. A clear historical overview of Palestine, the diaspora, and the conflict is provided, and the history colors the rest of the narrative, addressing crucial aspects of Palestinian society. Palestinians struggle to retain their traditions. Their modern social structure, values, social customs, and life, including education, in villages, refugee camps, and cities are covered. The importance of extended family and women's roles in a continuing patriarchy are also addressed. The famed Palestinian embroidery and typical food dishes are celebrated. Chapters on modern literature and the arts and cinema stress the artistic focus on the conflict with Israel. A helpful timeline, copious bibliography, and glossary round out the coverage.

In 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. Drawing together Palestinian accounts from 1948 with those of the present day, the book 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 memory and history. In the process, each unique and wide-ranging contribution leads the way for new directions in Palestinian scholarship.

"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"--Publisher.

Arabic is unconditionally the national language of Palestinians, but for many it is no longer their mother-tongue. More than a century after the early waves of immigration to the Americas, and more than seven decades after the Nakba of 48, generations of Palestinians have grown up in a variety of different contexts within Israel-Palestine and the world at large. This ongoing scattered state has led to the proliferation of Palestinian culture as it is simultaneously growing in multiple directions, depending on geographical, political, and lingual contextualization. The Palestinian story no longer exists exclusively in Arabic. A new generation of Palestinian and Palestinian-descended writers and artists from both Latin and North America, Scandinavia, and Europe at large, as well as Israel-Palestine are bringing stories of their heritage and the Palestinian nation into a variety of languages such Spanish, Italian, English, Danish, and Hebrew—among so many other languages. Being There, Being Here is the product of an eight-year long journey in which Maurice Ebileeni explores how the Palestinian homeland is being imagined in multiple languages from a variety of positions both locally and globally. The book poses unsettling questions about this current situation and also looks to the future to speculate about how a Palestinian nation might still house the notion of home for an increasingly diverse Palestinian population.

In 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. Instead, it searches for a new historical and political grammar for relating and narrating their complicated intersections. The book features prominent international contributors, including a foreword by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury on the centrality of the Holocaust and Nakba in the essential struggle of humanity against racism, and an afterword by literary scholar Jacqueline Rose on the challenges and contributions of the linkage between the Holocaust and Nakba for power to shift and a world of justice and equality to be created between the two peoples. The Holocaust and the Nakba is the first extended and collective scholarly treatment in English of these two constitutive traumas together.