Rather than a review, this article presents some parts of the book that I think link together nicely. Needless to say, there is a lot more to the book.

History is written by the losers

In Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced, Professor Rochelle A. Davis acquaints the reader with village memorial books.

These books, of which more than 120 have been published, are documentary histories of more than four hundred Palestinian villages that were “depopulated and largely destroyed in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.”[1]

Only coming into existence in the 1980s, the village memorial books came out of a desire of Palestinians that were displaced in the Arab-Israeli War “to record for their descendants the lives, the land and village culture that were lost in 1948.”[2]

At the same time the Palestinian leadership was relocated to Tunisia after it had been driven out of its base in Lebanon by Israeli forces during the 1982 Lebanon War. It was in this context that “recording these local history shifted the struggle of ordinary Palestinians from focussing on a distant (and largely discredited) leadership to attending to their own voices, stories, perspectives and histories.”[3]

Indeed, giving ordinary Palestinians their own voices, away from politicised metanarratives, which have “side-lined local Palestinian stories, histories, and subjects”[4], is a key purpose of the village memorial books.

A trope of Zionism[5] leading up to the creation of a Jewish state in British Mandatory Palestine was that Palestinians simply didn’t exist and that the land of Palestine was empty and awaiting cultivation by its rightful inhabitants. This was a view still held at the time of writing the village memorial books, and one that is still held today in some quarters.

It is because of this that parts of the village memorial books are presented as “dossiers of evidence” including land ownership records, genealogies, photographs and maps, thus “proving their [the Palestinians] existence on the land, and therefore their history, even though they are no longer there and the village no longer exists.”[6]

Once the native inhabitants of Palestine had been ‘discovered’ they were portrayed in the classical colonial terms relating to progress and development. While the Palestinians were seen as “uncivilised, penurious, and backwards”, the Zionists saw themselves as “creative, forward looking and enlightened” and therefore more deserving of the land.[7]

Contrary to this, the village memorial books provide details of a vibrant society, which, despite certain hardships, was developing. Photographs show locals standing and smiling next to a new water storage facility, a local soccer team posing for the camera, the Hajj Juama’a Brass Band performing at a wedding, and four Palestinians on a visit to the Royal Agricultural Association in Cairo. Other photos show people in more traditional settings such as women carrying jars on their heads on the way to the local spring and farmers harvesting their crops by hand.

According to the author, the photographs capture more than just a particular moment, and when they are viewed alongside the textual descriptions “we see the changes that took place in technology, beliefs and clothing”.[8] The village books also detail “traditional and changing farming techniques, non-capitalist market ventures, and subsistence agriculture.”[9]

Such details of local life, clearly showing development within Palestinian society, serve as yet more evidence against the colonial views of Zionism, as well as those of the British authorities in Palestine, during the early twentieth century.

A shared history

The Arab-Israeli War and its direct aftermath are known in Arabic as al-Nakbah (literally: catastrophe, cataclysm, or disaster). As a result of the war more than half of the 1.5 million Palestinian were displaced with over four hundred villages destroyed and several cities depopulated. The land that should have been a Palestinian state was now occupied by Egypt (Gaza) and Jordan (the West Bank), while some 750,000 Palestinians were scattered among the surrounding Arab states of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and a further 45,000 Palestinians living as intern ally displaced people (IDPs) inside Israel.

Prior to al-Nakbah, under the British Mandate, any written sources about the Palestinians were largely made by others (notably the British authorities and Zionist leaders). After 1948, the Palestinians found themselves dispossessed, dispersed and stateless – lacking the state institutions to produce a coherent Palestinian narrative.

This is where the village memorial books come in and it is also why a significant amount of content in the books is based on an oral tradition of historical record. While some historians may be tempted to distrust and relegate oral histories, in the case of the Palestinians’, research has shown that “what had long been asserted by Palestinians from their own experiences, which they told in oral histories and personal accounts about the events of the 1948 War, but which had been denied by historians and others, until they had access to the written Israeli sources that were declassified in the 1980s.”[10]

However, the village memorial books are not perfect. While the books provide a voice for Palestinians in the face of physical dispossession, they also “privilege to a male and patriarchal vision of the village”[11] – though the author does note several books composed by young female social activists attempting further enrich Palestinian history and historical study.

At times some of the village books pretend to a more idealistic version of the past, “some potentially embarrassing or negative subjects related to village life are sometimes glossed over, left out altogether, or re-evaluated through modern lenses”.[12] On the other hand some village books prefer to present a more realistic vision of village life in order to counter the sometimes romanticised view of the past held by the younger generation of Palestinians.

Aware of the constraints under which the village books were being produced, the authors themselves were sensitive to the fact that any accounts therein may contain “gaps, mistakes and missing information.”[13] In a way that stresses the already collaborative nature of the various books, the respective authors encouraged readers to contact them in order to provide any corrections to be included in later printings. An invitation that was readily taken up!

Finally, the accounts contained in the village books uncover another part of Palestine’s history that has largely been forgotten, and even intentionally obscured by certain actors on both side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: that of positive relations between Jews and Palestinians prior to the influx of Jewish immigrants from Europe and attempts by the international community to divide the land of Palestine.

Despite decades of conflict and separation, and perhaps out of a sense of nostalgia for remembering times of less conflict, the village memorial books “express how Palestinians recall shared spaces, religious occasions and mercantile relations between Arab Jews”.[14] Some village memorial books also include stories of attempts by Palestinian villagers and nearby Jewish settlers to dissuade military attacks once relations between the two parties had deteriorated.

It is here that the Palestinian village memorial books may prove to be most important when read by future generations of Palestinians and Israelis that may see themselves as part of an intractable conflict.

Footnotes

[1] Rochelle A. Davis (2011: xvii) Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced

[2] Ibid., xviii

[3] Ibid., xviii

[4] Ibid., 47

[5] Zionism being the political ideology that emerged in Europe in the late ninetieth century that sought the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of Palestine.

[6] Rochelle A. Davis (2011: 9-10) Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced

[7] Ibid., 29

[8] Ibid., 42 -43

[9] Ibid., 109

[10] Ibid., 129

[11] Ibid., 118

[12] Ibid., 109

[13] Ibid., 34

[14] Ibid., 190 – 191