The Nakba Archive

The Nakba Archive describes itself as a grassroots oral history collective, founded in 2002 to record the experiences of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who lived through 1948. Its own summary of the history it documents is unsparing: over 1947–48, during the creation of the Israeli state, close to a million Palestinians were forcibly expelled and dispossessed and around 530 villages were destroyed. Against that it sets a collection of more than five hundred video interviews with first-generation refugees from more than one hundred and fifty Palestinian villages and towns.

The methodological point that matters is who held the camera. The interviews were recorded by refugees from the camps in Lebanon, not by visiting academics — which shows in the content, since the interviews range far beyond the moment of expulsion into social and agricultural life before 1948, relations with neighbouring Jewish communities and the British Mandate, and the first years of exile. This is why the collection has value beyond the Nakba itself: it is one of the fullest recorded descriptions of pre-1948 Palestinian rural society, given by the people who lived in it, at the last moment when that was still possible.

Access runs on two tracks, and researchers should use both. The Arabic interviews are catalogued and searchable through the Palestinian Oral History Archive at the American University of Beirut, where the Nakba Archive collection sits alongside material from the Arab Resource Center for Popular Arts (al-Jana); that is where you go for systematic searching by interviewee, place of origin, subject or landmark. The Nakba Archive’s own site is the newer, curated layer — it presents interviews as named portraits, is adding English-subtitled video, and frames itself as a “living archive” with interactive learning resources and commissioned creative work built around the collection. It also invites participation from community members, organisers, artists, scholars and educators rather than treating the collection as closed.

Practical note: the Archive’s site is a lightweight single page with JavaScript-driven panels, so deep-linking to an individual interview is unreliable; navigate from the archive panel rather than bookmarking. For citation, name both the Nakba Archive as the recording project and POHA as the holding institution.

Sources

• The Nakba Archive — about and interview index
• About the Archive — Palestinian Oral History Archive, AUB Libraries