The Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA)
Around 1,000 hours of catalogued, indexed testimony with first-generation Palestinians in Lebanon — the Nakba, life in pre-1948 Palestine, folktales and songs, and the women of Ein el-Helwe after the camp's destruction in 1982.
- Access
- Open access
Free to search and read online, with no account required.
What it holds
- Roughly 1,000 hours of testimony, indexed and searchable by interviewee, place of origin, subject and landmark
- Five distinct collections, including the Nakba collection and al-Jana's biographies, folktales and Ein el-Hilwe material
- An interactive map interface and a controlled thesaurus; content licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 unless otherwise stated
POHA is what happens when a grassroots oral history collection is given a library. The project digitised, indexed, catalogued and preserved an archival collection of around a thousand hours of testimony with first-generation Palestinians and other Palestinian communities in Lebanon, and put it behind a searchable digital platform run by the American University of Beirut Libraries. The partners are the people who did the recording: the Nakba Archive and the Arab Resource Center for Popular Arts, al-Jana.
The collection structure tells you what is in it. There are five: POHA’s own Nakba collection, and four from al-Jana — Biographies, Ein el-Hilwe, Folktales, and a second Nakba collection. The archive’s stated focus is personal accounts surrounding the Nakba, but the material reaches well beyond that: life narratives of the pre-1948 period in Palestine, folktales and songs, and the stories of the women of Ein el-Helwe camp after its destruction in 1982. That last group is testimony about a later catastrophe, and it is one of the few places it has been systematically collected.
What POHA adds to the raw recordings is the apparatus. Interviews can be searched by keyword across all fields or narrowed to title, subject, date, interviewee, place of origin, landmarks or collection; there is an advanced search, a browse interface, a controlled thesaurus, and an interactive map that plots interviewees against places of origin. For anyone tracing testimony from a particular village, the place-of-origin field is the single most useful thing in any Palestinian oral history collection online.
Practical notes. The interviews are in Arabic — this is an Arabic-language archive with an English interface, and there is no translation layer. Except where otherwise stated, the material is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0, which permits citation and sharing but not adaptation or commercial use; check the individual record before reproducing. And the site distinguishes /Home/ from /Content/ paths, so links copied from search engines sometimes fail — enter through the front page and navigate.
Sources
The archive itself
The guide above is written by FALASTEEN.AI. The collection it describes is held, catalogued and kept by American University of Beirut Libraries, with the Nakba Archive and al-Jana, and every claim on this page traces to the archive's own pages, linked in full.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“The Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA).” The Archives, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/archives/palestinian-oral-history-archive-aub.- MLA
“The Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA).” The Archives, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/archives/palestinian-oral-history-archive-aub. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-palestinian-oral-history-archive-aub, title = {The Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA)}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/archives/palestinian-oral-history-archive-aub}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }