The Nakba Archive — filmed testimony of 1948 refugees in Lebanon

The Nakba Archive is a grassroots oral history collective founded in Lebanon in 2002 to record and commemorate the experiences of Palestinian refugees who lived through the Nakba. Between 2002 and 2005 its teams filmed more than 650 interviews on digital video with first-generation refugees, most of them elderly residents of Lebanon’s camps and informal gatherings. The archive contains eyewitness accounts from members of over 150 Palestinian villages and towns, mainly in the northern Galilee and the coastal cities of Jaffa, Haifa, and Acre.

Most interviewees were not public figures but farmers, Bedouin, and working-class city dwellers — many of them illiterate — whose memories preserve a social world that left few written records. In 2011 the project received the Oral History Association’s Stetson Kennedy Vox Populi award. Much of the original collection is now preserved and made accessible through the Palestinian Oral History Archive at the American University of Beirut, while the Nakba Archive’s own site continues to publish work, including its “Forms of Presence” project recording newer interviews on secondary displacement within Lebanon.

Why it matters

• It filmed the “generation of Palestine” at scale before age and exile silenced it — most of those interviewed have since passed away.
• Its village-by-village scope lets listeners hear the Nakba told not as a single event but as hundreds of distinct local catastrophes.
• The project’s methods centered refugee communities as producers of their own history, influencing later Palestinian oral history work.
• Its recordings underpin the searchable POHA platform at AUB, extending their reach to researchers worldwide.

Key resources

• Nakba Archive website
• 2011 Stetson Kennedy Vox Populi Award citation — Oral History Association
• Nakba Archive interviews via the Palestinian Oral History Archive (AUB)