Palestine Remembered — Nakba Oral History Project and village memory
A long-running, non-commercial website documenting Palestine's depopulated villages, whose Nakba Oral History Project publishes hundreds of recorded interviews with refugees who witnessed the events of 1948 firsthand.
Palestine Remembered is a non-commercial website dedicated to the Palestinian towns and villages depopulated in and after 1948. For each locality it assembles photographs, maps, satellite imagery, and historical detail, organized district by district — from Haifa and Jaffa to Gaza and Beersheba — so that destroyed communities remain findable and named.
Its Nakba Oral History Project sets out to document and retain refugees’ experience and memory before, during, and after the Nakba, recording interviews with refugees who witnessed 1948 firsthand at the age of twelve or older. The project reports having conducted more than 730 interviews, published with listings and summaries on the site, making it one of the largest openly accessible collections of Nakba testimony online. Interviewees recall village life, the circumstances of their flight, and the fate of family members and property — testimony that anchors the site’s village documentation in living voices.
Why it matters
- It links recorded testimony to the physical geography of destroyed villages, pairing voices with maps and photographs of what was lost.
- Its interviews capture elders who were children and teenagers in 1948 — a perspective often missing from elite-centered histories.
- Free, non-commercial, and organized for ordinary users: refugees’ descendants can look up their own villages and hear people from them speak.
- Its longevity makes it a reference point used by researchers, journalists, and genealogists around the world.
Key resources
Cited work
The summary above is written by FALASTEEN.AI. The document itself is published by Palestine Remembered and is linked here in full.