Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) — Nakba testimony at the American University of Beirut
A searchable digital archive at the American University of Beirut holding more than 1,000 hours of audio and video testimony recorded with first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, drawn from over 150 uprooted villages and communities.
The Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) is an archival collection at the American University of Beirut containing more than 1,000 hours of recorded testimony with first-generation Palestinians and other Palestinian communities in Lebanon. It was built as a partnership between AUB’s University Libraries and Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, together with two Lebanese organizations that began recording refugee testimony in the 1990s and 2000s: the Arab Resource Center for Popular Arts (AL-JANA) and the Nakba Archive. The digitization and cataloging project, launched in 2011, was supported by a 2016 grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities.
The archive brings together more than 800 testimonies from refugees hailing from over 150 uprooted communities in Palestine — most of them from the villages of the Galilee and the coastal cities of Jaffa, Haifa, and Acre. Interviewees describe life in pre-1948 Palestine, the violence and flight of the Nakba, and decades of exile. Each interview is individually cataloged with searchable metadata in English and Arabic, and most include streaming audio or video.
Why it matters
- One of the largest single collections of first-generation Nakba testimony, recorded while that generation was still alive to give it.
- Interviews preserve village-level social history — customs, economies, dialects, and geographies — that official records largely erased.
- Free online access with detailed cataloging makes it usable by researchers, students, and descendants of the interviewees themselves.
- A model of community-rooted archiving: the recordings were made by refugee-community organizations, not outside institutions.
Key resources
Cited work
The summary above is written by FALASTEEN.AI. The document itself is published by Palestinian Oral History Archive, American University of Beirut and is linked here in full.