The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern and Reclaiming Memory by Nur Masalha (review)

For the past thirty years, Palestinian historian Nur Masalha has been at the forefront of scholars writing about the Nakba, the catastrophe that befell indigenous Palestinians with the creation of Israel sixty-five years ago. Long an advocate of the importance of oral history, and the Director of the Centre for Religion and History at St. Mary’s University College (UK), Masalha has been mentoring a new generation of historians of Palestine whose fresh approaches are guided by their use of oral history.

As a work of both history and historiography, Masalha’s current book should appeal both to those interested in Palestinian and Israeli history and to oral history practitioners. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship, he explores how the formation of Israeli identity was premised on the erasure of Palestinian history and identity. While not explicitly discussed in the opening chapters, oral history’s role in historical reclamation is an underlying theme throughout the book. As Masalha argues, it is at the heart of the challenge to hegemonic Israeli discourse and to reasserting Palestinian memory. Moreover, it also subverts the silencing of ordinary people’s voices by the early male-dominated Palestinian nationalist leadership.

Masalha’s introduction and opening chapter places secular Zionist nationalism firmly in the European tradition of inventing nations, closely linked to the volkisch theory that promoted the separation of people of a common descent and the formation of a common state. In many ways, it is also comparable to the European colonial penetration of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with the Bible serving all these colonial enterprises. While the Bible was used as a “civilizing” force by the Europeans, Masalha argues that secular Zionists historicized it to create a new hegemonic Jewish consciousness. Their promotion of a continuous history from biblical times to modern Israel results in a flattening of the multiple layers of the history of Palestine. In fact, the creation of this seamless, unilinear history resulted in cultural genocide. This term, originating with Raphael Lemke, the founding father of Genocide Studies in the West, is similar to what the indigenous people of North America later called “culturecide.” Masalha explains that it denotes the “destruction and elimination of cultural patterns of a group, including language, local traditions, shrines, monuments, place names, landscape, historical records, archives, libraries, churches—in brief the soul of a nation” (11).

It is the destruction of these cultural patterns that Masalha documents in the following three chapters, where oral history sources are occasionally noted. Starting with the politics of renaming, he explains how official Israeli policy changed and reinterpreted the landscape and how it systematically destroyed or disappeared records, archives, and libraries. The linking of geographical naming with biblical archeology started with the British. However, what Masalha earlier referenced as the “Hebrew-imagined biblical identity” became a more potent force in 1949 after the establishment of Israel’s Government Names Committee (93). The assignment of new names, including biblical-sounding ones, defies the historical reality narrated in Palestinian oral sources. Additionally, in what Masalha terms ecological colonialism, the landscape was destroyed with an afforestation policy designed to cover up destroyed villages and towns. In turn, Israel created a network of national parks that projected an imagined Jewish heritage that defied the historical record of Arab and Muslim rule.

The final discussion of cultural genocide that focuses on the destruction of historical documents, records, and libraries, is a good prelude to the next chapters. That is where Masalha argues persuasively that oral history is a methodology par excellence for decolonizing Palestinian history, setting the stage with a discussion of the “new Israeli historians” of the 1980s and 1990s. The trio known as the “new historians”—Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim— drew on the then newly opened Israeli military archives in the 1980s. Although they presented a more critical view of the Nakba, Masalha argues that at...