New Directions in Palestinian Oral History

UNDER THE COVER OF WAR: THE ZIONIST EXPULSION OF THE PALESTINIANS. By Rosemarie M. Esber. Alexandria, VA: Arabicus Books and Media, 2008. 439 pp. Softbound, $29.99.

PALESTINIAN WOMEN: NARRATIVE HISTORIES AND GENDERED MEMORY. By Fatma Kassem. London, UK: Zed Books, 2011. 272 pp. Softbound, $34.95.

DISPLACED AT HOME: ETHNICITY AND GENDER AMONG PALESTINIANS IN ISRAEL. Edited by Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh and Isis Nusair. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010. 288 pp. Softbound, $24.95.

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE PALESTINIAN: STORIES OF PALESTINIAN PEOPLEHOOD. By Dina Matar. London, UK: I.B. Taurus (Palgrave MacMillan), 2011. 224 pp. Softbound, $28.00.

Introduction: the faces of Palestinian oral history
In different ways, these four books represent how Palestinian oral history is breaking new ground while continuing to document the nakbah (what is known as the catastrophe, the displacement of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs with the formation of the state of Israel on May 15, 1948).1 The works under discussion highlight the emergence of a new generation of Palestinian scholars as well as the central role that women are playing in redefining Palestinian oral history. Notably, that includes Palestinian women who are citizens of Israel.
Despite some commonalities, these four books also diverge from each in their agendas, their uses of oral history, and their writing styles. For example, while both Esber and Matar are presenting Palestinian history, they tell that history quite differently. Using extensive documentary sources for the period leading up to the formation of the Israeli state in Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians, Esber uses oral history quotes from refugees to flesh out written archival sources by documenting the lived nakbah experiences of refugees.
By contrast, Dina Matar’s What It Means to be Palestinian has both a longer historical sweep and presents a “personal history of Palestinians in their own words” (1). In other words, oral histories are the heart of her book. Like the cumulative impact of Studs Terkel’s oral histories in Working, these relatively short narratives resonate with meaning. Kassem, too, focuses on meaning in Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory, using interview excerpts to illustrate how narrators shape their stories and the language they use.
It is more difficult to characterize the anthology Displaced at Home: Ethnicity and Gender among Palestinians in Israel, edited by Kanaaneh and Nusair, because of the wide variation in both the disciplinary perspectives of the essays and their use of oral history. What is clear, however, is how personal status as Palestinian citizens of Israel drives many of the contributors’ research agendas.
What these books have in common is the attention the authors pay to the oral history process, elaborating not only on their methods and the number and nature of their interviews but also addressing practical problems and various ethical dilemmas. The number of interviews they conducted varied from 20 to 135 and, as noted, their inclusion of oral history materials varies, from relatively short excerpts, to longer ones, to complete edited narratives. Regardless of their use, these books add an important new chapter to the development of Palestinian oral history.

Nakbah oral histories
More traditional than the three newly published works, Esber’s book was published in 2008, when the sixtieth anniversary of the nakbah was the occasion for new publications. While providing historical context for the earlier period, Esber zeroes in on the civil war immediately preceding the formal declaration of Israeli statehood. The book is an exhaustively documented tome that primarily addresses the scholarly community. It will be of particular interest to those who have followed the debate about the creation of the refugees, particularly the work of Israeli “revisionist” historians Benny Morris and, more recently, Ilan Pappé.2 Esber does an excellent job in presenting the debate for the nonspecialist in her introductory chapter.
Archived official interviews figure among the documentary sources for the chapters on the Mandate period, including the evolving British position on the partition of Palestine and that nation’s ultimate withdrawal, as well as growing Zionist militarism. The detailing in this first third of the book, as later, is meticulous and provides rare historical insights into this time period. It is with chapter five, however, “From Provocation and Reprisal to Open Warfare” that we begin to hear the voices of the Palestinians, initially drawn from existing interviews and later from Esber’s own extensive ones.
In 2001, Esber traveled to the many sites in Jordan and Lebanon where Palestinian refugees reside today. In a detailed appendix, she describes the criteria for selecting narrators, which includes having resided in the areas depopulated before May 15, 1948, and having been old enough at the time to have a personal recollection. As wrenching as it is to read many of the accounts, Esber notes that not all the narrators became emotional during their telling. Rather, some delivered their eyewitness testimonies in a flat, straightforward manner.
Using oral histories to give real-life meaning to the archival sources on which revisionist historian Benny Morris relied, she contests his interpretation of what transpired.3 Village by village, city by city, the oral histories document the systematic campaign to depopulate these locations in the period prior to the declaration of statehood and before the intervention of any organized military forces sent by Arab governments.
Esber documents how the Haganah (Zionist forces that were a precursor of the Israeli Defense Forces) and its allegedly dissident groups initiated its offensive within a month of the adoption of the United Nations partition plan. By early April of the following year, Plan Dalet (Plan D) became fully operational and the Haganah attacked village after Palestinian village. Esber interviewed refugees from 75 of the approximately 225 locales that fell by May 15, 1948, listing the narrators by locale in an appendix. Although many narrators mention the shockwaves of fear that followed the infamous April 9th Dayr Yasin massacre, most make it clear that they did not simply flee as Zionist forces approached; rather, they were either ordered to leave or fled as their homes were attacked. Many also detail the atrocities committed by the Zionist forces as they attacked the villages.
Chapter by chapter, Esber documents the refugees’ experiences, organizing her discussion by areas and districts, from the villages in the Nazareth region, to the coast cities of Haifa, Acre, and Jaffa, to the largely Bedouin villages in the southern Beersheba district. Taken together, she concludes that the military operations carried out by the Zionist forces were neither primarily defensive nor merely a natural outcome of war. Instead she argues that Zionist attacks on Palestinian Arab civilians communicated only two options: “leave or perish” (354).
Although Esber’s use of interview excerpts makes for a compelling argument, a greater use of her interviews would have been welcome. Longer interview passages might also have made the book more accessible to the nonspecialist. Nevertheless, her contribution is enormous, especially in its examination of the period prior to Israeli declaration of statehood.
While Esber’s book is a critical addition to the scholarship on the history of the nakbah, Fatma Kassem’s Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory brings a different sensitivity to the nakbah literature, exploring not what people remember but how they talk about their experiences. More than that, by focusing on Palestinian women inside Israel, she is bringing to the fore women who “have been entirely left out of the formation of Palestinian national identity, which is based on the historiography, narratives, and political discourses of the Palestinian masculine elite” (9). Indeed, as she argues, there is a chasm between the Palestinian nationalist discourse and the language used by her twenty narrators from Lyd and Ramleh.
As with other members of this new generation of Palestinian scholars in/from Israel, there are both deep personal roots to their work and serious implications from their status as citizens of Israel. In the first third of the book, in addition to the sensitive and complex discussion of her life story methodology, Kassem’s reflexive discussion focuses both on her own family stories and the problematic position of being a Palestinian citizen of Israel. In an unusually frank discussion, she describes the hurdles she faced in conducting the doctoral project on which the book is based, laying bare the scrutiny and, above all, the censorship to which Palestinian scholars in Israel are subjected. In her case, the rector of the university told her, among other things, that “he could not accept that an Israeli citizen refer to our Independence Day as the Nakbah” (67). Ultimately, he agreed to her using the term “1948” instead and that she could use the term nakbah in the text if the narrator did.
Ironically, the twenty women from Lyd and Ramleh whose life stories are the focus of her book did not use the term. In fact, Kassem’s discussion of their language is the most interesting of the three chapters in which she analyzes the two- to four-hour life stories that she collected between 2002 and 2004 with thirty-seven women (and six men).
Kassem deliberately chose the narrators’ locale as a corrective to the usual
emphasis on the peasantry and the relative invisibility of urbanized Palestinians. When Lyd and Ramleh were captured in July 1948, 50,000–60,000 residents of the area were expelled and the 1,000 who were allowed to stay were confined to a fenced enclosure for a full year. Ten of the twenty women whose stories she highlights were original residents, while the other ten had been uprooted from other places and ultimately found refuge in Lyd and Ramleh where they still resided. All the women were over sixty-five years of age and had personal recollections of 1948.
In the most interesting of her three analytical chapters, Kassem raises serious questions about the distance between nationalist discourse and the ways that these ordinary women talk about their own lived experiences. Distinct from the men, who used more political terms, like “conquest” and “occupation,” only three of the thirty-seven women followed suit. Unsurprisingly, all three were activists in the Communist Party. Instead, other women referred to “migration.” At first blush, this would seem to diminish the severe disruption and the dispossession of their homes and land, and even the fact of their expulsion, and might even reflect internalization of Zionist discourse. Kassem, however, argues that it denotes resistance and positions the women as active agents.
Kassem’s imputation of agency is interesting but not wholly convincing, especially in light of how the women used phrases of sexualized violence like “the Jews entered and took us.” One might also ask if the avoidance of the use of the term nakbah differentiates Palestinians inside Israel from the refugees outside. Kassem dispels this notion, however, by turning to the work of Diana Allan, who notes that the refugees in Lebanon “actively resisted using the term Nakbah because it lent permanency to their situation” (102).4
Without going into more detail on the very rich and multifaceted discussion of language, it is important to note that the women stopped using passive verbs when they talked about the period after 1948. The verbs that denote revitalization of the land and are used to describe activities to restore and sustain the family definitely point to the exercise of agency, even under the harsh conditions that they continued to face.
Some of Kassem’s gendered analysis of women’s embodied memories raises questions for this reader. For instance, why would memories of thirst, hunger, and pain necessarily be gendered in contrast to women’s concern about not being able to produce healthy milk for their nursing children? Contrasting women’s remembered descriptions of the male body as wounded, broken, weak, and dead with the strong female body, she argues that “this representation of the female body offers an alternative form of (nonviolent) struggle, as well as an alternative image of heroism” (152). If the reader is convinced of this somewhat essentialist interpretation or not, Kassem does make a compelling argument on the way that women’s bodies are “a site of memory in which their experiences are encoded and preserved,” with historical events also linked to “body time” (187).
Finally, Kassem notes that home was one of the most complex and dominant themes in the women’s life stories, cutting across all differences among them. Beyond this theme, she argues that the setting of the interview in the private home with family, if not neighbors and friends present, marks it as a site of commemoration and of resistance, protecting Palestinian history from its erasure in the public places in Israel. In this final substantive chapter, Kassem moves from the women’s nostalgic memories of home before 1948 to their various rebuilding efforts in the ghettoized ruins, to the experiences today with the ongoing demolition of their homes by the state. As in her other chapters, ultimately Kassem sees these Palestinian women citizens of Israel as active agents in society and history.

On being Palestinian
It is no accident that “home” figures in the title of Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh’s and Isis Nusair’s edited anthology Displaced at Home. However, while nostalgic memories of home are the hallmark of Palestinian oral histories of the nakbah, Palestinian citizens of Israel have a more complicated relationship to the concept of home. This generation of Palestinian women in/from Israel, many of whom did their graduate work at Israeli universities, is motivated by and often grounded in their personal backgrounds and experiences. Unlike Kassem, however, most are more dispassionate, particularly in their more sociological writings. Given Kassem’s experience at her university, it is hard not to ask how tutelage under Israeli scholars might have influenced their work.
Almost all the contributors to Displaced at Home use interviews, some referring to them as in-depth, others as semi-structured; some simply reference their interview source, while others provide more details about their methodology. The latter are the essays on which I will focus here, selecting one essay from each of the three sections of the book, not just those included under the Part II rubric of “Memory and Oral History.”5
In Part I, “State and Ethnicity,” coeditor Kanaaneh discusses the complexity of interviewing her twenty self-identified Bedouin narrators and another fifty Palestinians who serve in the Israeli military. With great sensitivity, she deals with one of those silenced chapters of the Palestinian experience and draws on her ten months of fieldwork to document the painful choices and the strategies these soldiers tried. Ultimately, however, she goes beyond these motivations to make clear the overriding structural limitations they faced. Commenting on the parallels with the service of African Americans in the United States army during the height of segregation, the Algerians who fought with the French, or the South Asians in the British Indian army, she notes that these all point to “the complexity of the relationships subalterns have to the military power that subjugate them” (50).
The seventy women from the Galilee and Triangle regions whom Isis Nusair interviewed in 1998 and then intermittently from 2005 to 2009 represent three generations of Palestinian women: those born during the Mandate period, in the 1920s and 1930s, those born in the 1940s and 1950s who came of age under military rule, and those born after the 1966 end of military rule. Nusair, like Kassem, focuses on the gendered memory of the first and second generation and, among other things, finds that the issue of rape loomed large even though it was generally obfuscated by the narrators, as in most Palestinian narratives.
Unlike the idealized vision of the past presented by so many Palestinian refugees outside Israel, in short fragmentary statements, Nusair quotes how this first generation of women, especially those who worked the land, focused on how difficult life was before it was turned upside down during and in the aftermath of 1948. With minimal education and not speaking Hebrew, their narratives highlight alienation from the public sphere. Yet, locating themselves in their communities, they take pride in maintaining their dignity and in seeing their children educated.
The second-generation narrators focus on the story of their parents to set the context for their own experiences and usually describe their own lives at the end of the interview, beginning with the fear and poverty they experienced in their childhoods. After the lifting of the military administration in 1966, their lives changed. As narrator Summaya notes: “we had a chance to go out and see the world” (85). Ten years later, following the event that has come to be known as Land Day, when Palestinians protested the confiscation of their lands, a different consciousness began. For some of these second-generation women, that led to questioning, if not contesting, the limitations on their lives in public.
Finally, all the narrators viewed the third generation as gaining ground in education and the workplace. In an interesting switch, this generation is more likely to begin their narratives by defining themselves, what they study, and how they see their future. They also reveal heightened gender awareness.
Regardless of the differences among these three generations, and even with the expanded roles of the third, nearly all feel alienated from the state in which they are citizens. In different ways, the local remains consistent as the site of both belonging and resistance, captured most poignantly by the comment of third-generation narrator Nuhad: “My emotional belonging to my city substitutes for my lack of belonging to Israel” (91).
Lena Meari’s relatively short chapter in Part III of Displaced at Home also focuses on changes over time. In this instance, however, she follows the transformations in the roles of a single cohort of refugees from al-Birweh village under the changing economic-political regimes from 1930 to 1960. Meari discusses the personal dynamics of her oral history work, which she approaches as being in the storytelling oral tradition of this generation of Palestinians. She is clear about the complicated dynamics both of her father accompanying her to these two- to three-hour interviews with ten women and ten men as well as the implications of her own positionality. Although a third-generation al-Birweh refugee, her age, education, appearance, and gender clearly mark her as being different from these former peasants of the Galilee.
By the 1930s, following the 1928 British “law of land settlements,” most of al-Birweh villagers in the Galilee had only small land holdings, if any. The women participated in agricultural work on their own family’s land, or if they were landless, worked for the larger landholders. Quoting generously from the men and women she interviewed, what emerges are contradictory gendered descriptions, with the men more inclined to talk about a gendered division of agricultural work. The women, on the other hand, refer to a more flexible division of labor as well as roles not limited to the private sphere. When their village was destroyed in July 1948, the villagers took refuge in neighboring villages or fled the country. With many of the men absent—fighting in the resistance, being arrested, or escaping—women assumed responsibility for their families’ survival and made key decisions on where and how to resettle.
As they recount, many of these internally displaced refugees initially depended on the aid provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) until Israel proclaimed them as citizens and objected to UNRWA’s role. Their other survival strategies included planting on the lands in other areas confiscated by the state and even sneaking back to al-Birweh, which had been declared a closed military zone, to pick crops. As painful as it was, both men and women often ended up working for the Jewish settlers who occupied al-Birweh land. Ultimately, a new gendered division of labor emerged, with the Israeli authorities providing factory jobs for the men but limiting women’s work to agricultural labor.
Regardless of how the native villagers of al-Birweh experienced their changed lives from 1930 to 1960, their strong identification with their village more than sixty years after their displacement runs through Meari’s interviews. They visit the site of their village and commemorate their own or their families’ lives, much like other internal refugees.6
Although I have discussed only three of the essays in Kanaaneh and Nusair’s Displaced at Home, this volume, along with Kassem’s book, Palestinian Women, expands our understanding of what it means to be Palestinian inside Israel. By contrast, Dina Matar incorporates narratives of all segments of the Palestinian population: those inside Israel, those in the territories occupied in 1967, and those in the diaspora. Instead of the more analytical use of relatively short excerpts by the other authors, she presents a “narrative of narratives” of the period from 1936 to 1993. As she notes, however, these are not conventional life stories or narratives, but rather, “fragmented compositions of experience and existence, self-consciously staged testimonials that occasionally contain, along with the individuals’ experience, the assertiveness and stridency of the collective nationalist stance and rhetoric” (7). This frank assessment of Palestinian narratives is refreshing and so too is her willingness to deal with silencing about Palestinians’ own failures and even culpability.
Keeping in mind her intended audience certainly must have influenced her decision of whom to feature in the book from among the eighty narrators in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the 1967-occupied territories, and inside Israel. As Matar notes, it was not just how well they worked within her chronological framework, or their “truth-value” to experienced events, but also by how engaging they were. Basically, she seemed to rely on her instincts as a former journalist.
Following a fairly detailed prologue in which she discusses both methodological issues and her personal investment in the project—which she originally planned to do with her father—Matar turns to the five chapters representing different historical time frames. Each is titled with a theme for the period it covers; and each opens with her excellent historical introduction, again making this a book that is accessible to a wide readership.
For the earliest period covered in the opening chapter, “Palestine as a Landscape and a People,” it is mainly the written recollections of Matar’s father, Henry Matar, that tells us much about the 1936–39 Arab revolt. While he was a young teacher at the time, the other narrators were children. For instance, Salah Salah, only three at the time, recalls the British raid on his Bedouin village at the tail end of the revolt in 1939. Nevertheless, his recollections to 1948 are mainly of a happy childhood, until “everything was turned upside down” as news of captured villages and people fleeing spread (36). Many of the narrators recount stories of fleeing as their villages fell and their subsequent life in the refugee camps. The permanent and profound effect of their displacement is most poignantly captured by Jaffa native Shafik al-Hout: “. . . no matter what life throws at you, you can survive. You can survive loss but you cannot get over this void, the void of not-belonging” (48).
That void of not belonging is the title and theme of the following chapter, which covers the period 1948–64, with its various narratives of the nakbah and its aftermath. It is in the next period, 1964–70, with the emergence of the fedayeen (guerillas), that we encounter a new generation and a new meaning to being Palestinian. In this chapter, subtitled “Between Romance and Tragedy,” we hear more than the accounts of heroism and struggle so typical of official Palestinian narratives; and we hear from women as well. Samira Salah, for instance, the woman who became Salah’s wife in 1970, talked about her involvement and, ultimately, her sense of futility after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Yet, as Samia Nasser Khoury, a refugee from Jaffa living in East Jerusalem notes: “We cannot let go. There is a need to keep talking and telling our story, even though it might be like a lone voice in the wilderness” (110).
In “Living the Occupation, 1970–1987,” Palestinians from Amman to Lebanon, to East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and inside Israel relate a range of traumas and humiliations for the “idea called Palestinian.” While many recount feeling abandoned by their leadership, or of wearying of the revolution that was not giving anything back, Na’ila Zayyad, the wife of the poet and former mayor of Nazareth, is more upbeat. She describes Nazareth as the “imagined Palestine within Israel” (143).
The tone of the narratives decidedly changes in the final chapter, “Children of the Stones: Living the First Intifada.” As Matar notes in her opening to the chapter, “‘The children of the stones’ as they came to be known, were agents in their own story, like the fedayeen in the 1960s and 70s and mujahedeen of the 1930s” (161). Indeed, in that first intifada, the popular, grass roots uprising of 1987 that engaged the entire population, men and women, young and old, Palestinians were writing their own history. No longer victims on the one hand, individual heroic fighters on the other, or people feeling abandoned by their leaders, they were collectively exercising agency—and it was being beamed to the world. Khaled Ziadeh felt that he was speaking for his generation noting that “it was the beginning of a new generation of Palestinians that did not accept defeat” (172).
In an epilogue, Matar updates the history from the first intifada of 1987 to 2009. The events during those twenty-two intervening years, along with the ascendance of a more militant right-wing government in Israel and a fractured Palestinian polity, leads her to conclude that the nine to ten million Palestinians inside and outside historic Palestine are left with “neither clear accepted leadership, nor a clear, acceptable basis for political progress” (196). While Matar’s historical update and realistic political assessment are important, I wish that she would have closed with some analysis of what it means to be Palestinian today in light of this assessment. Silencing her own voice is a calculated decision on her part, a reluctance to give closure, as she explains in her discussion of the book’s structure. While that makes sense, it does leave the reader hanging, wondering. Does Matar believe that Khaled Ziadeh is correct, or would the “children of the stones” become another transitory moment in Palestinian history relegated to the dustbin of history? Or, on the other hand, would Amal Nashashibi’s 2007 comment reflect the continuing assessment of what it means to be Palestinian: “... but we are still around and our imagination remains intact” (168)?

Conclusion
When people ask me what general book they might read to learn more about Palestine, I often refer them to Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree, with its rich use of oral histories and deliberative historical contextualization.7 Now I would add Dina Matar’s book to my Palestine 101 recommendation list. Perhaps because academics Tolan and Matar both come from journalist backgrounds, they manage to weave together engaging personalized accounts that are, nevertheless, weighty. What is so significant about both of these more general readership books is the very thoughtful attention the authors pay to oral history methodology, although Matar does not use the term.
Similarly, the authors of, and main contributors to, the three more scholarly works discussed here are very attentive to their methodology, dealing with a host of complicated issues. For the feminist authors who are citizens of Israel, their positionality is of particular relevance and is a subtext even if not directly addressed. Esber, on the other hand, reveals little about herself and seems more distanced from her narrators.
With some notable exceptions, particularly among anthropologists, earlier Palestinian oral history was focused primarily on gathering accounts before the nakbah generation died off. More recently, however, not only has a new generation of oral historians emerged but it is a generation more interested in both expanding the historical record beyond the nakbah and in being more analytical. They are part of the generation represented in Sa’di and Abu-Lughod’s (2008) anthology.8 This generation also includes a growing number of Palestinians from inside Israel (known as ’48 Palestinians), adding to the scholarship forged earlier by scholars like Nur Masalha.9
It is significant, too, that this new generation of Palestinian scholars dares to raise questions about the official nationalist discourse, addressing thorny issues like the use of the term nakbah and the silencing in which Palestinian narrators engage. While silencing about rape has long been recognized by Palestinian oral historians, seldom have suggestions been made about Palestinian culpability and even collaboration.
The works discussed here do not just add to the growing Palestinian oral history literature, they break new ground. And in their thoughtful discussion of oral history methodology—no matter how they name it—these authors are contributing to the growing sophistication of the field writ large. It is unfortunate that we so seldom hear about the fruits of their work at our national, let alone international, oral history conferences.

Sherna Berger Gluck
California State University, Long Beach

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NOTES
1 For a discussion on the development of Palestinian oral history, especially how it has been used in documenting and analyzing the nakbah, see Sherna Berger Gluck, “Oral History and Al-Nakbah,” in The Oral History Review 35, no. 1 (2008): 68–80.
2 Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Ilan Pappé “Were They Expelled?” in The Palestinian Exodus, 1948–1998, ed., Ghada Karmi and Eugene Cotron, 37–61 (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1999), and more recently, Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2006).
3 Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian.
4 Diana Keown Allan, “The Politics of Witness: Remembering and Forgetting 1948 in Shatila Camp,” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, ed., Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, 253 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
5 This section includes a brilliantly condensed version of Fatma Kassem’s book chapter on language, “Counter-memory: Palestinian Women Naming Historical Events,” 39–52.
6 These commemorations are being increasingly documented. See, for instance, Isabelle Humphries, “A Muted Sort of Grief: Tales of Refuge in Nazareth (1948–2005),” in Catastrophe Remembered: Palestine, Israel, and the Internal Refugees, Essays in Memory of Edward W. Said (1935–2003), ed., Nur Marsalha, 158–62 (London, UK: Zed Books, 2005).
7 Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006).
8 Op. cit.
9 Marsalha’s earlier work on the subject includes: Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought 1882–1948 (Washington, D.C: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); A Land Without a People (London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1997); and The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestine Refugee Problem (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2003).

Source: Oral History Review (2011), First published online: November 1, 2011, pp. 1–12