The Abu Hameds of Mulabbis: An Oral History of a Palestinian Village Depopulated in the Late Ottoman Period

Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture

I have been engaged in a constant writing project that intends to highlight Palestinian narratives since 1948 up to the present. The dispossession narrative touches every Palestinian family including my own. During the 1948 Nakba and the war period, two family members on my father side were martyred, Jawdat Ali Rida Muhammad Bazian and Imran Ali Rida Muhammad Bazian, while another relative, Rida Ali Muhammad Bazian, was tortured by the British and released to the family bleeding and unconscious in a coma and died at home after a few days, in 1946. The Bazian’s narrative is but a small part in a large picture that includes FaouziAs’adBazian and 14-year-old Khalid Bazian who were martyred in 1967 and 2000, respectively. The Bazian family narrative includes the dean of prisoners, ‘Alaa Bazian, a blind man but endowed with piercing vision for freedom, resistance and a towering figure in the prisoners’ movement.

The Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) project, based at the American University of Beirut (AUB), was launched in 2011 to digitize, index, catalog, and provide access to over one thousand oral history testimonies by first-generation Palestinian refugees residing in Lebanon. The interviews and other recorded statements provide a valuable lens through which to examine a defining moment of rupture in Palestine's modern history from an underrepresented social and cultural perspective. This report highlights the methodological decisions that informed the planning and implementation of the POHA project as a grassroots digital archive that seeks to preserve the orality and immediacy of the refugees' narratives. The archive aims to engage scholars interested in Palestine studies, in particular, and Middle East studies, in general, within the broader framework of a person-centered archival perspective, with a view to furthering a dialogical ethnographic methodology and producing a narrative of the Nakba " from within. " IN HER REVIEW ESSAY " Oral History and al-Nakbah, " historian Sherna Berger Gluck discusses a set of oral history collections that narrate the Nakba from the point of view of Palestinian refugees. She notes the collections' potential to provide evidence of the events of 1948 through the rarely recorded points of views and lived experiences of ordinary Palestinians. Gluck emphasizes the potential of such collections to reveal underrepresented histories of entire communities whose voices are generally not heard in official narratives. She concludes that, in spite of some of the medium's shortcomings—the subjective and fallible nature of human memory, as well as the subjective, individual viewpoint of any single testimony—oral history testimonies and archival collections, when aggregated and consolidated, can deepen our understanding of the watershed moment by " pulling together the various strands of the Nakba story, highlighting recurring themes, and sensitizing us to questions about memory and memorialization. " 1 Gluck discusses the corrective potential of such oral histories, emphasizing their role as signifiers of an important and formative moment in modern Palestinian history. In particular, she notes that oral testimony provides powerful and effective tools for reconstructing, filling in, and widening a narrative of the historical event that is true to the lived human experiences of expulsion and displacement of Palestinian communities in granular detail. Hence, oral testimonies of the Nakba help construct a narrative of loss " from within, " a potentially useful tool in Palestinian communities' pursuit of justice. 2

Biography, 2014

Berkeley Undergraduate Journal, 2022

The memories carried by the Palestinian people can be understood in two forms. First, there are the memories as a result of direct trauma recieved through displacement and death throughout the history of the Zionist colonial project. The Palestinian Nakba, as but one example, highlights the extent of such memories through the traumatizing military massacres and forced expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians at the hands of Zionist militant groups. These direct memories are carried from generation to generation and transform into a looming sense of collective melancholy experienced by the later generations both in historical Palestine as well as those living in diaspora. There is a clear disconnect in historical academia as people try to understand the suffering of the Palestinians through questionable historical frameworks rather than a lens that accurately represents the memories and trauma of the Palestinians as they had and continue to experience. As a result, Palestinians today find their memories of trauma challenged and in some cases outright denied via these historical frameworks and atmospheres produced by the Israeli government. The question is then how could we be able to understand trauma and memory as it relates to the Paletsinians? Throughout this thesis we will explore several different forms of translating and transmitting Paletsinian memory.

AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Scholarship, 2005

As Linda Smith notes in the Foreword, it has been the common experience of indigenous peoples to have their histories erased and retold by the conquering colonial powers, and it is all too common for indigenous people to be powerless and passive participants in this process. In this paper it is my intention to retell the history of my own people, the Palestinian Bedouin living in what is now southern Israel, from an indigenous perspective.

Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies, 2022

Published during a period of intensifying resistance in colonized Palestine, Voices of the Nakba presents an essential collection of stories told by a cross-section of first-generation refugees expelled during the “catastrophe,” or the 1948 Zionist conquest of their land. As well as having the potential to deepen scholarly understandings of orality, memory, and anti-colonial histories, contributions to this edited volume make clear their relevance to the present. The “rumbling present” of a continuing Nakba, as Mahmoud Zeidan (xx) describes in the foreword, shapes how narratives of ethnic cleansing project into the 21st century.

Review of Contemporary Philosophy, 2026

This article analyzes Palestine-1: Stories from the Eve of the Nakba (Comma Press, 2025) as a formally coherent counter-archive that revisits 1948 through speculative, fantastical, and non-realist narrative strategies. Conceived as a prequel to Palestine + 100, the anthology reverses futurist projection in order to confront catastrophe "from the eve" of the Nakba, moving across villages, towns, and neighborhoods whose naming operates as an ethical act of resistance to erasure. Building on debates about how extreme violence fractures time, memory, and meaning, the article argues that the collection's non-realism-ghosts, doubles, temporal fractures, speaking landscapes-functions not as aesthetic ornament but as a necessary narrative technology for an unfinished historical condition. The anthology's ordering is read as a "counter-map," where geography replaces chronology and recurrence replaces linear progression, generating unity without stylistic uniformity. Situating the collection within Palestinian narrative lineages (Kanafani, Habibi, Darwish) and postcolonial critiques of imperial "imaginative geographies," the article shows how Palestine-1 mobilizes form to resist closure and to restore erased places to cultural memory. Ultimately, the anthology demonstrates that non-realism can operate as historical method: a way of narrating dispossession not as concluded past but as an ongoing structure organizing Palestinian time and space.

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2024

This paper provides a social and geographic account of al-Lajjun (Jenin Sub-district), a prominent Palestinian village during the British Mandate period (1918–1948). It portrays a countryside in renewal, encapsulated in the story of Umm al-Fahm’s expansion and Lajjun’s resettlement. In contrast to existing scholarship, the present work contextualizes the site within the wider diachronic, longue durée, history of the region, and the synchronous, shifting pattern of settlements in Marj ibn ‘Amir (Jezreel Valley), Bilad al-Ruha (Ramot Menashe), and Wadi ‘Ara (Nahal ‘Iron). It focuses on the development of the physical outlines of the (re)new(ed) village, with the development of three “Lajjuns” reflecting its founders’ Hebronite/Khalīlī patterns of settlement. Furthermore, it explores Lajjun’s diversified economy and its metamorphosis from a derelict hamlet into a hub of utilities and transportation infrastructure of regional importance under the British Mandate of Palestine (1920–1948).

American Ethnologist, 2000

The paper is a social and cultural account of the daily lives of Palestinians in the Old City of Jerusalem through the memories of children and adults of their school days, missionaries, and occupying forces over an eighty-year period