抄録
Israeli historical narratives, which rely on the state-own archival sources, have marginalized Palestinian oral history. This paper describes the methods of Palestinian oral history and then discusses the possibilities and challenges for Palestinian historians.
The cases examined here are a series of monographs on destroyed Palestinian villages, published by the Center for the Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society (CRDPS) at Birzeit University in the West Bank. The CRDPS project can be divided into two phases. The first phase, led by anthropologist Sharif Kanaana, relied on oral testimony as the only source, so that the monographs developed the known diversity of each of the villages while also envisioning rural Palestinian society as a unified whole. The second phase, led by historian Saleh Abdul Jawad, aimed to establish an accurate, complete, and national narrative, which would be essential for the discursive struggle with Israel.
In light of the real-politics, the second phase’s national narrative is considered the more persuasive one. Nevertheless, the significance of the first phase local and diversity-oriented narrative lies in its characteristics as the record of a people’s past that would otherwise fall out of the historical consciousness of the real-politics.
