Scars of the mind. Trauma, Gender and Counter-memories of the Nakba

Drawing on narratives recorded by the Nakba Archive with Palestinians expelled to Lebanon, it marks a shift of focus from the colonial machinations that produced these events towards an experiential understanding of their unfolding. In the wake of the destruction of 531 Arab villages by Zionist forces between 1947–48, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted. Some 110,000 fled to Lebanon, where they were placed in camps administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).6 These camps have become home to at least five generations of refugees, who live without citizenship or rights. Their accounts attest to oppression and injustice in the longue durée and invite a reconsideration of the Nakba’s temporality and scope. Determining where catastrophe begins and ends is both epistemologically necessary and politically significant. ‘To identify the Nakba as a past and finished event is to insist that there is no longer a struggle to define it,’ writes the Palestinian historian Joseph Massad. ‘It is to grant it historical and political legitimacy as a fact of life, but also to endow all its subsequent effects as its natural outcome.’