The Simplest Thing a Person Can Do is Remember: Memory in Spaces of Indigenous Palestinian Resistance

Abstract

Abstract This thesis draws upon literature from the fields of oral history and Indigenous Studies to look at how Palestinians are using memories and shared narratives in spaces of indigenous resistance in Haifa and the Galilee. Looking beyond collecting and archiving, I have focused on commemorative activities and projects lead by various civil society actors in which oral history plays a central role. Taking a bottom-up qualitative approach my data is derived from in-depth interviews, informal conversations, participant observation and textual analyses, gathered between 2013-2016. This has resulted in an interdisciplinary thesis which conceptualizes Palestinian memory as a form of Indigenous resistance. The Palestinian community in the 1948 Territory, unlike many of their brethren, remained on the physical site of the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing. This fact is an important and defining one, their physical presence on their land has influenced their identity and their collective narrative which is so heavily influenced by oral histories. Their subsequent exclusion and segregation from the Israeli Jewish settler population whilst creating spatial and temporal limitations, has at the same time allowed for an assertive Palestinian identity and narrative to develop without being assimilated into the settler structure. Memory in particular plays a huge role in the assertiveness of this Palestinian community and this thesis examines how they are being harnessed to challenge both the epistemic and physical erasure of Palestine whilst at the same time creating new forms of political and cultural agency to recreate Palestinian space. At the same time as their exclusion from Israel, the Palestinian community in the 1948 Territory have also been largely marginalized from the Palestinian national project. Therefore, it has mostly been up to them to create space for themselves in which futures can be imagined. This imagined future is based on memories of Palestine before the settler colonization and reinforced by commemorations return activities, which actively challenge the reality that the Zionist State deems irreversible. The outcome of this research is the understanding that in certain Palestinian spaces in the 1948 Territory, there has been the development of a memory politics which is distinctly future orientated and has decolonizing potential.