She keeps the key on a nail above the kitchen door. Her granddaughter has grown up watching it — black with age, its teeth worn smooth — without fully understanding what it unlocks. The grandmother knows. She knows the name of the village, the name of the neighbor whose fig tree overhung the wall, the sound the well made when the bucket hit the water. She knows because she was there, and because she has decided, with the particular stubbornness of very old women, that she will not be the last person to know.
Across the Palestinian diaspora and inside historic Palestine itself, a generation of women who survived 1948 is in its final years. What they carry — place names, property deeds, the texture of a specific April morning — exists nowhere in any state archive. It lives in them. A handful of dedicated oral history projects have spent the last two decades in a race against mortality to record it.
The Palestinian Oral History Archive at AUB
The most extensive of these efforts is the Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) held at the American University of Beirut. Assembled largely between 1998 and 2016 by a team led by researcher Diana Allan and collaborators including historian Rosemary Sayigh, the archive contains roughly 1,500 hours of recorded testimony from Palestinian refugees living in Lebanese camps — Shatila, Bourj el-Barajneh, Dbayeh — as well as in Syria and Jordan. The majority of first-generation survivors interviewed were women.
Rosemary Sayigh, whose decades of fieldwork produced the landmark study Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (1979) and the later Too Many Enemies (1994), has written extensively about why women’s testimony was for so long undervalued in Palestinian national memory-making. The public, masculine register of the fedayeen dominated; the domestic knowledge held by grandmothers — which family owned which orchard, what the mukhtar said the night before the village fell — was treated as supplementary. Sayigh’s argument, sustained across decades of work, is that this domestic knowledge is in fact foundational: it is the granular, verifiable detail that gives the Nakba its specificity and resists erasure.
The POHA testimonies are archived, catalogued, and — for a portion of the collection — accessible to researchers. They represent a geography of loss rendered in first-person voice: the villages of the Galilee, the coastal plain, the hill country of the West Bank and what is now the Negev. Women describe crops left in the field, the weight of what they carried, the direction they walked, the names of the soldiers and the names of the dead.
Diana Allan and the Nakba Archive
Anthropologist Diana Allan, whose book Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile (Stanford University Press, 2014) drew on years of immersive fieldwork in Shatila, has also worked directly on digital preservation of testimony. Her approach is ethnographic rather than narrowly documentary: she is interested not only in what survivors say, but in how memory functions across generations inside the camps — how a grandmother’s account of a village in the Galilee becomes part of the daily imaginative life of a grandchild born in Beirut who has never left Lebanon.
Allan’s work foregrounds something that purely archival projects can miss: the performance of memory. The key above the door is not only a legal instrument. It is a teaching tool, a ritual object, a daily act of refusal. In interviews conducted for her research, elderly women described producing village maps from memory for their grandchildren, tracing roads and field boundaries with a finger on a kitchen table. The accuracy of these hand-drawn maps has, in several documented cases, been confirmed against pre-1948 British Mandate survey records and cadastral maps held at institutions such as the Palestine Remembered database and the Institute for Palestine Studies.
Zochrot: Israeli Jewish Memory Work and the Nakba
Since its founding in 2002, the Tel Aviv-based organization Zochrot (Hebrew: “remembering,” feminine plural) has pursued a parallel and politically distinct mission: bringing knowledge of the Nakba into Hebrew-language Israeli public consciousness. Zochrot has collected and published testimony from Palestinian survivors and organized tours to depopulated and destroyed village sites inside present-day Israel — places where Jewish communities or forests planted by the Jewish National Fund now stand over the remnants of Arab villages.
Zochrot’s oral history work is archived on its website and in its iNakba mobile application, which maps over 500 destroyed and depopulated Palestinian localities and links each to available testimony, archival photographs, and documentary evidence. The organization explicitly situates this work within an argument about the right of return: recording what was there is inseparable, in Zochrot’s framework, from acknowledging what was done and to whom.
For Palestinian grandmothers whose testimony appears in or alongside Zochrot’s materials, the collaboration is sometimes complicated. The political valence of having one’s memory housed in an Israeli Jewish institutional framework is not lost on survivors or their families. And yet the documentation itself — the village name, the map coordinate, the deed — carries a value that transcends the frame around it.
The Keys, the Deeds, the Village Names
The house key as symbol has become so central to Palestinian collective memory that it risks abstraction. But in the oral testimonies collected by POHA, by Allan, and by Zochrot, it appears as a concrete, specific object: a particular key, belonging to a particular family, from a particular house in a particular village whose Arabic name — Saffuriyya, Lubya, Iqrit, Kafr Bir’im — is repeated with the precision of someone who knows that precision is protection against forgetting.
Land registration documents, known as tabu deeds, are likewise preserved in family collections across the diaspora. Historians including Walid Khalidi, whose exhaustive survey All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992) remains a foundational reference, drew on a combination of archival records and oral testimony to document over 400 depopulated localities. The grandmothers’ accounts, cross-referenced against British Mandate land records and Israeli military archives, have repeatedly proven accurate in their geographic and demographic detail.
The UN estimates that the Palestinian refugee population, including descendants, now numbers approximately 5.9 million registered with UNRWA. The first-generation survivors — those with direct embodied memory of 1948 — number in the thousands now, not the hundreds of thousands they once were. Each death closes an archive that cannot be reconstructed from documents alone.
What Passes Down
What oral history projects like POHA, Allan’s ethnographic work, and Zochrot’s archive collectively demonstrate is that the transmission of Nakba memory is neither passive nor automatic. It requires deliberate effort: the grandmother who chooses to speak, the grandchild who chooses to record, the institution that chooses to preserve and make accessible. The key above the door does not explain itself.
What these women pass down is not only grief, though grief is present. It is also a precise and stubbornly detailed account of a world that existed — its roads, its trees, its families, its name. That precision is, in itself, a form of testimony that no archive built from official records alone can replicate. The grandmothers know this. They have always known it. The question, as this generation passes, is whether enough people are listening.
Sources
- Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA), American University of Beirut: aub.edu.lb/ifi/poha
- Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (Zed Books, 1979)
- Rosemary Sayigh, Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon (Zed Books, 1994)
- Diana Allan, Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile (Stanford University Press, 2014)
- Walid Khalidi (ed.), All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)
- Zochrot, iNakba archive and documentation project: zochrot.org
- UNRWA, “Palestine Refugees”: unrwa.org/palestine-refugees
- Palestine Remembered database: palestineremembered.com
