The cover of "Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory."

On May 15th, Palestinians all over the world, whether silently or in community memorial ceremonies, will mark the fifty-ninth anniversary of the Nakba. The Arabic word, meaning "Catastrophe", is used to refer to the Palestinian dispossession, during which more than 700,000 Palestinians were forced out of their native villages and towns. In the wake of this mass exodus, the state of Israel was declared, and the properties of the overwhelming majority of Palestinian exiles were taken as spoils of war.

In addition to the enormous economic, political, and emotional impacts of the Nakba on Palestinian exiles, there was an equally significant alteration of the landscape. At least 418 Palestinian villages were destroyed or depopulated. Their houses and public and religious institutions were torn down, and many of them were renamed entirely on the new maps of the state of Israel. The Palestinians who left or fled in 1948 now number more than 4.4 million, and many of them still live in abject poverty in refugee camps throughout neighboring Arab countries and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (Columbia University Press, 2007), editors Ahmad H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod examine the transformation of an entire population from native residents of their homeland to dispossessed exiles without economic or political power over their lives, and how that transformation shapes the identity of the entire Palestinian people over the last fifty-nine years. The book also explores the multiple ways in which Palestinians have dealt with the memory of these events, and how memory and the ongoing condition of Nakba have shaped Palestinian experience.

To the casual observer, it may appear that Palestinians are relentlessly attached to the past, that they are happiest only when they are reconstructing it. This phenomenon is not only true of Palestinians who experienced the Nakba of 1948 firsthand, but often of their children and grandchildren, who inherit the stories of the past and the names and details of long-lost villages like the most precious of family heirlooms. Several of the articles in the book explore the significance of this cultural phenomenon, and the very real purpose it serves in the Palestinian community.

In the section entitled "Places of Memory," author Rochelle Davis explores the practice of "recreating the lost homeland" (55), which began with the simple tradition of exploring in great detail the origins of each Palestinian's family, and evolved into the publishing of village memorial books. These books, which first began to appear in the 1980s and 1990s, were published locally by Palestinian families, and detailed everything including the location of their native villages, family trees and genealogies, as well as wedding songs and traditional practices that were part of the fabric of daily life in pre-1948 Palestine. Many of them came to include hand-drawn maps, family photographs, and accounts of crops grown and livestock raised.

Far from being trapped in the past, Palestinians were engaged in an act of "salvage ethnography" (56), in which they had to bring out of the rubble their own silenced history, often in the face of a clearly articulated campaign of denial by the institutions of the new Israeli state. The practice of mapping the past, then, is a survival tactic for a people in exile who still suffer catastrophes of dispossession and violence in an ongoing conflict.

In "Modes of Memory," author Rosemary Sayigh notes that refugees in camps in Lebanon often say "Tarikhna majhul - our history is unknown" (152). She and other scholars concur that they are faced with numerous challenges when studying the Nakba, including the absence of the Palestinian narrative altogether from the history of the region. Sayigh notes that this "can be explained by the power of the victors in 1948, as well as separation after 1948 from national archives and monuments, and the dispersion of scholars and cultural institutions" (152). What has survived is a largely oral tradition, that lives on among those who experienced these traumatic events, and those who inherit the story as they continue to live the ongoing Nakba of refugeedom.

In one of the most moving articles in the collection, Omar Al-Qattan recounts a journey he took with his father to their hometown of Jaffa. They went on the same journey that many Palestinians exiles undertake, searching for a lost home from the shards of memory, and making their way through renamed streets and dilapidated neighborhoods. For Al-Qattan, the search was more than a journey to his father's childhood home. It served as a meditation on the burden and the necessity of memory in Palestinian life.

Faced with the dual experiences of romanticized nostalgia about life in pre-1948 and the debilitating sorrow that exile creates, not just in his own family, but in Palestinian society as a whole, Al-Qattan concludes: "It is clearly impossible to return to point zero, to eliminate everything that has happened and retrieve the illusory moment of purity...for this would amount to...a vain attempt to cancel the past. But it also impossible for any Palestinian to honestly pretend that the trauma of 1948, or of the subsequent dispossessions and forced exiles which afflicted us and continue to do so, are no longer central to our lives. Nothing makes much sense without those memories and that history (204)."

Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory is available at Amazon.com.