Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities

2016 winner
Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published Date: April 2016
ISBN-13: 978-0231176361

Conducting interviews with first-, second-, and third-generation members of Syria’s Palestinian community, Anaheed Al-Hardan follows the evolution of the Nakba—the central signifier of the Palestinian refugee past and present—in Arab intellectual discourses, Syria’s Palestinian politics, and the community’s memorialization. Al-Hardan’s sophisticated research sheds light on the enduring relevance of the Nakba among the communities it helped create, while challenging the nationalist and patriotic idea that memories of the Nakba are static and universally shared among Palestinians. Her study also critically tracks the Nakba’s changing meaning in light of Syria’s twenty-first-century civil war.

Review(s):

Reviewed by: Amelia Smith

When recollecting the Nakba, Palestinian refugees in Syria recall fishing in the Jordan River, the trees on their land and the houses they once lived in. With these memories they evoke a world that was destroyed by the 1948 Catastrophe, rather than the actual death and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to make way for the...

Author(s):

Winners of the Palestine Book Awards

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  • Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948
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  • Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial
  • Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes : Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body
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  • Power born of dreams: my story is palestine
  • Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization
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  • Places of Mind: A life of Edward Said
  • Except for Palestine: The limits of progressive politics