Title: Against Genocide: Mapping the Future of Palestine, One Archive at a Time
Metatag Title: Mapping the Future of Palestine, One Document at a Time
Section: The Transcripts
Editor: Farah-Silvana Kanaan
Feature image: 1 Sabastiyah Nablus.tif
Images: Poster of the event + maps and photos from the PLSC collection
Captions:
*This transcript has been edited for clarity and grammar
Renowned scholar and historian, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, founder and President of the Palestine Land Studies Society in London and donor of the Palestine Land Studies Center (PLSC) in conversation with Ghada Dimashk, PLSC coordinator, librarian and archivist, for the first installment of Archives & Heritage for Palestine, a series hosted by Dr. Jamila Ghaddar and Tam Rayan, in defense of Palestinian life, land, liberation, and return at the American University of Beirut on June 4, 2024.
Drawing on records, documents, and maps from the PLSC collection, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta illustrates and explores the role of archives and heritage pertaining to Palestinian history and identity to counter epistemic violence, colonial erasure, and the cultural dimensions of genocide.
The following individuals gave introductory remarks before the talk: Ghada Dimashk, PLSC coordinator, librarian and archivist; Dr. Jamila Ghaddar, assistant professor, Department of Information Science, Dalhousie University in Canada and director, Archives & Digital Media Lab; Rami Zurayk, professor and chairperson, Department of Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management, Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, American University of Beirut and interim director of the PLSC; Fatme Charafeddine, associate university librarian for Research and Academic Collaboration Services at the American University of Beirut; Basma Chebani, president, Lebanese Library Association; Dr. Fadlo Khuri, president, American University of Beirut; Dr. James Lowry, founder and director of the Archival Technologies Lab at City University of New York.
Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, founder and president of the Palestine Land Studies Society in London:
It's very important that we know all the facts. The facts set us free. The facts help us make the right decisions. Also, the truth is the basis of justice, [so] we must always seek the truth. The enemies of truth do not seek justice. And I always ask: who is afraid of the truth? Only the criminal is afraid of the truth. Only the criminal wants to hide that. And in my case, as any Palestinian who witnessed Al Nakba on this fateful day of 13th of May 1948, we were attacked by 24 armored vehicles in my land Al Ma’in by the Haganah. And they attacked us. They destroyed the school which my father built in 1920. They destroyed our houses. They destroyed the wells and the flour mill. They destroyed everything. They burnt everything and they killed everyone in sight. And I was, as a child of 10, amazed. Who are these people? Where do they come from? The elders told me they come from different countries. They call them Vagabonds of the Earth, because they came from so many countries, they spoke different languages. I said, what have we done to them? Why did they come to us to destroy our life, to destroy our houses, to destroy everything which brings life to us? Where we have lived for thousands of years? And this question has grabbed my attention all my life. Who are these people? Why do they want to do that? When we were expelled on that day, I became a refugee, on the 14th of May 1948.
On the very same day, when I became a refugee, after the destruction of our home, a man called David Ben Gurion sat in Tel Aviv, spoke to his council of settlers in our land, and declared the State of Israel for the very same reason. Then, fortune took me to all corners of the earth after that. And this question remained in my mind all my life until today. One thing we must remember is that not only have we lost our own homes, like all Palestinians, not only have we lost our land, we also lost our identity as a legal identity. We lost every record of the Palestine government, we lost certificates of birth and death, school certificates, medical certificates, banks, records of harbors and ports, records of ownership of land, we lost every single trace, to unite our geography and history. But we have one thing left in our mind. Until today, we had the memory and the identity. So our job in life, for all of us, is to bring documents to prove that we have been there. This is our country. This is our life. The robbery which has taken place is not only [found] in the physical features but also in the indirect features of our life, our geography. Our existence has been denied. Their history says that Palestine is a land without people. All this is unbelievable. There is no case in history like it, neither in colonization, nor in occupation. So the question, which occupied my attention, especially when I did my PhD in London in 1961, is to go to the records of the British government, because 10 years earlier, they had just left Palestine. So this was a natural thing to do. Over the years, I found a very curious situation that we in Palestine, and also in Bilad al-Sham including Egypt, did not bother to document our existence, because we didn't need to. We had families, we had grandfathers, grandparents and so on. We know who we are, we know where we live, we don't need a piece of paper to prove that we belong to this land. And where did I find these documents? These documents were found in the colonization records of the countries which came to colonize us, the records of our mapping. Our records were found in London, in Berlin, in other places, because they had their plans to take over our land from Napoleon since 1801, when he came to Palestine and Egypt. They had an army of travelers, spies, priests, travelers, adventurers, surveyors, etc. They came to write the documents by all kinds of means, so it was more than natural for me to seek [out] these records, which we have been denied to have in these countries. And it took, of course, many years to do that. In Britain, for example, there were 20 to 30 places where you could find these in military archives or political archives. This is only the case for Palestine, not any other colonized land. But then you go to Germany, for example, which had been fighting the first World War with the Turks. Here I found the first aerial photos of the German Air Force in Palestine. You could go further, to Napoleon’s time, when he had 76 scientists come to Palestine and Egypt and record our countries. Before them, Volney came in 1785. He made maps of Bilad al-Sham. But when we go to recent times, you would like to find out what Balfour did and why. You will know that the first British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel was a Zionist. You will know what happened in 1936 to 1939, when there was a big revolt against the emigration of Ashkenazi Jews to Palestine, and all the records are in the military archives of King's College. You then see how, after the 1939 revolt, the Zionists were sure that they would capture all of Palestine. So they started planning to invade and take Palestine in 1942, at The Biltmore Conference, in which 600 Zionist delegates and leaders met to create the Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine, while the British were there.
In 1945, when the British began to think of leaving, the Zionists attacked them. They attacked their erstwhile benefactors because they didn't need them anymore. And then we find in 1948, all the records of the over 90 massacres committed by Zionists against Palestinians, in which they attacked and depopulated 530 towns and villages and deported and expelled them through the threat of massacres. When you check all these massacres, they were planned by region, by time, in nine brigades attacking these villages. That was a deliberate plan to expel Palestinians: we kill many of you, and if the rest don't leave, we'll kill you. So the answer is very clear: ethnic cleansing. And when you actually look at that, the records are fantastic because you read them with a new look. For example, you will know the myth that Palestine is a land without people, which was propagated in the 19th century, it turned out to not really be a myth. They knew that Palestine was populated. It was a plan to make it a land without people. So the genocide idea was created very early on, that the Zionists would like to make a Palestine without people. And that's the definition of genocide. While the British were in Palestine in 1940, Joseph Weitz, who was the head of the [Jewish] Colonization Department, the Jewish National Fund, said: “We shall not leave one village alone, we should not leave that.” That was in 1940. In the United Nations library, you’ll find very important documentation about the massacres written by Truce Observers, who were primarily European UN officers. They documented massacres at that time, and they said, sorry, we have no time to document all massacres because there are so many. These records of the United Nations Truth Observers are not known to the public. They are hidden. In another example, the Quakers were the first Christian group to come to Palestine. They are actually the ones who were based in the refugee camps in Gaza and said these people, the Palestinians, don't want food, they only want to return home. When you look at the series of actions by Israel after 1948, they did what we call today ethnic cleansing. What does it mean? Ethnic cleansing means I take your land and property and throw you out. If you don't go, I will kill many of you to convince you to leave. Fine. Well, that has happened in many countries before. What is different in this case is that these Palestinians who were expelled have been chased by the Israelis, even in their refugee camps. For example, one of the big massacres was the Khan Younis massacre in 1956, during which every house lost one young man, taken out of his home and killed. There are so many cases. So what is happening in this question of ethnic cleansing is that, over time, it converted into genocide. That is the case today in Gaza because these people [the refugees] will not go away. “We have to take their country. We have to kill them, but they keep coming back. We will chase them.” Why did they, for example, make massacres in Sabra and Shatila and in Jenin? If you look at the news today, you see all the attacks against refugee camps: in Jenin, in Balata, in Nablus, in Tulkarem. They will chase the very same people whom they have tried to expel. Now, therefore, documentation is the proof, not to us, but to the world who supported [the Zionists]. We take the records from the West and tell the West, again: look, your records show what I told you all the time, you didn't believe me. Now you have that record and, therefore, you have no excuse. If you ignore the truth, then you are on the side of the criminal. And that is the reason we created these archives and this center.