The 1970s–1980s Palestinian Nakba Oral-History Traditions

Record summary

Palestinian refugees preserved stories, songs, place legends, family genealogies, and accounts of the 1948 Nakba, many of which were collected or published during the 1970s and 1980s. These materials are valuable for comparing oral tradition, political memory, displacement, and the transformation of personal testimony into communal legend. Narratives may preserve local history while also acquiring symbolic or heroic elements through repeated performance. Researchers should identify the collection, village, narrator, and publication date, since ‘Palestinian folklore’ is too broad to establish one uniform tradition.