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No Bridges Will Take You Home: The Jordan Valley Exodus of 1967 Re-examined Through Oral History.
Abstract
In the summer of 1967, Israel occupied and ethnically cleansed the Jordan Valley, transferring the vast majority of its Palestinian population towards the East Bank of the Jordan River. This included tens of thousands of Palestine refugees who had settled in the Jordan Valley following the onset of the Nakba in 1948. At the time, this paper argues, Israel envisaged the Jordan Valley as an empty frontier, which materialised at the expense of Palestinians’ land and flesh; In the months that followed the occupation, Israel organised and implemented three intertwined strategies against the Palestinian population of the Jordan Valley: mass displacement, systematic denial of return, and the demolition of several longstanding communities, which together made way for establishing an expansionist settlement enterprise. Until today, this period of the Jordan Valley’s past remains overlooked by historians of Palestine, largely preserved in the memories of Palestinians. Hence, the absence of a comprehensive historiography of the Jordan Valley makes the oral history of Palestinians a valuable source to document and examine the experiences which they lived upon their exodus from the Jordan Valley. To do so, this work draws from oral history interviews recently conducted with Palestinians in the Jordan Valley and in refugee camps across the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, combined with materials from the archives of two pertinent organisations that were present in the Jordan Valley at the time: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The paper aims to construct a clear narrative of Palestinians’ lived experiences, especially the Nakba refugees, during and after their displacement from the Jordan Valley in 1967, with a focus on ensuing transformations in the area’s social and political histories. More broadly, the paper explores the constitutive role of using oral testimonies and archival sources in the context of settler colonial erasure, highlighting the advantages and limitations of combining oral, visual, and written records to document the narratives of the displaced Palestinians.
Discipline
Anthropology
History
Sociology
Geographic Area
Israel
Jordan
Palestine
West Bank
Sub Area
None