PhD Supervisor and 2nd Reader: Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou and Riccardo Bocco
Funding Organisation: Swiss National Science Foundation, Doc.CH scheme
Timeline: September 2021–August 2024
Budget: CHF 222,217
Keywords: Palestine/Israel; Jordan Valley; Forced Displacement; Settler Colonialism; Oral History; Social History
In June 1967, the Israeli military forces occupied the Jordan Valley, a central Palestinian geography and home to thriving communities that historically formed an integral thread in Palestine’s social and economic fabrics. Under the swift shadows of the Six-Day-War, Israel displaced most of the Jordan Valley’s Palestinian population to the East Bank of the Jordan River, including many Nakba refugees, and systematically denied their return. Israel then demolished several Palestinian communities and UN-run refugee camps in the Jordan Valley, laying the grounds for its settler colonial project in the area, which has been expanding ever since. This period of the Jordan Valley’s past, often overlooked by historians of Palestine, holds many unexamined stories of colonialism and resistance; displacement and steadfastness; life and death.
This research project delves into the collective memories of Palestinians to reconstruct, scrutinise, map, and archive their fading narratives of the Jordan Valley’s occupation in 1967. By unearthing the oral history of the Palestinian population on both banks of the Jordan River, this research project writes a social and political history of settler colonialism in the Jordan Valley which centralises the lived experiences of the displaced and dispossessed Palestinian population.
The main objectives of this research are to bring in original knowledge about a central period and geography to the field of Palestine Studies; to contribute thematically and methodologically to scholarly debates about settler colonialism; and to introduce an oral history archive related to the War of 1967, focusing on the Jordan Valley exodus.
Methodologically, this project involves a multi-sited ethnography to engage with the Jordan Valley’s oral history, mainly held by a group of elderly Palestinians that is quickly declining in numbers, combined with extensive archival research in Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and Geneva.
By carrying out this historical research with a bottom-up approach that centralises the oral history of the indigenous population, this project makes original methodological contributions to the fields of Palestine studies and settler colonial studies.
