Toward a Global History of “Nakbah”: Historiographical Reflections

This paper examines the history of the concept of disaster in Arab social theory and historiography from the late nineteenth century to the present. Known in the singular as the “Nakbah,” disaster refers to the Palestinian exodus of 1948. Much has been written about the Nakbah as a central pivot in the historiography of the modern Middle East marking the beginning of the post-colonial era. The paper unravels previous uses of the concept of disaster in the plural, as a conception of time and circular causality.

The paper examines the resurgence of the concept of disasters in the early twentieth century as a means of articulating cyclical periods of decay and prosperity, which helped Arab thinkers explain the dynamics of social and political formation. Intense armed conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine in the interwar period contributed to the resurgence of disasters as a framework for contriving the temporalities of Arab history. The paper follows the transition from thinking about disasters as a framework of history within which events may be situated, to presenting 'disaster' as a critical juncture and a call for action, resistance, and social reform. The paper then follows the trajectory of the concept of disaster throughout the second half of the twentieth-century, its global reception, and contemporary transformation in light of current armed conflicts.

By comparing the nature and function of “disasters” with that of “crises” and “revolutions,” the paper opens a conceptual space for envisioning the relationship between war and the history of ideas, in the Middle East and beyond. It suggests that the Arab Nakbah helped to set strategies and discourses of resistance in motion in the postcolonial era, not only in the Middle East but also in other parts of the world.