Reflecting on the Past of an Unfinished History

Almost exactly 30 years ago, I began research for the dissertation that, a decade later, became my first book, Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine. As a document-based historian, I was unprepared for the scarcity of Arabic sources representing Jaffa’s inhabitants and Palestinian leaders. Writing its history required skills my university had not taught—I had to learn to read Islamic court records, Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Hebrew, and to conduct ethnographic research and oral histories with still-traumatized populations. I also had to analyze literature, poetry, architecture, urban geographies, music, and visual iconography, ultimately developing a methodology to weave them together into a coherent narrative. My goal was to give voice to a community silenced for over half a century.

This paper examines the historian’s role when historical knowledge is not merely erased but rendered ineffective in the face of ongoing violence. Situating Palestine’s present within a longue durée framework, I explore how archival fragments, material traces, and oral histories function as methods for writing histories that remain politically and ethically engaged. But can such analyses remain grounded when the ground itself is layered with the crushed bodies of the dead? Drawing from conversations with Indigenous scholars, I reflect on the historian’s role as an intimate outsider amid deepening exclusion. I argue that historical methodologies must account for the material and political conditions under which knowledge is produced and mobilized, particularly when that knowledge is confronted with the physical obliteration of landscapes, communities, and the very archives that document them.

By placing Palestinian history in conversation with Indigenous struggles across Latin America, North America, and Australasia, this paper considers how historical analysis can respond to dispossession and destruction without reinscribing the logics of loss that settler colonialism depends upon.