The tour bus travels the length of the country, displaying all the wonders of modern Israel: a kibbutz, a forest, metropolitan cities, flourishing fields where swamps once reigned. "A land without people for a people without a land" as the famous old Zionist slogan goes. The average tourist would never know what every Palestinian knows: that the clumps of sabra cacti and fig trees, the occasional pile of stones or the empty wells, even the kibbutzim and cities themselves, mark spots where Palestinian villages once stood. The tourists are seldom told that creating the myth of an empty Palestine required the evacuation and destruction of over 450 such villages.

The original inhabitants of these villages, those who experienced the exile of 1948, are growing old. Today they are scattered throughout Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the rest of the world. But they are the only ones who can re-create village life and tell the story of al-Nakba [the tragedy]: the story of Palestinian dispersion and dispossession.

The Birzeit University Center for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society is concerned with recording the stories of these villages. The center has published a series of books (20 to date) recounting the history of Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel in 1948 and 1967. Oral histories collected from surviving villagers form the basis of the books, whose ethnological-historical style provides economic, social, and cultural pictures of the villages.

"This is work we must do today because the surviving villagers will die soon," explains Saleh Abdel Jawad, director of the center. "The Israelis are waiting for the young generation of Palestinians to forget the watan (homeland), so it is imperative to preserve the life of the villages in the minds of the youth. In spite of the fact that we failed in our political struggle--the Oslo Agreement is the crystallization of this failure--we don't have to lose our history."

From its inception the project has been riddled with both practical and philosophical problems. Conceptualized by two Birzeit professors in 1979, the first book of monographs was published in 1985, followed by a larger survey which provided much of the information for the book All That Remains. This encyclopedic work, edited by Dr. Walid Khalidi and published in 1992, was a groundbreaking publication, outlining 418 destroyed villages and including photographs, descriptions of social structure, village economy, and details about battles or massacres at the sites.

The Intifada and the closing of Birzeit by Israeli authorities in 1988 paralysed the project for a number of years. Although books continued to be published, virtually all new research came to a standstill. It was in 1993, after Birzeit reopened and Abdel Jawad was appointed director of the center, that the project was reinvigorated and research begun anew. But still the closure of the territories and lack of Jerusalem permits for much of the staff continues to create difficulties for the researchers.

Along with a new staff came new methodological questions: how to compile information on a topic with so few written records, when the primary source is based on personal memories? How to represent a subject that constitutes a central part of Palestinian national consciousness and political mythology?

One point of contention is whether or not to use Israeli military sources to supplement the information provided by oral histories--for example, to give concrete dates to events remembered but not recorded by Palestinians. The idea of using Israeli sources is distasteful to some Palestinian academics; to others, it is a way of being thorough and receiving a more complete understanding of history. Although Abdel Jawad believes oral history to be the most important method of information-gathering, he advocates a mixed research method.

"For example, through the oral testimonies we are learning that there were more massacres than previously thought." Abdel Jawad said. "There was a massacre at the Abu Shusha village near Ramle in which sixty people were murdered between May 14-16,1948. We only know this through oral accounts, but we don't know which Israeli brigade was responsible and we can use Israeli documentation to fill in missing details."

Abu Shusha was a village of approximately 900, famous for its road builders and public workers. As the muezzin was giving the call to prayer at dawn on May 14, Haganah forces from nearby Kibbutz Gezer attacked the village with mortar and machine-gun fire. After weighing their options, the villagers decided that the men would stay in the village and fight while the women, children, elderly and the farm animals would go to nearby caves. When some women emerged three days later, they found that 60 people had been killed--30 in the initial battle; seven axed to death in their homes; three old people, too weak to walk to the caves, killed in their homes; others executed or taken prisoner and later killed; a ten year old, nicknamed al-Zar (short), shot in front of his mother's eyes. The women formed a committee to bury the dead. Several days later the remaining villagers were evacuated. Many settled in the Ramallah area.

It has proven difficult, however, for Palestinian researchers to get through the door of the Israeli army archives. The archive workers are instantly suspicious and require special permission before allowing access. Jewish Israeli researchers too are subject to restrictions and must present an official request. Besides these technical problems there are conceptual ones as well. For example, how does one represent al-Nakba, a pivotal event in the Palestinian experience. Abdel Jawad asserts that the reality of 1948 was more complex than the stereotypical stories of battle and heroics:

"There were some cases where villagers fought the Zionists to defend their lands from confiscation, but this was largely before the April 10 massacre at Deir Yassin. After that, the fear of being massacred was sufficient to cause villagers to flee on their own. After Deir Yassin, the Zionists didn't need to massacre people to capture their villages.

"There are fascinating questions about why people fled and the role of the psychological war. Several of the villages that had previously resisted Zionist forces, or even killed soldiers, were the first to flee. Why? Were there really "agreements" between Jewish settlers and Palestinian villagers, as in the case of Caesarea? Or was it part of the Zionist psychological war, calculated to weaken Palestinian resistance and inspire false trusts?"

The center's research answers some of these questions. The village of Zir'in (present day Kibbutz Yizre'el) was an important farming village of 315 houses in the Marj Ibn Amer valley (Emek yisre'el). Changes in land-ownership law during the 19th century were such that by the 1940s the land owners lived outside the village, and they did not arm the inhabitants. Thus, the ability of the villager to resist was lower than elsewhere. Still, with the help of Arab volunteers, Zir'in succeeded in defending itself repeatedly until April 1948, when an Israeli unit launched an attack. Although that unit suffered heavy losses, two days later the villagers fled. Zir'in served as an army station for the Palmach, which afterwards became the basis of the IDF. The project is providing invaluable information and details about pre-48 Palestinian life. It is also clear that the oral histories will have to be gathered an oral-history library of cassettes.

The project is providing invaluable information and details about pre-1948 Palestinian life. It is also clear that the oral histories will have to be gathered more quickly than at the present rate. Funding is being sought for a larger project, which would entail conducting hundreds of interviews and then creating an oral-history library of cassettes. Before the peace process, Palestine, both physically and spiritually, was an inviolable whole. Now, as the Oslo and Cairo agreements solidify, "Palestine" is becoming synonymous with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Palestinian authority. As the PLO continues negotiating away parts of Palestine, it becomes increasingly important not only to document the past, but to learn from it as well: one cannot negotiate away memory.