Who Owns a Story? Palestinian Memory, Family Archives, and the Ethics of Witnessing

Nada El-Kouny in conversation with Hadeel Assali

In 1969, Golda Meir’s government drew up a secret plan to move up to 60,000 Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip and resettle them in Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguay. Only a handful made the journey before the scheme was exposed. One of them was Mahmoud, a nineteen-year-old who boarded a plane believing he was bound for work and a future in Brazil, and who realized only later that the promise was a lie. Decades on, his great-niece, the anthropologist Hadeel Assali, has spent years documenting his story and those of the other transferees. Palestinians in Paraguay, a four-part investigative documentary series, for Uncovering Roots co-produced by Max Saakyan, Nada El-Kouny and Nadeen Shaker tells this story. The series uncovers one of the most extraordinary, and until its release, largely buried, chapters in Palestinian history: Israel’s documented 1969 plan to secretly transfer 60,000 Palestinians from Gaza to Paraguay.

After the podcast’s release, Nada El-Kouny interviewed Hadeel Assali a second time to reflect on what happens when a family’s story is made public, and the questions that surface: who owns a story, what a story can do, and more importantly, how Palestinian personal and family archives should be cared for in a moment of genocide and accelerating erasure. Witnessing is the subject here, and witnessing, Assali argues, is never neutral: it is bound up with consent, value, relationship, and the long history of who gets to hold the record.

Nada El-Kouny (NE): How did you initially feel about the Paraguay transfer scheme and about getting the story out and how do you feel now, after it has been circulating for a while, through the podcast series documentary, news coverage of the story, your own talks, and your publications on the story?

Hadeel Assali (HA): I first met my great-uncle Mahmoud in 2005, 21 years ago, which would have put me at around 25 years old. When I understood what had happened to him, it felt extraordinarily close to my own experience. I was stateless until I was 21. Granted, I was “intentionally” in the West with my family, not tricked and dropped into a strange country. But I understood what it meant to be that age and to think about your future possibilities. And it still haunts me: that moment when he realized it was all a lie, at 19, stuck in a country he had never heard of. What a traumatic moment that is still having ramifications for his descendants.

I had a soft spot for him. He had a very hard life; after he returned to the Arab world, he married, and his wife died of cancer after having four kids. He remarried, and the second wife died of cancer after raising them. He was quite depressed after his second wife passed away, but I often reminded him to keep going for the sake of his kids (my cousins), who were so beautiful, well-behaved, and smart. There was also this structural cruelty: his residency in Jordan was contingent on his surrendering his Chilean passport, and his children’s residency depended on his. So, when he died, they all had to leave Jordan. There is still no stability for any of them; they are still stateless and scattered in different countries now with their own families. Like Mahmoud, they are survivors who deserve justice for their dispossession.

At the time, although I felt an urgency to research and document what happened, I didn’t know what the story could do. I just felt it was an enormous injustice and that people needed to know. Mahmoud himself wasn’t sure of the point, he’d say, why does this matter, when they’re shooting people in the head in full view of the world with impunity? He had an expression I want to get exactly right Spanish/Arabic saying “Cada uno mata a su toro” something like “everyone should slaughter their own bull.” Meaning: everyone is responsible for their own story, that he did not owe it to anyone. It was his daughter (and I of course) who pushed back, no, this isn’t just your story, it’s a Palestinian story. We thought telling it might help us find other transferees (and we did find one, Talal). In the end, however, no matter how much this story gets exposed, he died without a sense of justice, and there is no prospect of justice for his descendants. So, in one sense, maybe he is right: Who should “own” a story? What was the point of documenting it if it did not bring about a material change in their (our) lives?

I find some solace in Palestinian historian Rana Barakat’s book “Mapping Return: Mapping Memory and Storytelling in Palestine.” She insists on Palestinians in the diaspora staying committed to stories and storytelling as a kind of “grounding” in the land. For those of us who are dispossessed, how do we maintain or forge such relations? Barakat reminds us of the value of gathering (lam shamil), and even if incomplete – as was the case in my own family story. Gathering is a practice that takes serious effort, especially for Palestinian refugees; thus it is also a commitment to relations as a way of grounding. Barakat writes “grounding requires a speculative act, a relationship with memory and remembering what is grounded in the land over time, even when our material bodies are denied this grounding in time.” What is the “speculative act” here? For me, it was the hope that uncovering this story and identifying the perpetrators could lead to some sort of justice – justice being the return of our stolen homeland and restitution. The “by-product” so to speak were the gatherings with relatives that had been severed, the sharing of family stories and photographs and love. Many elders have passed by now, Allah yerhamhum (God have mercy on them). So even if justice has not been achieved, the “research” brought about beautiful gatherings, tighter family bonds, and new relations.

I also find some solace in what Edward Said has argued for – that even if justice and liberation are not within the foreseeable future, we must keep inventory for the day they arrive.

NE: You’ve described trying to make the work less extractive, giving back, materially, where you can.

HA: Yes. Research can be so extractive, especially if we are located within colonial institutions in the heart of Empire (as I have been). Although they are family – including Talal who has become like family – I have been hyper-sensitive of what I share and why. These are intimate stories, and they welcomed me (and my mom in Jordan, and my mom and friends in Paraguay) into their homes with cameras and sound recorders. They gave their full trust, and so I must be judicious in what is worth exposing and how. The goal is not simply exposure and voyeurism; the goal is justice, but also to nurture our relations and each other. We were able to support Mahmoud’s daughter Layla and her family through her asylum process (now they are in Canada). Also, we supported Talal’s attempted family reunification with his relatives who had recently evacuated from Gaza to Egypt. (He sadly had passport troubles and could not reach them.) I have realized that mutual aid for people in Gaza enduring genocide is a tiny way of reciprocating while maintaining relations and continuing to “gather” and share and learn together.

NE: And now, how do you feel about what the story has done?

HA: I keep coming back to the question I ask at the end of my rough cut: what was the point, in the end? In some ways Mahmoud was right; he has since passed away. Talal, however, is very much eager for justice; he wants the record set straight and more of his story told. And then there are the children, the next generation, who I think should be part of whatever comes next if more is done with the story.

This story allowed me to witness the limits of Israeli allyship. There is a huge difference from how Israeli journalists and researchers have tended to write about this, “look at the crazy thing our government did,” with no real concern for the Palestinian victims and survivors. A story like this deserves proper attention and documentation and care for the survivors, not just the sensationalism of an Israeli journalist finding a file in an archive.

What I find moving is how the documentation holds value within the family. When Mahmoud and his two siblings passed, their kids asked me for the footage of the long conversations I recorded during family gatherings. Whatever the story can or can’t do in the world, that footage means something to them, and I think that made it all worth it.

NE: When you began, did you document it because it was an important story, or did you already have a film in mind?

HA: A film. I wanted to make a documentary or ideally a narrative film. I really wanted to deliver that shock I imagined Mahmoud felt when he learned he had been tricked. But I was doing a PhD at the same time and had not realized how difficult it is to fund and complete a film. I have a shoddy rough cut of a documentary, but I keep thinking about a narrative film’s potential. Who knows, maybe one day it will happen.

NE: Let’s stay with the material itself, the photographs, the archives you found. What concerns surface for you when an intimate family archive becomes public?

HA: Consent, first, and that’s partly my own failing. I took liberties I shouldn’t have without involving the family more, even if they entrusted them with me. They are family heirlooms. After the podcast was released, I was getting a lot of requests for media, and I did not carefully vet how the family photos would be used. Perhaps I had mistakenly assumed proper permissions and paperwork would be done before anything was published. However, one morning, a friend sent me a link, and I opened the +972 article on the story with a lead image of my family staring back at me. I panicked, to be honest; two of the uncles in that photo are alive in Gaza now. Imagine if they knew their image was published in an Israeli publication without their consent? I insisted that the image – and all Palestinian photo archives – be removed immediately and thankfully they complied.

I have relatives who have never seen that photograph, in large part because it had been tucked away for years in my late aunt Aziza’s little suitcase of old photos. It was a whole process getting her to open it: traveling to Jordan with my mother, gathering several times during that month of Ramadan, my aunt bringing down her precious suitcase (archive), going through her photographs together, photographing the photographs. My aunt has since passed, and I still don’t know the full story behind every picture. They are precious objects full of unique family stories that are also Palestinian stories.

The physical photographs – I don’t know where they ended up. And although I digitized what I could, there are serious limits to digitization. I have so much footage on hard drives I keep migrating, because hard drives fail. I’d put everything on a university Google Drive with unlimited storage, and then the policy changed and I had to move it all off. I’ve been thinking a lot about digital versus physical, whether digitizing something can, in a way, kill the material.

NE: Kill it how, in the sense that we lose track of what we have? Or that the physical object makes us engage differently?

HA: Both. You lose the sense of how precious it was to get a particular photo, that it took my mother and me several trips all the way to Amman, during Ramadan, in the middle of rare family gatherings that don’t happen anymore. There’s a life to these photographs and archives that is very hard to preserve, very hard to honor properly. And some of the people in them are still alive, and even if they aren’t, their descendants are. So it comes back to consent, and to value, not money, but valuing the person in the photograph. I would want to know if my photograph were going to be published somewhere. There’s protocol, common courtesy, an obligation to think about the person. At times, I took the photographs for granted myself, sharing them with others – even if trusted – before asking consent. Even if years ago they did give their consent, the context is different now. There must be more respect and protocol given to these precious photos.

If we were to ever make the film, and I still want to, Mahmoud’s kids and Talal’s family should be part of the process as a kind of committee. I think it would be a beautiful process, another form of gathering and grounding. And they’d have so much of their own to contribute.

NE: Broadening out: what does this case tell us about how Palestinian personal and family archives should be treated right now?

HA: There’s an existential question underneath it that troubled me deeply, and that I needed friends to help me work through: who owns a story? When the +972 episode happened, some people said they stole your research — and it wasn’t really like that. But the feeling it surfaced was about ownership: I did not want to gatekeep or claim ownership over the story – but Talal and my mother (my elders) disagree with me, in large part because of the labor we put into it. So is it my story? It is really Talal and Mahmoud’s family’s story – especially for those who are still living its consequences. It is at once an intimate story, where they should have a say in how it is told and how much is revealed… “Cada uno mata a su toro.” But also, it is a Palestinian story – an important documentation of Palestinian history and Palestinian agency that should be inventoried. So who owns the story? I don’t have an easy answer.

Part of what unsettled me about the +972 article was the sense that the photographs were being used as a prop, there was no real engagement with them (or the people in them), and arguably no need for them in the piece at all. It is a question of value and care. Compare that with the AP images in the same article, which were surely paid for, documented, permissioned. Why wouldn’t our archives be treated the same way, especially in a time of genocide, and against decades of erasure and appropriation of Palestinian archives?

I think this begs a larger question: What is the appropriate course of action for Israeli scholars who locate Palestinian material in the archives? Publish or hand it over to Palestinians? How to ensure not only that they are treated with care, but that we are the central narrators of our own stories. The right thing to do, in my view, is what an anti-Zionist Israeli classmate did when he came across the central document related to the Paraguay transfer scheme in the Israeli state archive: he simply handed it over, expecting nothing in return. This does not mean allies cannot be part of the work, but they must understand the depths of relations embedded in each item, whether a family album or something taken from an archive, and that these relations matter. These are not dead documents. Otherwise, it shades into appropriation.

I once heard someone say, “we do not need allies, we need accomplices,” and I think this is exactly how Israelis with access to archives should function. Steal our stolen stuff from the archives and return it to us; secure our ownership over them rather than use them for your own publications and careers.

NE: Justice is a big word. Setting aside the largest scale like the right of return, putting an end to genocide, what starting points for justice or repair do you see in this work of exposing stories and dealing with archives?

HA: I discovered that Alon Confino, a history professor at UMass Amherst, was the grandson of Ada Sereni, the Italian Zionist architect of the transfer scheme. Confino was allegedly an ally: he drew comparisons between the Holocaust and the Nakba and he had written against the IHRA definition of anti-semitism. I thought, surely he would be eager to help correct the harms his grandmother committed, harms that were still having ongoing effects? I thought maybe he would have access to archives and information to reveal more about her crimes. And I thought he could set an example of how to repair harms in lieu of (not instead of) the full right of return and restitution for Palestinian refugees.

Instead, he chose to write a piece for +972 in which he claimed his grandparents were for co-existence with Arabs. And then Confino passed away. It seemed to me preserving his family legacy was his priority, not repairing or even acknowledging their harms. Thankfully, +972 editors added a disclaimer to his piece, indicating that his grandmother was the architect of the ethnic cleansing scheme. (Interestingly, they only linked to Israeli sources, not to my own article that first exposed Ada Sereni.) So we even have to fight for justice in competing narratives of the same past; we even have to fight to be the narrators of our own stories.

NE: That connects to something you mentioned years ago, before the podcast recordings ‒ that Yossi Melman, as an Israeli journalist, helped bring the story to light, yet was at the same time opposed to the right of return.

HA: Right. There’s a framing I use, from Areej Sabbagh-Khoury’s work on the kibbutzim and the Zionist left, Colonizing Palestine, about how leftist Israelis move through a process of recognition and disavowal. They recognize that something was done to Palestinians and disavow it in the same breath. Melman is still very much a Zionist; he made a point of telling me, when we met, that he doesn’t like the settlers, doesn’t go to the West Bank, and I asked him what makes him not a settler. He changed the subject. He’s against the right of return; when I pointed out that he himself came from Poland as a child, he insisted that Israel has the right to set its own immigration policy, that it is a state for Jews. He is like Benny Morris, someone who does important historical work recognizing the injustices that happened to the Palestinians, but then disavow them for the sake of the Zionist project. For, as Benny Morris said, ‘you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You must dirty your hands. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore, it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population.’ Melman said the same thing at the end of his article exposing the Paraguay transfer scheme – that Israel may have no choice but expelling the Palestinians.

NE: So what would the good example look like, an Israeli who wants to do something here?

HA: The example of my anti-Zionist Israeli colleague at Columbia is one: he came across something and gave it to me, expecting nothing. There was another anti-Zionist Israeli anthropologist who helped me conduct research in Tel Aviv and tried to access archives, again with no expectation of anything in return. They both understood that this is how you use your access and position. But Israelis like that are rare. I believe that by now both have disavowed their relationship with Israel and left – literally decolonizing Palestine. I think the right thing for Israelis to do is simply: return what was stolen. And if they can find in themselves a way to shed the anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism in which they were steeped, maybe they can learn to treat our stories and our lives with care.

NE: If we treat this as a teaching moment, for people in academia and journalism who want to “be decolonial” but don’t know what that means in practice, what would you say?

HA: I really think at heart it is a question of care. And this requires some honesty with one’s self. How to be in good relations with whom you are doing research. It is difficult within the institutions and structures we are in ‒ for journalism, academia, social media content creation – because there is an expectation of a production rate, which forces extractive relationships. How can we take our time and really build long-term relations in a “publish or perish” climate?

Even for longer term research like anthropological fieldwork, it is hard to maintain the relationships we cultivate with care. Maybe part of the answer is to commit to stay “grounded” in fewer places, and to recognize the different stakes the research has for different “stake-holders,” so to speak. Will you publish a paper, and they will never see you again? Or are you family now?

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References

Assali, Hadeel. “Maintaining the Social Fabric: Mutual Aid in Gaza.” Institute for Palestine Studies. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1656919.

Barakat, Rana. Ongoing Return: Mapping Memory and Storytelling in Palestine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2026.

Gaza Mutual Aid Solidarity. Instagram account. Accessed June 14, 2026. https://www.instagram.com/gazamutualaidsolidarity/.

Sabbagh-Khoury, Areej. Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023.

Said, Edward W. “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.” Social Text, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 7–58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/466405.

Saakyan, Maxim, Nadeen Shaker, and Nada El-Kouny. “Palestinians in Paraguay: Part 1 — The Scheme.” Uncovering Roots, Season 3, Episode 1. March 11, 2026. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2279961/episodes/18826328.

Treyf, Ben. “The Paraguay Scheme: Israel’s Secret Plan to Deport Gazans in the ’70s.” +972 Magazine, March 26, 2026. https://www.972mag.com/paraguay-scheme-israel-mossad-deportation-gaza/.

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About the Authors

Nada El-Kouny is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work explores rural politics, transnational migration, and heritage in Egypt. Since 2023, she is an affiliated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, where she is developing her book manuscript, An Egyptian Village Between Two Revolutions: From Socialist Foundation to a Declaration of Independence. Nada received her PhD from Rutgers University, supported by grants from the NSF and Wenner-Gren Foundation. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow on the project Traces of Mobility, Violence, and Solidarity: Reconceptualizing Cultural Heritage through the lens of Migration. Her writing appears in Citizenship Studies, Mondes Arabes, Jadaliyya, and Ahram Online. She has also taught at Rutgers University, Princeton University, and the American University in Cairo, and has a background in journalism and documentary film production.

Hadeel Assali is a Palestinian anthropologist, writer, and filmmaker whose work sits at the intersection of decolonial scholarship, environmental science, and collective memory. An anthropologist and former engineer, her research examines the ongoing colonial legacies of geology as a discipline, as well as anti-colonial ways of knowing and relating to the earth in southern Palestine. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2021, where her research traced the development of geology in Britain and its export to the colonies for extraction, mapping, and state-making. She is currently a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society and a lecturer in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Her public scholarship includes writing for the London Review of Books and her work draws extensively on her family’s history in Gaza, including her research into the 1969 Paraguay Transfer Scheme. 

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Citation: Nada El-Kouny, Hadeel Assali, Who Owns a Story? Palestinian Memory, Family Archives, and the Ethics of Witnessing, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 30.06.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/66246

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