Nur Masalha

For both individuals and groups (which can be any group related to tribe, band, ethnicity, gender, class) to “remember” is to learn and form social norms and habits, while incorporating significant memories and experiences of the past in a meaningful way. No experience has shaped Palestinian attitudes and lives since 1948 more than the traumatic events of the 1948 Nakba and the devastating loss of hearth, home and land.

the Zionist and Israeli settler-colonial collective memory and mega-narrative, Palestine was a semi-deserted “land without a people for a people without a land”; a terra virgina (virgin territory) of hard soil or swamps only made fertile, productive and “blooming” by the genius and hard labour of the European Zionist settlers.

Post-Nakba conditions of displacement and dispersal gave rise to circumstances in which a person from the destroyed village of Ruways, for instance, would be given the surname Ruwaysi ‒ someone from Ruways ‒ instead of the customary clan eponym. Village solidarity stood in place of the absent village and dispersed clan members. The name of the original village also replaced the name of the hamula (clan), and the relationship among persons who belonged to the same original village became similar to hamula solidarity.