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.

Founded and managed by the Israeli state, Yad va-Shem is completely silent about the atrocities of Deir Yassin, and contains a contain amount of anti-Palestinian propaganda. In essence, Yad va-Shem represents official Israeli “collective memory” for forgetfulness. Together with genuine oral history of the Holocaust, Yad va-Shem was established in 1953, five years after Deir Yassin, by a Knesset act and located in West Jerusalem. According to its website, Yad va-Shem is a vast, sprawling complex of tree-studded walkways leading to museums, exhibits, archives, monuments, sculptures and memorials.

Founded and managed by the Israeli state, Yad va-Shem is completely silent about the atrocities of Deir Yassin, and contains a contain amount of anti-Palestinian propaganda. In essence, Yad va-Shem represents official Israeli “collective memory” for forgetfulness. Together with genuine oral history of the Holocaust, Yad va-Shem was established in 1953, five years after Deir Yassin, by a Knesset act and located in West Jerusalem. According to its website, Yad va-Shem is a vast, sprawling complex of tree-studded walkways leading to museums, exhibits, archives, monuments, sculptures and memorials

individual testimonies of Palestinian refugees in the mid-1970s and she made them into a number of articles in Journal of Palestine Studies (1977a, 1977b) and her book Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (1979).

This “history from below” approach and popular memories rather than high politics or top-down approaches has both powerfully challenged and enriched the written historiography of Palestine.

Edward Said’s In Search of Palestine, Muhammad Bakri’s 1948, Simone Bitton’s film about the poet Mahmoud Darwish, Et la terre comme la langue, and Maryse Gargour’s La Terre Parle Arabe, with which I have been personally and closely involved.