What's the importance of acknowledging the Nakba? Remembering it is the only way for both Jews and Palestinians to understand that this land is shared. It’s the only way of preventing the system from duplicating the same injustices over and over again. By Muhammad Jabali A friend and I visited Ramallah last Saturday. It was a sunny afternoon; we took a friend’s car and hit the road so we could arrive in time for last minute preparations for the first screening of the Tunisian Documentary Film Month at Ramallah’s Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center. We are helping to organize the screenings as…

The Israeli Right has been waging a war on history in recent years, using extreme measures to remove evidence of the Nakba from the national discourse. It failed. Yedioth Hakibbutz is the weekly magazine of the United Kibbutz Movement. It is delivered every week to hundreds of Kibbutzim as part of the weekend edition of Yedioth Ahronoth, the best selling paper in Israel. Even at a time of diminishing political influence – there is not a single representative of the United Kibbutz Movement in the current Knesset – the Kibbutzim remain both a symbol and a stronghold of conservative Zionism, and the…

Palestinian citizens of Israel return to the village of Al-Ruways, which was destroyed by Zionist military forces during the Nakba.  Photos by: Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org The Israeli group Zochrot organizes many tours of Palestinian villages depopulated during the Nakba of 1948. What made this Saturday's tour of Al-Ruways particularly remarkable was the large number of displaced Palestinians and their descendants who made the event more of a return than a simple tour. Zochrot, whose name means "remembering" in Hebrew, aims to educate Israeli Jews about the history of the Nakba and the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees. Typically, they will…

A new guidebook provides readers with tours of 18 Palestinian villages depopulated in 1948, allowing Israelis to slowly learn the story of Palestine and create a new reality between the river and the sea. By Danit Shaham A book always makes a statement.  Whether it’s resting on the table or visible on a shelf, it’s making a statement – cultural, political, or both. Space, on the other hand, represented by maps, hiking trails, signs, is usually viewed as something objective.  Neutral.  Not subordinated to social, historical or other forms of power. “Once Upon a Land,” published by Zochrot and Pardes, offers 18…

A new documentary aims to decipher some of the anxiety that accompanies the Israeli debate over the events of 1948. A strange thing regarding the debate on the Nakba: the responses it generates in Israeli society are becoming more and more hostile, while at the same time, the Nakba is mentioned more and more often. Those contradicting elements live side by side, as if the more we work to forget the Nakba, the harder it gets - the recent campaign regarding "the Jewish refugees" that the Foreign Office launched is  just one example. Israeli-Russian-Canadian journalist Lia Tarachansky (from The Real News) is…

Six or seven years ago, I was sitting in Tel Aviv's Cafe Ginzburg with a man I admire deeply. Mikhael Manekin was then, along with Yehuda Shaul, one of heads of Breaking the Silence. BTS was still a budding organization at the time, made up entirely of Israeli soldiers who participated in the occupation and sought to document and inform of its atrocities. The organization was expanding its activities. Manekin came to Tel Aviv to brainstorm on organizing tours for Israelis and foreigners in Hebron. "I would like to bring authors there," he told me. "I feel that authors have…

Until we find a way of measuring the efficacy of one form of protest or another, surely we must encourage all forms and enable all those who desire change to express their desire in the way they think will be most effective. By Yonatan Preminger Roee Ruttenberg’s recent post criticized the way a group of “pro-Palestinian” activists in Berlin disrupted a concert by the Israeli choral group Gevatron. The gist of his article is that the protesters were childish attention-seekers, and that this form of protest is ineffective. This piece raises a thorny question: how are we to gauge the…

Greta Berlin's anti-Semitic tweet was but one in a series of comments she has made, enabling many of her critics to discredit the entire Free Gaza Movement. As activists, it is our job to make sure one bigotry can never be used to justify another. By Tom Pessah An Iranian American acquaintance once explained to me the predicament she’s in. She’s a committed feminist who wants to expose and critique any examples of male domination in Iran. Yet whenever she does so, her critique is immediately seized upon by those wishing to justify the next war, which could harm her…

Amira is a 30-year-old Palestinian woman, struggling to raise her three children in Shuafat Refugee Camp. Amira grapples with fear, feelings of vulnerability, and isolation from her family in Amman. But her biggest concern is teaching her children to love. The robbery was the proverbial straw that broke Amira’s back. Two weeks ago, Amira, her husband, and three children discovered their house in Shuafat Refugee Camp had been broken into. The money that Amira and her husband, Munir, had set aside for a family vacation to Jordan—where Amira’s parents and three brothers live—was gone. Jewelry that had sentimental value was…

The Nakba has a dual meaning today. On one hand, it is about the hundreds of villages that were razed in 1948 and the hundreds of thousands of refugees who lost their homes. On the other hand, Palestinians continue to suffer the Nakba daily - the separation of families, continuous confiscations of land and settlements choking every Palestinian village and town. Palestinians today mark 64 years since the Nakba (catastrophe). They are not commemorating a historical event that has long passed, or a sad moment in their past. Many of the Palestinian people are living the reality of the Nakba…

By Tom Pessah Limor Livnat was furious. The minister of culture was speaking at a Knesset discussion about the Independence Day arrests in Tel Aviv, following an attempt by a small non-profit called Zochrot to commemorate the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. The Israeli police surrounded the Zochrot office in central Tel Aviv, preventing the activists from exiting. One person spent a night in jail for reading aloud the names of destroyed Palestinian villages from a history book. But Livnat’s anger wasn’t directed at the police, but rather at those arrested: I went in with my iPhone to the…

Despite attempts to conceal the memory of stones in the village of Hunin, papers in the kibbutz archives left a trail revealing the hidden war. In his bold book, Stone, Paper, Tomer Gardi places history in its present, as a driving political force, while rejecting the practice of historical writing. By Yehouda Shenhav | Translated by Dana G. Peleg There is a children’s game called "rock, paper, scissors." It's played with two players: each one hides his or her hand behind the back, and then they stretch their arms out forcefully and simultaneously, making one of three possible signs that…

A response to Dahlia Scheindlin's piece about Mahmoud Abbas' comments on ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem. I am going to have to totally disagree with my colleague Dahlia Scheindlin on her piece, Response to Abbas: we’ll be together in Jerusalem forever. Although I am also ignorant of the speech Abu Mazen gave in Qatar, except for what I read in the papers, Abbas was saying that Israel is instituting a policy of ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, which the Israeli media framed as an attempt to deny ANY Jewish connection to the holy city. Dahlia’s contention is that Israelis and Palestinians are…