#Israeli Routes Through Nakba Landscapes: An Ethnographic Meditation, by Rebecca L. Stein: While conducting research about the history of northern Israel, an Israeli friend of mine stumbled across the story of a mosque whose remains were situated on the grounds of her father’s childhood kibbutz. She learned that the mosque’s structure had remained relatively intact long after its Palestinian client population had fled or been expelled during the course of the 1948-1949 war, while its lands had been folded into the territory of the nascent Israeli state and subsequently redistributed for the expansion of Israel’s rural Jewish communities. She called her father at his Tel Aviv home to confirm the discovery. Did he remember the mosque, she asked? No, he responded, he did not. She pressed him a bit. I have its coordinates, she insisted, and its remains are located on kibbutz land. But he was certain, reminding her that he knew every inch of kibbutz territory, having spent his childhood hiking its environs in accordance with prevailing Zionist pedagogy. His denial was categorical and there the conversation ended. A few days later, he called her back with a set of belated memories. It seemed that in discussion with his sisters who had also grown up on this kibbutz, a forgotten landscape had slowly come into view. Yes, the mosque was there, he confirmed. Indeed, he recalled watching Palestinians harvesting fruit from its adjacent fields when he was a young boy, a memory he presumed to be a 1949 post-war scene from the moment when Palestinian families recently exiled from Israel returned to harvest their crops and inspect their property. This memory process disturbed him. How could such an intimate knowledge of one’s homeland simply vanish only to come suddenly and vividly back into view? This paper is an ethnographic exploration of Jewish Israeli encounters with formerly Palestinian landscapes, places, buildings, artifacts, and histories. It is a portrait of Israeli travels and routes of varying kinds – alternately as soldiers, looters, tourists, immigrants, and activists – through sites that are now legally ‘Israeli’ but which carry the traces, in varying degrees of visibility, of their pre-1948 Palestinian pasts. Grounded in incomplete snapshots from the lives of several different Israelis, from very different walks of life, this paper meditates on the highly political nature of Israeli itineraries within the borders of their nation-state and the ways these itineraries have, at different historically moments, intersected with the history of the Palestinian dispossession of 1948.2 Through the lens of these routes and biographies, this ethnography attempts to raise questions about the ways that Israeli Jews have interfaced with the Palestinian history of their nation-state and contended with the abundant material evidence of pre-1948 Palestinian life that remains within Israel’s borders – this despite Israeli state efforts to remove this evidence through both physical means (predominantly the razing of villages in the aftermath of 1948) and pedagogical projects of state-sanctioned forgetting.
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 19:06:27 +0000
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