Erased from Space and Consciousness

Noga Kadman

Description

2016 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection, Outstanding Rating

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Hundreds of Palestinian villages were left empty across Israel when their residents became refugees after the 1948 war, their lands and property confiscated. Most of the villages were razed by the new State of Israel, but in dozens of others, communities of Jews were settled—many refugees in their own right. The state embarked on a systematic effort of renaming and remaking the landscape, and the Arab presence was all but erased from official maps and histories. Israelis are familiar with the ruins, terraces, and orchards that mark these sites today—almost half are located within tourist areas or national parks—but public descriptions rarely acknowledge that Arab communities existed there within living memory or describe how they came to be depopulated. Using official archives, kibbutz publications, and visits to the former village sites, Noga Kadman has reconstructed this history of erasure for all 418 depopulated villages.

Foreword by Oren Yiftachel
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
List of Abbreviations
List of Foreign Terms
Introduction
1. Depopulation, Demolition, and Repopulation of the Village Sites
2. National Identity, National Conflict, Space, and Memory
3. The Depopulated Villages as Viewed by Jewish Residents
4. Naming and Mapping the Depopulated Village Sites
5. Depopulated Villages in Tourist and Recreational Sites
Conclusion: The Remains of the Past, A Look Toward the Future
Appendix A: Maps and Lists of the Depopulated Palestinian Villages
Appendix B: Official Names Given to Depopulated Palestinian Villages by the Government Names Committee
Appendix C: Mapping the Depopulated Palestinian Villages over the Decades
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Human Geography
• urban planning
• historic preservation
• HISTORY
• Israel
• Regional geography
• History of the Middle East
• General officer
• Middle East
• Palestine
• General
• 1948
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 07 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253016829
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

ERASED FROM SPACE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
ERASED FROM SPACE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948
Noga Kadman
Foreword by Oren Yiftachel
Translation from Hebrew: Dimi Reider Translation consultant: Ofer Neiman
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Noga Kadman
Hebrew edition published in 2008 as BeZidei HaDerekh UveShulei HaToda a
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kadman, Noga, author.
[Be-tside ha-derekh uve-shule ha-toda ah. English]
Erased from space and consciousness : Israel and the depopulated Palestinian villages of 1948 / Noga Kadman ; translation from Hebrew, Dimi Reider ; translation consultant, Ofer Neiman.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01670-6 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01676-8 (pb : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01682-9 (eb) 1. Israel-Rural conditions. 2. Israel-Rural conditions. 3. Villages-Israel-History-20th century. 4. Palestinian Arabs-Israel. 5. Israel-Arab War, 1948-1949-Destruction and pillage. 6. Palestine-History-1917-1948. I. Reider, Dimi, translator. II. Title.
HN 660. A 8 K 3315 2015
307.72095694-dc23
2015009101
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
To my family
Look at the landscape around you, and carve it onto your memory. You must change it, so that it does not resemble what was here before you. You must leave your mark on it. The mountains, the hills, the forests and the meadows-they must all bear your name and reflect the light of your face. . . . You must mercilessly destroy anything in the landscape which is not directly related to you. . . . Tell everyone that you were here first. They will believe you. Tell them there was nothing before you-no mountain, forest, hill or meadow. Say this with complete objectivity.
-Amos Kenan, The First
Contents
Foreword by Oren Yiftachel
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Depopulation, Demolition, and Repopulation of the Village Sites
2 National Identity, National Conflict, Space, and Memory
3 The Depopulated Villages as Viewed by Jewish Inhabitants
4 Naming and Mapping the Depopulated Village Sites
5 Depopulated Villages in Tourist and Recreational Sites
Conclusion: The Remains of the Past, A Look toward the Future
Appendix A. Maps and Lists of the Depopulated Palestinian Villages
Appendix B. Official Names Given to Depopulated Palestinian Villages by the Government Names Committee
Appendix C. Mapping the Depopulated Palestinian Villages over the Decades
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword: On Erasure, Research, and Reconciliation
- Please stop at Masmiyya.
- Where is it?
- You know, the junction where you can turn left to Be er Sheva or right to Tel Aviv.
- No, this place is called Re em junction . . . what was that weird name you just used?
- Masmiyya. You haven t heard about it? This is what the people from the south call this junction.
- Okay, I m from Jerusalem, but I drive here every once in a while, and I don t know the name . . . You should know: this place is called Re em junction, and it s even on the map, look . . .
This recent conversation I had with a cabdriver from Jerusalem, a person of Russian origin, demonstrates well the act of erasure and its long-lasting influence. Those who were born in the 1950s, like me, still carry with them fragments of memories of the Palestinian localities demolished by Israel, mainly retained from the landscapes we traveled through, in which we frequently brushed against the ruins of the demolished sites. Those ruins had names, and of course were connected to systems of roads and tracks, as well as remains of orchards, groves, hedges, and fields. These crumbs of memory have also survived in spoken, everyday language, which refers to the country s places, vegetation, and customs. But the new generations, and especially the new immigrants who have arrived over the last few decades, already have no connection to this disappearing geography.
This, of course, is no coincidence. The act of erasure has been guided for decades by the mechanisms of the Jewish state, which seek to expunge the remains of the Arab-Palestinian society living in the country until 1948, as well as deny the tragedy visited on this people by Zionism. The act of erasure, which followed the violence, the flight, the expulsion, and the demolition of villages, is prominent in most major discursive arenas-in school textbooks, in the history that Zionist society recounts itself, in the political discourse, in the media, in official maps, and now also in the names of communities, roads, and junctions. Palestine, which underlies Israel, is continuously being erased from the Israeli-Jewish body and speech. The remains of Arabness left in the Israeli landscape are perceived by the Jewish majority as the communities of Israel s Arabs -some sort of Arab islands scattered around, unrelated to the Palestinian space that existed here before 1948.
At the same time, Palestinian society is going through an opposite process: it makes an ever-growing effort to document, map, revive, and glorify the memory of the pre-1948 Palestinian society. For the refugee population who still live in camps or in temporary host countries, the pre-1948 reality continues to sizzle as a self-evident, daily matter, which casts meaning into their personal and communal identity. In the last few years the general documentation effort has also grown, as well as Arab-Palestinian research and media discourse, both of which try to revive a society that has disappeared. The Nakba-the disaster of the defeat of 1948-turns from a historical event and a low point in a still-bleeding conflict, into a basic value, through which many Palestinians try to rebuild their nation through memory, return, and political resistance.
Therefore, the two national movements have created opposing discourses, resembling photographic negatives, in which the same land-sacred to both peoples-embodies opposite images. Zionism draws a Jewish, Western, and democratic country, rooted in the Hebrew biblical space while erasing the Arab-Palestinian past. Palestinian society, on the other hand, portrays a romantic image of a lost paradise and (in part) refuses to recognize the millions of Jews who settled in Israel and created a new vibrant society on the same ruined Palestinian space. These polarized discourses-held by considerable groups within each nation-reject any possibility of reconciliation.
However, other groups and approaches exist to challenge this dualism. Noga Kadman s research, in the book you are holding, seeks to break out of this polarized discourse. It documents in detail the spatial practices of erasure and manufactured oblivion by Zionist institutions as well as by Jewish residents who settled the lands, and sometimes even the houses, of Palestinians. Her research is pioneering and important in several ways. First, it explores a fascinating geographical, political, and psychological phenomenon that sheds light on the mechanisms through which one ethnic space is being erased and replaced by another. The understanding of these processes has consequences for many conflict areas in the world in which similar phenomena have taken place. Too little has been written about this colonial geography, focusing on both institutional and cultural practices of dispossession. In her research, Kadman adds an important aspect that seeks to open the State of Israel s supposedly self-evident framework of legitimacy ( It s our territory and our business! ) in order to document and analyze the takeover act.
No less important is the attempt to understand (even if not to support) the acts of the Jewish residents. Kadman approaches the practices of manufactured oblivion in a critical way, but the practitioners in the book are flesh and blood: not only the vanguard of a national historical enterprise, but also refugees themselves who seek a safe haven in a world full of dangers and discuss the morality of their deeds among themselves. By day they are loyal soldiers of the Zionist frontier project, but at night they still live under the terrifying shadow of the Holocaust of the European Jews and the aftermath of a war of survival, forced-according to their view-on the Jewish community in 1948. Kadman opens and fragments the internal Jewish colonial act and presents it as it is-a human deed with all its complexities.
Kadman s research joins a small number of studies that courageously seek to remove the mask of daily denial of the Palestinian exile, which grips not only Jewish society at large and its consensus-seeking leaders but also its academic and research institutions, which are supposed to pursue historical truth. The act of denial was already described with painful accuracy in 1949, by novelist S. Yizhar in his book Khir