The War of 1948

Description

The 1948 War is remembered in this special volume, including aspects of Israeli-Jewish memory and historical narratives of 1948 and representations of Israeli-Palestinian memory of that cataclysmic event and its consequences. The contributors map and analyze a range of perspectives of the 1948 War as represented in literature, historical museums, art, visual media, and landscape, as well as in competing official and societal narratives. They are examined especially against the backdrop of the Oslo process, which brought into relief tensions within and between both sides of the national divide concerning identity and legitimacy, justice, and righteousness of "self" and "other."

Preface and Acknowledgments
Avraham Sela and Alon Kadish

Israeli and Palestinian Memories and Historical Narratives of the 1948 War—An Overview
Avraham Sela and Alon Kadish

The 1948 Palestine War on the Small Screen: A Comparative Analysis of its Representation in Two Israeli Television Series
Bosmat Garami

Israel's Publications Agency and the 1948 Palestinian Refugees
Rafi Nets-Zangut

The War of Independence Exhibited: A Study of Three Israeli Museums
Ofer Boord

Contested Urban Memoryscape Strategies and Tactics in Post-1948 Haifa
Ziva Kolodney

The Making of a Myth: The Story of Kfar Etzion in Religious Zionism 1948–1967
Dror Greenblum

Descending the Khazooq: "Working Through" the Trauma of the Nakba in Emile Habibi's Oeuvre
Assaf Peled

Wa-Ma Nasayna (We Have Not Forgotten): Palestinian Collective Memory and the Print Work of Abed Abdi
Tal Ben-Zvi

The Palestinian Exile—Drama Shapes Memory
Mustafa Kabha

Epilogue: Reflections on Post-Oslo Israeli and Palestinian History and Memory of 1948
Avraham Sela and Neil Caplan

Sujets

• Middle Eastern Studies
• Middle Est
• Jewish Studies
• Jewish
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Jews
• Israel
• History of the Middle East
• Politics
• Middle East
• War

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 21 novembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253023414
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE WAR OF 1948
An Israel Studies Book

An Israel Studies Book is sponsored by the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Brandeis University.
THE WAR OF 1948
Representations of Israeli and Palestinian Memories and Narratives
Edited by Avraham Sela and Alon Kadish
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
2016 by Indiana University Press
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 Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02242-4 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-02341-4 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments Avraham Sela and Alon Kadish
Israeli and Palestinian Memories and Historical Narratives of the 1948 War-An Overview Avraham Sela and Alon Kadish
PART 1: ISRAELI-JEWISH NARRATIVES: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE
1 The 1948 Palestine War on the Small Screen: A Comparative Analysis of Its Representation in Two Israeli Television Series Bosmat Garami
2 Israel s Publications Agency and the 1948 Palestinian Refugees Rafi Nets-Zehngut
3 The War of Independence Exhibited: A Study of Three Israeli Museums Ofer Boord
PART 2: THE POLITICS OF SPACE MEMORY
4 Contested Urban Memoryscape Strategies and Tactics in Post-1948 Haifa Ziva Kolodney
5 The Making of a Myth: The Story of Kfar Etzion in Religious Zionism 1948-1967 Dror Greenblum
PART 3: PALESTINIAN TRAUMATIC MEMORY
6 Descending the Khazooq : Working Through the Trauma of the Nakba in Emile Habibi s Oeuvre Assaf Peled
7 Wa-Ma Nasayna (We Have Not Forgotten): Palestinian Collective Memory and the Print Work of Abed Abdi Tal Ben-Zvi
8 The Palestinian Exile-Drama Shapes Memory Mustafa Kabha
Epilogue: Reflections on Post-Oslo Israeli and Palestinian History and Memory of 1948 Avraham Sela and Neil Caplan
Index
Preface and Acknowledgments
T HIS BOOK CONSISTS of studies of Israeli representations, both Jewish and Palestinian, of memory and historical narratives of the 1948 War. The chapters map and explain the ongoing evolution of Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian perspectives of the 1948 War as represented in literature, museums, art, visual media and landscape, as well as in competing official and societal narratives.
Most chapters included in this book were originally presented and discussed in periodical meetings during 2009-2010, by a research group on Myth, Memory and Historiography: The Case of the 1948 War, comprised of Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian scholars, sponsored by the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. Notwithstanding the tensions stemming from different national and disciplinary approaches, the presentations, including by outside guest speakers, and discussions that followed, the group developed into a vibrant and educative forum for exchanging views and insights based on fresh original studies of distinct aspects of memory and historiography of the war. The research group s work culminated in an international symposium which was held in Jerusalem in December 2010, co-sponsored by the Van Leer Institute and the Harry S. Truman Institute of the Hebrew University. We are especially grateful to the Van Leer Institute for its generous funding and congenial accommodation of the research group throughout its meetings, and to the Truman Institute for sharing the financial cost of the international symposium.
We wish to thank all those who were involved in the earlier stages in the development of this project: members of the research group, including Efrat Ben-Ze ev, Tal Ben-Zvi, Ofer Bord, Hillel Cohen, Ami Elad-Buskila, Bosmat Garami, Dror Greenblum, Aziz Haidar, Mustafa Kabha, Noga Kadman, Yechiel Klar, Ziva Kolodny, and Adel Manna; guest speakers Hadas Baram, Sinai Peter, Boaz Gaon, Rafi Nets-Zehngut, and Rona Sela; and participants in the international symposium, including Larry Abramson, Meron Benvenisti, Neil Caplan, Alon Confino, Yifat Gutman, the late Yoram Kanyuk, Eman Nahhas, Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, Anita Shapira, Muhammad Ali Taha, Dan Tzahor, and Jay Winter. All contributed valuable insights and helped to clarify and hone our views. We are also indebted to Lior Lehrs, our research group s administration assistant, for his dedication and perceptive summaries of our discussions. Last but not least, we are especially thankful for the interest shown in our project by the editors of Israel Studies , Ilan Troen and Natan Aridan.
Avraham Sela and Alon Kadish
THE WAR OF 1948
Israeli and Palestinian Memories and Historical Narratives of the 1948 War-An Overview
Avraham Sela and Alon Kadish
Preface
This volume consists of a collection of studies of Israeli representations, both Jewish and Palestinian, of memory and historical narratives of the 1948 War. The studies map and explain some Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian perspectives of the 1948 War as represented in literature, historical museums, art, visual media, and landscape, as well as in competing official and societal narratives. They are examined especially against the backdrop of the Oslo process, which had strongly brought into relief tensions within and between both sides of the national divide concerning identity and legitimacy, justice, and righteousness of self and other. Five chapters represent varied aspects of Israeli-Jewish memory and historical narratives of 1948, while two others offer representations of Israeli-Palestinian memory of that cataclysmic event and its consequences.
Each chapter represents a particular version or expression of a sectorial memory of the war and its consequences, not necessarily identical with the single national interpretation the national institutions (Israeli and Palestinian) provided. The collection as a whole demonstrates how the diversity of the historical experience (as well as cultural legacy, ideologies, etc.) of different components of society is reflected in the diversity of memory. Moreover, most of the chapters demonstrate how memory changes and evolves along with the historical changes within the various components of the national communities.
This collection is the first of its kind offering new perspectives of Israeli memory, both Jewish and Palestinian, based on in-depth empirical studies. Whether the case is myth construction by the religious Zionist movement, museum exhibitions by rival ideological groups, or drawings of the Nakba by an Israeli-Palestinian artist, they all represent diverse layers of memory and carry a particular contribution to their specific discipline or field of research. We hope that the diversity of substance and form of the groups memories of a supposedly unifying national event within the national community, and the dynamics of change presented in this issue will contribute to the development of theory of the nexus of memory, narrative, and historiography.
We offer a brief discussion on the dialectics of memory, narratives, and historiography as well as the main trends and characteristics of Israeli and Palestinian memory and historiography of the 1948 War. While Israel s Palestinian citizens are historically part of the Arab world, including the Palestinian people at large, their post-1948 separation from other Palestinian and Arab communities coupled by their particular social, administrative, and political experience as an ethnic and religious minority in the Jewish state, shaped their consciousness and cultural world as a distinct Arab-Israeli identity group and memory community. 1 The introduction explains these distinct characteristics of Israel s Palestinian citizens within the broader Palestinian national context.
The Palestine war of 1948 remains a formative event in the Middle East and especially for the immediately concerned parties, Israelis and Palestinians. Notwithstanding the primary role of that war in shaping the contours of the Arab-Israeli conflict for generations and its impact on processes of socialization and politics in Israel and the Arab neighboring countries, the study of memory and historiography of 1948 is still in its infancy. The last three decades witnessed a major surge in the production by both Israelis and Palestinians of historical research and memory of the 1948 War along with the shifting focus of the Arab-Israeli conflict from one between Israel and its Arab neighboring states to its original inter-communal Arab-Jewish dispute within historic Palestine. Whether the result of intensified conflict or peace negotiations, or the timed release of archival documents, the dialectic of politics and self-legitimation accounted for mutually encouraged efforts to recover, rewrite, and disseminate particular historical narratives of the 1948 War concerned with issues of injustice, morality, and guilt, especially but not exclusively, the Palestinian refugee problem.
The increasing interest on both sides of the national divide in the background and consequences of the 1948 War parallels the incremental return of the