Cultural Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20

Between knowing and understanding: Israeli Jews

and the memory of the Palestinian Nakba

Norma Musih

To cite this article: Norma Musih (2021): Between knowing and understanding: Israeli Jews and
the memory of the Palestinian Nakba, Cultural Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2021.1967417

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1967417

Published online: 25 Aug 2021.

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CULTURAL STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1967417

Between knowing and understanding: Israeli Jews

and the memory of the Palestinian Nakba
Norma Musih
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

ABSTRACT
The village of Miska is one of the 530 Palestinian localities destroyed during the
Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for great calamity, catastrophe, or devastation).
Although the ruins of these places are part of the Israeli landscape, and most
Israeli Jews have some knowledge about the Nakba, they do not understand
its meaning. In this paper, I deploy Hannah Arendt’s distinction between
knowing and understanding to answer the question of how the Nakba can at
once be known but not understood by Israeli Jews. Drawing on the tours
conducted by the activist organization Zochrot (Hebrew for ‘we remember’)
to the ruins of Miska, I argue that the embodied and symbolic practices
conducted during the tours to Miska can work to challenge the gap between
knowing and understanding by creating a different perspective on the
Nakba. From this perspective, the Nakba is not only understood as the
memory of the ‘other’—that is, the Palestinian memory of the place—but is
understood as a complex memory that embodies a dialectical relationship
between Jewish and Palestinian remembrances: a potentially common
memory of the place and the basis for the imagining of a common future.

KEYWORDS Israel/Palestine; memory; activism; Hannah Arendt; imagination; tours

Understanding, as distinguished from having correct information and scientific

knowledge, is a complicated process which never produces unequivocal results.
It is an unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come
to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the
world. (Arendt 2005, pp. 307–308)

‘Miska is here!’ reads the Hebrew sign held by the activists and refugees in
the photographs (Figures 1 and 2) who are protesting the planned demoli-
tion of the last remains left from the village. Until 1948, the village of Miska
was located 15 kilometres southwest of the city of Tulkarm in Palestine.
Today, its ruins are situated next to kibbutz Ramat Ha Kovesh, in between
fields and orange groves, not far from the city of Kfar Saba in Israel. The
stone buildings depicted behind the wired fence in the background of
these photographs are the ruins of Miska. These, are a familiar backdrop

CONTACT Norma Musih norma.musih@gmail.com

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 N. MUSIH

Figure 1. Photograph by Zochrot. Figure 2. Photograph by Zochrot.

in Israel, where ruins of Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods can be

seen everywhere (Benvenisti 2002, Khalidi 2006, Abu-Sitta 2010, Kadman
2015). While real estate agents advertise magnificent properties with
arched windows and high ceilings in Jerusalem and Haifa as ‘Arab
houses,’ Israelis can also see villages that have turned into piles of blocks,
lines of cactuses and uncultivated fruit trees in the northern part of Israel,
or paths that lead to nowhere in the southern part of Israel. These are
not singular cases; hundreds of ruins of Palestinian life, culture and heritage
are still part of the Israeli environment, and yet they are almost invisible for
most Israeli Jews—almost because it would be inaccurate to say that Israeli
Jews cannot see them. In fact, although the memory of the Nakba (Arabic
for ‘catastrophe,’ referring to the destruction of Palestinian life in 1948) is
not part of Israeli public culture, knowledge about the Nakba is available
in Israel.1 The question we need to ask, then, is this: what is the mechanism
that allows Israeli Jews to know that ‘this is an Arab house’ without under-
standing the meaning of the house’s emptiness?
Hannah Arendt (2005) speaks to the gap between what we know and what
we understand in her essay ‘Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of
Understanding)’. Knowledge and understanding are not the same for
Arendt, but they are interrelated. ‘Understanding is based on knowledge
and knowledge cannot proceed without a preliminary, inarticulate under-
standing. Understanding precedes and succeeds knowledge. Preliminary
understanding, which is at the basis of all knowledge, and true understand-
ing, which transcends it, have this in common: they make knowledge mean-
ingful’ (Arendt 2005, p. 310). Arendt further explains that we become
alienated from understanding when we succumb to rules that dictate what
we know or what we see and ignore our own experiences. This process of
alienation, or learning not to see what is in front of one’s eyes, is central to
the socialization process of Israeli Jews- myself included. Their inability to
understand is not for lack of knowledge; Israeli Jews have an embodied
knowledge of the Palestinian past that they cannot erase. They know
 CULTURAL STUDIES 3

Palestinians lived there before (hence the ruins that gesture to their absence),
they reside in neighbourhoods that were Palestinian (and may still bear a
Palestinian name), and they have visited national parks and examined the
ruins of Palestinian life up-close on myriad occasions. Yet, they refuse to
understand the meaning of Palestinian’s ruins in and as part of modern Israel.
In this paper, I deploy Arendt’s distinction between knowing and under-
standing to answer the question of how the Nakba can at once be known
but not understood by Israeli Jews. In the first part of the article, I consider
the gap between knowing and understanding by examining how the
memory of the Palestinian Nakba appears, disappears, and reappears in
Israeli public culture. In the second part of this article I consider the work con-
ducted by the activist organization Zochrot (Hebrew for ‘we remember’), a Tel-
Aviv based NGO that seeks to promote acknowledgement of and accountabil-
ity for the Palestinian Nakba among Israeli Jews. As an Israeli Jew, knowing
facts about 1948 while not understanding its meaning for Palestinians, was
part of my ‘becoming Israeli’. 2 This very gap, which after October 2000s
became unbearable for me, was what led us, a group of Israeli activists, to
establish Zochrot.3 Therefore, Zochrot is not just an object of study for me,
but a place in which I learned to speak a new language, learned how to
imagine with others and learned the boundaries of my own imagination.
This paper is based on my experience as part of Zochrot, a film docu-
menting the inaugural tours to the ruins of Miska conducted in 2001 and
2002, photographs from the tours, a booklet in which testimonies were col-
lected, and a counter mapping activity based on the tours.4 Following an
analysis of these I argue that the symbolic practices conducted during the
tours to Miska challenged the gap between knowing and understanding
by creating a different perspective on the Nakba. This perspective, which
arises from a bodily experience of visiting a Palestinian destroyed village, lis-
tening to testimonies as part of a group, and deploying and activist
approach to suppressed memories of the Nakba can potentially connect
between knowing and understanding. From this perspective, the Nakba is
not only understood as the memory of the ‘other’—that is, the Palestinian
memory of the place—but also as a complex memory that embodies a dia-
lectical relationship between Jewish and Palestinian remembrances: a
potentially common memory of the place and the basis for imagining a
common future.

Remembering the Nakba in Hebrew

Memory is a central pillar in the constitution of Israeli national identity. Zionist
Jews who arrived in Palestine in the first decades of the twentieth century as
part of the ‘Hebrew project’ undertook a memory enterprise: recreating an
ancient history of Eretz Israel. This ancient history featured heroic myths of
4 N. MUSIH

ancient Jews such as the Bar Kokhba revolt and the fall of Massada that were
relatable to the young, mostly secular Zionist Jews (Zerubavel 1995). Yet, for
them, remembering came hand in hand with forgetting: forgetting their
languages and their past as diasporic Jews. 5 This combination of remember-
ing an ancient Hebrew past and forgetting a recent Jewish one constituted
the Israeli national ethos.6 However, when the state of Israel was formally
declared in 1948, it was declared a Jewish democratic state (not a Hebrew
democratic state). Sociologist Uri Ram (2000, p. 48) explains this move,
noting that Jewish tradition provided the legitimization needed for the
Israeli project of colonization and a sound definition of group boundaries:
‘in these circumstances, ‘Jewish’ would come to mean, more than anything
else, ‘non-Arab’’. The justification for the Nakba necessitated that even
secular Jews turn to the Bible and Jewish continuity. As Baruch Kimmerling
(1999, p. 340) observes, ‘the main characteristic of the Israeli social order is
Zionist hegemony. This hegemony is expressed in the taken-for-grantedness
of the equivalence between the Jewish religion and the nation’. This hege-
mony also dictates what can and what cannot be remembered in public.
Thus, although remains from the Nakba—that is, the expulsion of between
700,000 and 800,000 Palestinians and the demolition of 530 towns and vil-
lages (Morris 2004, Khalidi 2006, Abu Sitta 2010)—can be seen all over
Israel, they are not acknowledged on Israeli maps, signs, or commemoration
sites in Hebrew.
Public memory is not a stable object; it is fluid and always in a process of
becoming. In the case of Israeli society, the memory of the Nakba, which has
been violently silenced through the massive destruction of Palestinian life
and culture over more than fifty years, is considered the memory of
another public: the Palestinian public. This memory, however, has almost
no publicness in Israeli society. Yet, as I show here, despite the violent
efforts to erase it from the physical places and consciences of Israelis, it is
already part of Israeli public culture.7 To make this argument I discuss two
examples that show how knowledge of the Nakba was widely circulated in
Israeli popular culture from 1948 through the early 1950s and show how
the status of this knowledge changed during the 1970s and became a taboo.
In 1949, acclaimed Israeli Jewish author S. Yizhar published the novella
Hirbet Hizah in Hebrew, which describes the expulsion of Palestinian residents
from a fictional village and the atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers. It was
an immediate bestseller and, in 1978, and it was made into a film with the
same name by Israeli director Ram Levy. When the film was about to air on
Channel 1 (at the time, the only TV channel run by the Israeli Broadcasting
Authority), it sparked a public debate because its depiction of unethical
deeds done by Israeli soldiers towards the Palestinian inhabitants of the
village. It is worth noting that Yizahar’s novel was not unique in the Israeli cul-
tural landscape of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Prominent Israeli poet
 CULTURAL STUDIES 5

Nathan Alterman published his poem ‘Al Zot’ (‘On This’) in the popular Davar
newspaper towards the end of 1948. The poem describes the massacre of
unarmed Palestinians by IDF soldiers and is thought to reference the war
crimes committed in Lod (Lydda). Following its publication, David Ben
Gurion, Israel’s prime minister, ordered the poem to be distributed among
all IDF’s soldiers.8 During the late 1940s and early 1950s, then, the events
of the Nakba, including the atrocities committed by Israeli Jews to Palesti-
nians, were discussed openly.
Following the war of 1967 and the territorial expansion of Israel—the con-
quering of East Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the
Sinai Peninsula—the Israeli public atmosphere was one of euphoria. ‘The
occupation’ emerged as a concept associated specifically with the 1967 con-
quests and the Israeli settlement of the West Bank, which began in the 1970s.
This ‘occupation’ created new conflicts in Israeli society that displaced the
1948 Nakba from the Israeli consciousness. While after 1967 became legiti-
mate in Israeli society to criticize the ‘occupation’ of the West Bank, questions
about 1948 became a taboo.9 In the interim between the events of the Nakba
and the public discussion of the events in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, the
events of the Nakba became unthinkable to the point that they were almost
unmentionable, certainly not to be represented on TV. For many Israeli Jews,
the Nakba occupies the same traumatic/commemorative space as other trau-
matic memories. 10 This proximity generates anxiety related to the fear that
by recognizing one memory, others will be erased. The strong opposition
to remembering the Nakba in Israeli public culture reveals the depth of
power the event holds over the culture.
In the last fifteen years, the word Nakba has resurfaced in Israeli public dis-
course and popular culture, mainly around Israel’s Independence Day. Conse-
quently, the word Nakba has entered the everyday vocabulary and is used in
popular language to refer to a great calamity not necessarily related to Pales-
tinian history. For example, one of the fans of the Hapoel Tel Aviv soccer team
declared that the day the Usishkin stadium—the team’s home soccer field—
was destroyed ‘the Nakba day of Hapoel Tel Aviv.’ Popular language usually
recognizes a change by accepting new words before they are formally
adopted by official institutions. This anecdote shows that the meaning of
the word Nakba is known to most Israelis, even if it carries a negative conno-
tation because of its association with Palestinian political claims. The Nakba
Bill proposed by the right-wing party Yisrael Beiteinu and approved by the
Knesset (Israel’s parliament) in March 2011 demonstrates this duality. The
bill criminalizes any public memorial of the Nakba and sanctions state-
funded Israeli institutions that commemorate Nakba Day.11 So, on the one
hand, this bill represents a government’s effort to silence this memory
while, on the other hand, it shows Israelis cannot forget the Nakba.
6 N. MUSIH

This reappearance of the term might be because the Nakba is an event

that constantly leaves traces. Since the Nakba has not been acknowledged
by the state of Israel, Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 continue to
be refugees. In addition, because no reparations have been paid, the
Nakba is arguably not only an event of the past but an event that continues
in the present. Another possible explanation for this is that the Nakba,
although silenced and repressed, is already part of the Israeli public
memory and consciousness because it is part of Jewish Israeli culture and
identity.12 It is part and parcel of Israeli consciousness not only because it
occurred in the place that is currently home for Israeli Jews, but also
because Israeli Jews were the perpetrators of this atrocity, and they have
been—and still are—benefitting from its outcomes. The Nakba is thus inte-
grated in the Israeli past, and this may be one of the reasons the work of
Zochrot resonate with Israeli Jews who are willing to open up this black box.

Zochrot- remembering the Nakba in Hebrew13

Zochrot, the feminine plural form of the Hebrew verb meaning ‘to remember,’
is a Tel Aviv-based NGO that promotes the memory of the Nakba and Pales-
tinians’ right of return among Israeli Jews.14 As memory occupies a central
place in Israeli public culture, focusing on memory in the name and
mission of the organization was a strategic decision that gestures towards
a subject that is already important for Israeli Jews. The name Zochrot uses
the feminine plural form of the verb to challenge the project of national
memory in Israel. Hebrew customarily employs the masculine form of the
word to speak about memory in general and national memory in particular;
thus, this form of the verb operates as a challenge to the traditionally mascu-
line historical narrative.15 Memory and, more specifically, the Jewish com-
mandment zkhor (remember), which in Hebrew implies a level of action,
appear multiple times in the Hebrew Bible. In Israeli secular culture,
memory is applied mostly in relation to the Holocaust and in relation to Mem-
orial Day, commemorating fallen Israeli soldiers. Zochrot’s mission to remind
the Jewish Israeli public about the Nakba is more complex than a straightfor-
ward educating mission. Remembering assumes previous knowledge of that
which needs to be remembered. Thus, the organization’s emphasis on
remembering reveals an assumption that Israeli Jews do already know in
some way or another about the Palestinian past of the place—that is, that
they have preexisting knowledge of the Nakba. Activists, therefore, need
not teach something new but rather jog the memory of something that is
already known but repressed and forgotten.
‘To speak the Nakba in Hebrew’ is how Zochrot defined its mission in 2001.
This mission statement points to an absence in the Hebrew language: the
impossibility of speaking the memory and history of the Nakba. The insertion
 CULTURAL STUDIES 7

of the Arabic word Nakba was itself an attempt to expand the Hebrew voca-
bulary in Israel so that it would include the possibilities for narrating other
memories and stories without duplicating the hegemonic Zionist discourse.
The formation of Zochrot was preceded by the founding of grassroots
Palestinian organizations such as BADIL and ADRID, which brought the
Nakba (back) to the centre of the Palestinian discourse.16 These organizations
were established as a political reaction to the Oslo Accords of 1993 that, like
the Israeli mainstream political agenda, sought to frame the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict around the 1967 war as if, ‘it all started then; no refugees, no Nakba,
no problem with the Palestinians in Israel’ (Zreik 2016, p. 361). Zochrot’s work
of specifically targeting the Israeli Jewish public mirrored this move and
sought to put the Nakba back at the centre of Israeli public discourse.

The tours of Zochrot

The performance of rituals is a central mode of remembrance in Judaism and
the repetition of rituals is also how secular Jewish Israelis construct collective
memory (Zerubavel 1995). For example, secular Jewish Israelis visit heritage
sites, and during the ritualistic visit, their national identity is re-inscribed on
their bodies. Heritage tourism is a well-established practice in Israeli public
culture. According to Rebecca Stein, during the first decades of the twentieth
century, touring the land was ‘a central technology’ of ‘nation-making,’ which
helped to rewrite the Palestinian landscape as a Jewish topography (2009,
pp. 339, 342). The practices of touring the land, rewriting its geography,
and—after the 1950s—hearing testimonies of Holocaust survivors, have
become major components in the symbolic establishment of the state of
Israel and a pedagogical tool of national identity formation.17 In the
context of post-Oslo tourism, Stein’s (2008, p. 2) main argument is that tour-
istic practices ought to be understood as ‘important site[s] of national refor-
mation’ through which ‘Israel was being reimagined’. Tourism not only takes
place ‘outside’ the nation-state but is also a practice that consolidates and
defines the nation-state by marking the borders of who can be part of this
community of belonging—who can be a tourist and who cannot.
Zochrot’s tours make use of these practices to introduce a different, some-
times even opposing memory. Opposing that is to the Israeli hegemonic
memory encapsulated in two weeks- during springtime- in which rituals,
mourning and celebrations come together to consolidate Israeli national
identity and collective memory. These start with the Holocaust commemora-
tion day to mourn the six million Jews killed by the Nazis, and a week later
Memorial Day to commemorate the Israeli soldiers who died for the state.
Memorial Day ends with the beginning of Independence Day celebrations.18
These sequence of national events trace a clear Zionist historical narrative in
which Jews are victims or heroes but never perpetrators, and there is no place
8 N. MUSIH

for others narratives. The historical narrative that the tours present is not just
an opposing narrative to the above mentioned sequence or a narrative
limited to the history of a Palestinian past (and present). It also includes
the memory of a wide range of relationships between Jews and Arabs that
are absent from Israeli historiography and cannot be reconstructed within
the political present. Zochrot offers participants the opportunity to tour the
land and listen to testimonies that sometimes challenge their own historical
understanding. Participants in the tours are invited to re-examine something
they know from their own experiences while simultaneously acknowledging
the gap between what they know and what they (do not) understand.
Yet, contrary to the heritage tours of historical sites that are acknowledged
through monuments, signs, and institutionalized tour guides, the Zochrot
tours temporarily construct a memory site that otherwise would not be
recognized as such. Moreover, while the heritage tours conducted in Israel
by state institutions (e.g. schools or the army) reproduce and reinforce
Zionist understandings of places, Zochrot tours produce a vernacular knowl-
edge through the many memories articulated on the tours. Noam Leshem
and Yifat Gutman refer to Zochrot tours as ‘memory activism.’ Leshem
(2010) understands the tours as ‘building a community of memory,’ a com-
munity comprised of Arabs and Jews that defies the Israeli ethnocratic
logic (p.176).19 Gutman (2017a, 2017b) asserts that the interaction between
past and future that characterizes this case of memory activism ‘provides a
lens to view not only how the past shapes the future—but also how future
visions can shape our understanding of the past’ (p.14). Both Leshem and
Gutman observe the memory dynamics between past, present, and future
on the tours. The bodily experience of the participants in these tours, I main-
tain, is as important. The body works as an evidentiary vehicle for historical
knowledge and thus memory making.20 It is this bodily experience that
plays a central role in creating the site of the tour as a site of a common
memory.
Common memory is developed through the shared experience of walking,
listening, and being together in a place: a Palestinian village that through the
tour becomes visible and potentially repopulated. This experience tempor-
arily challenges the spatial politics of Israel which prohibit Palestinian refu-
gees from returning to their homes.
The combination of an activist approach with a tourist experience offered
by Zochrot tours provides a generative understanding of the Nakba and its
meaning for Israelis and Palestinians. ‘Tourists’ become activists by participat-
ing in the creation of the place as a site of memory for the Nakba and by using
the Palestinian name of the place, which is reinforced by posting a sign with
the name of the village in Hebrew and Arabic. These signs, of course, are not
‘official signs’ and are usually removed either by state agents or, more typi-
cally, by ‘concerned citizens’ who grasp the meaning of the naming as a
 CULTURAL STUDIES 9

gesture towards a (re)claiming the place and decide that they cannot allow
such a manifestation to be part of their ‘Israeli’ place.
Contrary to the traditional tourist experience, Israeli Jews who take part in
the tours do not venture far to see a place they could not see at home. In
many senses, they stay at home. Yet, the testimony and guidance of Palesti-
nian refugees changes the experience of ‘home.’ While the locations of
Zochrot’s tours are usually familiar to the Jewish Israeli tourists who partici-
pate, such tourists are incapable of understanding its meaning without phys-
ically being there with a Palestinian group. This is because there is a
fundamental difference between reading a testimony and hearing it
firsthand from a Palestinian refugee as part of a group composed of Israelis
and Palestinians in the very place it occurred. When hearing a witness testi-
mony, one listens also to the silences, to the moment where the voice tone
changes and to the body language of the witness that sometimes reveals
other traumatic aspects of the event that are not concealed in words. More-
over, the embodied experience of walking, listening, and inhabiting the place
together creates a new understanding of the place, its traumatic meaning
and potentialities.
Safyyie Shbita conducted many of the Zochrot-organized tours through
her village. She was more than eighty years old when the photograph
(Figure 3) was taken in 2005. As she did in earlier and later tours, Safyyie
told the story of her family. Safyyie walked paths that were no longer
there, but through her footsteps and those of the group that followed her,
new paths were (re)traced. While Safyyie walked, she talked and pointed at
different places: houses that once stood there, the village cemetery, the
mosque. The participants in the tours could feel the distance between the

Figure 3. Safyyie Shbita posting a sign in Miska; photograph by Zochrot.

10 N. MUSIH

different sites in the village and see the remains of the village taking shape in
front of their eyes. They could experience the void of the village’s absence in
the present. Through their walking, the participants in the tour marked on the
ground with their feet a memory site that is not marked on the map and is not
marked on the place. This bodily activist experience, which generates knowl-
edge about the past through actions in the present, can potentially lead
Israeli Jews to understand the meaning of the Nakba for Palestinians and
for themselves.

Memories of the past, activism in the present

During the tours to Miska, refugees besides Safyyie spoke. Their testimonies
were intertwined: speaking together and helping each other remember. They
imparted knowledge to the Jewish Israeli tour participants, while activating a
practice the participants were familiar with—listening to a survivor’s testi-
mony. Since the 1960s, the recollection and public hearing of Holocaust sur-
vivors’ testimonies has become a national practice in Israel playing a
significant role in the construction of a national Zionist identity (Zerubavel
1995). Memories are inscribed, recollected, and articulated by individuals,
yet as Halbwachs (1992, p. 40) writes, ‘The individual remembers by placing
himself in the perspective of the group, but one may also affirm that the
memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in the individual memories’.
Thus, personal and collective memories merge and construct each other.
Moreover, the performativity of memory—that is, where, when, and with
whom this memory is shared—changes, in a sense, the memory. So for
example, if a painful memory is part of a public ceremony where perpetrators
of that very painful memory are present, the memory can turn into an act of
aknowledgement, a political claim, and an act of solidarity.
Since the mid-1980s, there have been grassroots efforts to collect testimo-
nies about the Nakba from the first generation of Palestinian refugees.21 Two
important features of these efforts are their popular basis and the direct par-
ticipation of the displaced community.22 These memories resist the con-
ditions of silencing imposed by the Zionist narrative and contribute to a
counter-memory of Israel/Palestine. Moreover, as Lila Abu-Lughod and
Ahmad Sa’di (2007, pp. 6–7) claim, Palestinian memories of the Nakba also
‘criticize the present in the name of a trauma that has hardly begun to be
recognized by those outside the Arab world and that awaits some form of
redress’. The memories of the Nakba represent both a symbolic claim on
the past and a claim on the present by publicly uncovering the historical
reasons for the status quo and providing the basis for reclaiming land, prop-
erties, and rights. The memories shared on Zochrot’s tours are part of these
wider grassroots projects. However, while the above-mentioned projects
address the Palestinian public, the memories shared by the refugees on
 CULTURAL STUDIES 11

Zochrot’s tours are translated into Hebrew explicitly addressing the Israeli
public. Moreover, Zochrot makes a special effort to include the memories
of Israeli neighbours and Israeli soldiers regarding the place and the expul-
sion of its residents.23 These memories are usually difficult to find since
they require an acknowledgement of the atrocities committed by the
person who tells the story. That is, it requires the perpetrator to acknowledge
and understand the meaning of their deeds and step forward to tell them.24
The production of knowledge about the past reflects the power relations
and politics of the present. The production and reproduction of knowledge
about the events of 1948 has been asymmetrical because Israeli historians
use archival documents while Palestinian historians, who have no access to
Israeli archives and have been deprived of their own historical archives, rely
mainly on oral history. This inequality is maintained by the force of the
dual narrative constructed around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as seen in
public debate and political discourse. This dual narrative assumes that
there is one Israeli history of the place and another Palestinian history of
the same place and that these two histories can be told separately.
Performance theorist Diana Taylor (2003) traces a distinction between
archival and oral history, or repertoire. She points out that while archival
memory exists in the form of documents and is intimately related to
power, the repertoire enacts embodied memory. The repertoire ‘requires
presence: people participate in the production of knowledge by ‘being
there,’ being part of the transmission’ (p. 20). In the case of Zochrot tours,
the repertoire—the memories of the refugees—takes shape through the
group walks, the questions and answers, and the different voices that add
to these memories. The refugees and their families who were present on
the tours called attention to real bodies and traumatic experiences that
affected particular people, entire families, and continues to affect future
generations.
Safyyie’s unique voice during the tours was always clear and sound. One
particularly painful and vivid memory Safyyie shared during the 2001 tour
opened the door to another aspect of the Nakba that Zochrot activists had
not heard about before. Safyyie spoke about agreements the village had
with the surrounding Jewish settlements—agreements of mutual non-belli-
gerence (Bronstein 2001). These were agreements between neighbours
who had a shared history and who tried to oppose the violence that sur-
rounded them in 1948. The agreements came after months of tension.
Safyyie recalled:
All residents of the area gathered in Tel al Ashir and wrote together a paper
[agreement]: we will move safely and you will move safely [in the area] as neigh-
bors, and that’s it. We [signed] the agreement. We and our neighbors. After
some time, they sent a message and asked someone in charge of the village
12 N. MUSIH

to come to them. He went, and they told him, ‘We are canceling the agreement.’
He said to them, ‘Why? Someone did something?’ They said no. (Bronstein 2001)

In a 2009 interview, Safyyie explained that the Jewish villages had cancelled
the agreement because they said that the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary
organization that later became the core of the Israel Defense Forces, would
not honour it (Shbita 2009, pp. 52–53). She said, ‘They are coming from
Deir Yassin, and these Moshe Dayan and Ben-Gurion are not committing
themselves to anything.’25 The inhabitants of her village left after hearing
about the Deir Yassin massacre, which had taken place only a few weeks
before. They were never allowed to return.
The history of the agreements between Palestinian and Jewish villages is
even more neglected than the history of the Nakba. This is largely because
these agreements reveal a form of existence in Palestine that challenges the
Zionist nationalist history and questions the ‘inevitability’ of the 1948 war
and the subsequent expulsion of Palestinians. In her film Civil Alliances,
Ariella Azoulay (2012) traces many of these agreements through Israeli
archives in order to reconstruct a civil history that still needs to be
written. Thus, the agreement Safyyie described was not unique, nor was it
an isolated event.
In the same 2009 interview, Safyyie spoke about the expulsion from Miska,
remembering her fear and insecurity, the death surrounding her, and her own
helplessness:
Mahmud Jyousi came to us—he was known as Abu Zaharan. He told us to leave
[the field] and go back home. ‘The villagers left,’ he said. We did not believe him
so we continued to harvest. Then came Alanis and told us, ‘Go back home, there
is nobody left in the village,’ he said and began crying. (Shbita 2009, pp. 52–53)

On the 2001 tour to Miska, Safyyie also spoke about a Jewish family, the Ben
Tovs, who were their neighbours before 1948 and are still their friends:
We had the land and they had the water. … The parents are already dead, only
the children are alive. And each has two children, one boy and one girl; they live
in Tel Aviv—actually before Tel Aviv. … They are very loyal. Their daughter,
Bahadana, was married to Yakob Duri, the first chief of staff of the Israeli
army. It was only thanks to the Ben Tov family that the Shbita family
managed to stay in Tira. (Bronstein 2001)

One of the many questions that come to mind when thinking about the close
relations between the Shbita and Ben Tov families—and moreover, when
thinking about the agreements the villagers had with their neighbours—is
what could have happened if these agreements had been honoured. What
could have happened if the Jewish neighbours of Miska had kept their word
and protected the village? Today, immersed in a violent public culture, we
don’t have the tools to ‘imagine otherwise.’ But there is an urgent need to
imagine roads not taken and ‘potential histories’ (Azoulay 2013) in order to
 CULTURAL STUDIES 13

challenge the inevitability and inheritance of the political present. The tours to
Miska offer the possibility to ask: how does it feel to lose one’s home and entire
village? How does it feel to become a refugee? And at the same time, they offer
the possibility to imagine what Miska could have looked like today if it had not
been destroyed. The tours to Miska provide a way to imagine not only what
could have happened differently then, but also what can happen differently
now by performing a community that listens, remembers, and acknowledges
the Nakba in Hebrew and Arabic.
On the tours, second- and third-generation Palestinian refugees spoke
about their present lives and their wishes for the future. Fadi Shbita spoke
in fluent Hebrew, addressing the Jewish-Israeli tour participants:
Part of my family is in Tira now, and part of my family is in Jordan, and another
part is in refugee camps. … You are expected to be Israeli and not Palestinian,
and when you say you are Palestinian it sounds threatening. Every time I think
of the story of my family, I imagine [what] if I were now living in Jordan or in a
refugee camp. How would I feel then? How can I say that I am Israeli and not
Palestinian when with a small historical change I could be in a refugee camp
in the West Bank? … We shall never give up the hope and the dream, and we
will live all our lives claiming our right to come back to our place, to the
place where our roots are. (Bronstein 2001)

On the 2001 Zochrot tour to Miska, Eitan Bronstein, a Jewish-Israeli co-

founder of Zochrot, and then its director, opened his speech in Arabic.
Switching to Hebrew, he said:
Dear people of Miska, thank you for hosting us in your lands. We hope and we
believe that we are not far from the day we will be your guests in your new
houses in Miska next to your neighbors from Ramat ha Kovesh, Sde Warburg,
and Mishmeret. … We believe Jews and Arabs will be able to live here as
equal citizens only after the Palestinian suffering will be publicly acknowledged
by Israelis. (Bronstein 2001)

The speeches of Fadi and Eitan added yet another layer to the tour, connect-
ing the past with the present by asking the participants not only to look at
Miska’s past but also to imagine a future for Miska. The connection the
speeches made offered a practical approach to taking responsibility—not
only acknowledging the memory of Miska, but also clearly calling for the refu-
gees’ right of return to their homes.

Reframing ‘their memory’ as ‘our memory’

Zochrot’s tours to destroyed Palestinian villages started with an urge to fill a
gap—to tell the silenced story of the Nakba and a history that Israeli Jews do
not know, which Zochrot activists initially understood as the Palestinian
history of the place. This remains the main motivation that brings Israeli
Jews to join the tours. But as the tours progressed and more testimonies
14 N. MUSIH

from Palestinians and Israelis began to accumulate, Zochrot activists started

to understand that the memory of the Nakba is not just, not quite, and not
only, a Palestinian memory, but a shared memory. It is the memory of a
common past that holds a wide range of relationships between Jews and
Arabs: from amicable neighbourly relationships to atrocities, destruction,
and expulsion. Here it is important to distinguish between memory and
suffering. The suffering was and still is Palestinian. Palestinians are the ones
who lost their houses, their land, and their freedom, yet the memory
belongs to the perpetrators of this suffering as well. They were there, they
committed the atrocities or stood by and watched them, and we, Israeli
Jews, enjoy their fruits today. In the sense that both Israelis and Palestinians
share this event as victims and perpetrators, this memory belongs to both
groups, and it forms part of a shared history that cannot be told separately.
However, understanding the Nakba in terms of victims and perpetrators is
not enough. As Azoulay (2013, p. 561) clearly puts it: ‘The Nakba framework
places all Jews on one side and all Palestinians on the other, ignoring the role
of the Nakba in creating the national rift as well as its destructive effects
within the Jewish population’. On the Zochrot tours, this understanding crys-
talized through the different testimonies that revealed the tragic conse-
quences of the Nakba, not only for the Palestinians who lost their homes,
but also for the Israeli Jews who lost the possibility of living in a civil
society. For example, during the tour of Miska in 2001, Safyyie painfully
described the Etzel attacks that the villagers (mainly the women, since they
were the ones cultivating the fields) suffered from 1936 to 1937.26 Tal
Haran, a Jewish Israeli woman, also participated in this tour. She listened care-
fully to every word Safyyie said, but she did not speak. In 2009, as part of yet
another organized tour to the village of Miska, Zochrot published a booklet.
For this booklet, Tal wrote a short piece reflecting on her first tour to Miska
and her encounter with Safyyie’s testimony:
Among the speakers was an old woman dressed in a fallaha27 dress, her eyes
bright and her voice firm. She talked about the old days. She said the people
of Miska were in friendly relations with their Jewish neighbors. Then she told
about the young men from the Etzel who started patrolling the fields and inti-
midating the fallahas. I asked when that was. She said it was in 1936 or 1937.
Then, the land overturned on me. … My father, an Etzel militant, used to tell
us how he kept guard and protected the fields of Ramat Ha Kovesh in 1936
or 1937. … I owe an apology to the speaker since then, while tears filled my
eyes I could not approach her. (Haran 2009, p. 22)

Tal’s inability to verbalize her apology to Safyyie during the tour needs to be
understood in the gap between what Tal knew and what she understood. All
her life, Tal heard her father’s stories about the days in which he ‘defended’
the fields of Ramat Ha Kovesh. She knew this fact. But she never thought
about it, or, to borrow from Arendt, she never understood completely that
 CULTURAL STUDIES 15

what her father described as defense was in fact the intimidation of women
working in the fields that resulted in the expulsion of the people of Miska.
Tal’s tears during the tour were the first appearance of an understanding
that was formed through her bodily experience. Something she knew all
her life transformed into something she understood. During the tour, Tal
could start to imagine the history she heard from her father from the perspec-
tive of Safyyie, and she understood what her father’s deeds meant for the
people of Miska but also for herself—a Jewish Israeli woman who, although
she did not perform the act of expulsion herself, benefits from it and is part of
a society that does nothing to repair the wrong. It took her seven years to
publicly acknowledge her father’s active role in the expulsion of Miska and
articulate her apology. But now part of Tal’s memories—her father’s stories
—are connected to Safyyie’s story. Again, in Azoulay’s (2013) words, we
can say that becoming a refugee was Safyyie and her family’s catastrophe,
but becoming perpetrators and descendants of perpetrators is now Tal’s dis-
aster and our disaster as Israeli Jews.
The story of Tal and Miska does not end here. The understanding that
makes politics meaningful—as Arendt describes—is a never-ending
process that has deliberative characteristics and an ongoing commitment
to action. In the summer of 2010, Tal participated in another and more ambi-
tious initiative. This time, she articulated her willingness to acknowledge but
also to take responsibility for the expulsion of Miska, and to actively imagine a
different present. Together with refugees from Miska and other activists from
Zochrot, Tal was part of a counter-mapping workshop conducted by Einat
Manoff that aimed to develop specific plans for the return of the refugees
to Miska (Figure 4). During the workshop, the participants studied historical

Figure 4. Counter-mapping workshop at Zochrot Gallery; photograph by Nimrod Zin,

Zochrot.
16 N. MUSIH

maps and historical and aerial photographs and compared these to the
current state of affairs in the area. Then they traced new maps in order to visu-
alize the possibilities for rebuilding Miska in the present. As Manoff (2011)
describes it,
The main question we asked was, ‘What will the return of refugees actually look
like on the ground?’ Our attempt to answer this question was an exercise in the
practical space of utopia: we looked at the future in order to create the space for
a discourse of change in

the present as part of a strategy of movement through time and space in oppo-
sition to segregation and the ongoing policy of occupation. (p.8)

Tal took part in this process out of the conviction not only that the refugees of
Miska should return, but also that she needs to be part of this planning and
should be active in facilitating their return. Not all participants in the tours
went through the same process Tal went through in response to her encoun-
ters with Safyyie at Miska. While for some, as in Tal’s case, these encounters
resulted in further action, for others they did not. Nonetheless, Tal’s process
demonstrates the potential for transformation on the tours. It reveals that
engaging with embodied practices of memory activism that take responsibility
in the present for the past can lead to political actions in the future.

Decolonizing memory, imagining a future

Zochrot operates in a context in which the Nakba is not only part of the past
but part of the present in the sense that the Nakba is an ongoing process:
Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 and their descendants are still refu-
gees. No restitutions were made, no compensations were paid by the state
of Israel, and there has not been a process of reconciliation. This is contrary
to what usually happens in commemorative efforts where contested or trau-
matic public memory is the memory of a conflict that has come to an end.
Remembering and forgetting are essential for the consolidation of commu-
nities. If we think about the constitution of hegemonic memory as a
process of colonization, the decolonization of memory becomes an essential
first step toward decolonization. This necessitates pointing to what can and
cannot be remembered in the public sphere. In the case of Israeli society, it
is the memory of the Nakba. Zochrot has taken the approach to remember:
their tours re-interpret and give new meaning to historical events that
have been consolidated in Zionist public memory as the basis for claims of
validity and power. Dragging the Palestinian history of a place onto the
surface is not all that happens on Zochrot tours. The active approach to
memory is a call to reimagine the memory of the place and the memory of
the Nakba as a memory that belongs to both victims and perpetrators and
therefore a memory that bears a joint responsibility to carry it together.
 CULTURAL STUDIES 17

Raif Zreik (2016) rightly points out that ‘Israel is a society that lacks even a
fantasy about the future.’ One possible explanation for this is that Israeli
society has not made amendments with its past and thus cannot imagine
its future. Or, to paraphrase Arendt, Israeli Jews have not come to terms
with the reality they created and thus cannot imagine a future in which
they are at home in the world. Taking a performative activist approach, the
tours of Zochrot gesture towards a different path, both to the past and to
the future. By politicizing the memory of a specific place and resisting the
hegemonic Zionist ideology, the tours create an alternative memory. This
memory, in turns, facilitates the transition from knowing to understanding,
which I characterize here as part of a performative and collective experience.
Although this is a temporary change (the individuals taking the tour will
eventually return to their homes), the transformation experienced by the par-
ticipants remains within their bodies. While it is difficult to measure political
change in a cultural context, it is worth noting here that the tours to Miska
that started in 2001 continue to take place and have led to hundreds of
tours to other villages and cities.
For Israeli Jews, understanding is a process of reflexivity. It means more
than having correct information about the atrocities of the Nakba for the
Palestinians. It means becoming aware again and again of the implications
and consequences of the Nakba for Palestinians and for themselves as the
lawful heirs of the 1948 catastrophe. That is, the heirs of the perpetrators
of 1948 who, by not actively opposing the consequences of these atrocities
in the present, are doomed to continue this perpetration. Understanding
the Nakba, therefore, is an action that needs to happen in the world as
part of a dialogical process between Israelis and Palestinians. Understanding
means taking responsibility for the past and the present of the Nakba, and it is
the only way for Israeli Jews to not be perpetrators, reconcile with the
present, imagine a future, and ‘try to be at home in the world.’

Conclusion
Arendt describes the differences between knowing and understanding and
marks the relationship between the terms but does not specify how to
move a public from a preliminary understanding to knowing to the under-
standing that ‘makes knowledge meaningful.’ If we assume that knowing
and understanding are not passive states of being but are the outcomes of
an active approach to being, we come to see that the answer to the questions
of ‘what is worth knowing?’ and ‘what is worth understanding?’ are political
decisions.
Through the analysis of the multilayered relationship between the Nakba
and Israeli public culture as it manifests on the tours conducted by Zochrot, I
sought to show that memory and imagination are two interrelated forces
18 N. MUSIH

that can help to move a public from knowing to understanding. Understanding

is an unending process that requires a continuous engagement with remem-
bering the past and coming to terms with it by actions in the present. Arendt
calls the faculty of the imagination ‘the gift of the understanding heart,’ and
towards the end of her essay she writes: ‘true understanding does not tire of
interminable dialogue and ‘vicious circles’ because it trusts that imagination
eventually will catch at least a glimpse of the always frightening light of
truth’ (2005, p. 323). Inherent in understanding is imagination, and it is imagin-
ation that Israeli Jews exercise during the Zochrot tours that allows them to
start filling the gaps between what they know and what they understand.

Notes
1. Although knowledge of the Nakba in Hebrew has been growing since the late
1980s, thanks to the work of historians like Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé, soci-
ologists like Yehuda Shenhav and Ronen Shamir, literary scholars like Hanan
Hever, philosophers like Adi Ophir, and visual-culture scholars like Ariella
Azoulay, among others, this has not significantly changed the Israeli public’s
understanding of the Nakba.
2. I was not born Israeli but became Israeli by the ‘law of Return’ that grants citi-
zenship to Jews around the world.
3. In 2001, I co- founded Zochrot and served in different roles during the ten years
I was actively involved with the organization. Among other things, I developed
the education department, established and curated the art gallery, and served
as general director of the organization.
In October 2000 Palestinians from Israel (Arab citizens of the state) demon-
strated in solidarity with the second intifada led by Palestinians in the Occupied
Territories. The violent response of Israeli security forces that killed 13 Arab citi-
zens led to a rupture in the Israeli left. For an account of October 2000’s events
see: Bishara 2001.
4. The materials discussed in this paper are available online at https://zochrot.org/
en/village/49248
5. The Zionist discourse that evolved towards the beginning of the 20th century
seek to (re)construct a Hebrew nativeness highlighting the connection of the
Jewish people to the land and to Hebrew as a spoken language. This, as
opposed to a Jewish diasporic tradition where Hebrew was perceived as a
holy language reserved only for prayers.
6. Complementary to this ethos is the ethos articulated through the Zionist
slogan: ‘A land without a people for a people without a land.’ For the Zionist
movement, one can learn from the slogan, the land was empty and the empti-
ness of the land represented the right and legitimacy of the Jewish people to it,
not only because it was promised [by God] and historically inhabited by ancient
Hebrews, but because it made sense, it was a good match: a people without a
land for a land without a people.
7. See Eitan Bronstein Aparicio (2016) for a compelling historical account of how
the concept of Nakba works in Israeli society.
8. Hannan Hever has shown that Israeli poetry publicly referred to the Nakba in
the first years after its occurrence. Hever 2010.
 CULTURAL STUDIES 19

9. The word occupation as used in Israeli public discourse to refer to the events
following the war of 1967 is misleading. Occupation is usually a timely situation
that, contrarily to colonization, is expected to end. However, ‘the occupation’ in
the Israeli context is ongoing for more than 50 years. And considering that the
state is 70 years old, the ‘occupation’ is already part of the constitution of the
State of Israel. For a compelling account of the occupation as part of the
state formation, see Azoulay and Ophir 2012.
10. The main traumatic memory of the Israeli society is the memory of the Holo-
caust. Although the memory of the Nakba and the memory of the Holocaust
– two foundational traumatic events- are usually discussed separately, there
are intersections between them that as Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg
show are embedded in cultural imaginaries and power relations. See: Bashir,
Bashir, and Amos Goldberg Foreword by Elias Khoury Afterword by Jacqueline
Rose, eds. The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History.
Columbia University Press, 2018.
11. Palestinians in Israel commemorate Nakba Day on Israel’s Independence Day
instead of May 15, which is the official Nakba Day. This is because during the
first eighteen years of the Israeli state (1948 to 1966), Palestinian citizens of
Israel were governed under military law and needed special permits to leave
their homes. They were only free to travel on Israel’s Independence Day, and
the first thing they usually did on that day was visit their houses, villages,
and towns. This is how this tradition began.
12. See Even-Tzur 2016 for an in-depth analysis of the Nakba as part of a collective
Israeli unconscious.
13. For more information on Zochrot, see www.zochrot.org/en.
14. The right of return is established in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, par.
13, sec. 2: ‘Every person has the right to leave any country, including their own,
and to return to their country.’ The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refu-
gees (UNRWA) registered approximately 5 million refugees living in the Gaza strip,
the West Bank, Jordan, and Lebanon in 2004 (‘Palestine Refugees,’ n.d.). Another
1.7 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants are not registered with the
UN, and about 355 thousand Palestinians and their descendants are internally dis-
placed persons (IDPs; see ‘FAQs about Palestinian Refugees,’ n.d.).
15. The words memory (‫ )זכרון‬and masculine (‫ )זכר‬hold the same root in the Hebrew
language:‫ר‬.‫כ‬.‫ז‬.
16. The establishment of BADIL and the establishment of ADRID preceded the
establishment of Zochrot and contributed to its formation.
BADIL is a Palestinian NGO based in Bethlehem and established in 1998. It is
a resource center for Palestinian residency and refugee rights that, through
advocacy and educational and community-based projects, is committed to pro-
tecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees and internally dis-
placed persons. ADRID is the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the
Internally Displaced in Israel, a Palestinian NGO based in the north of Israel
that leads tours to Palestinian destroyed villages and organizes the March of
Return every year.
17. The survivors’ testimonies received a place in the Israeli public discourse mainly
after the Eichmann trial, while touring is a practice that started with Zionism
before the Holocaust and has been influenced by secular and romantic
German traditions of the ‘return to nature.’ The Zionist tradition also added
some religious elements of longing for Zion and love for the sacred land.
20 N. MUSIH

18. For an engaging visual testimony of how memory works in Israeli society see Eyal
Sivan’s documentary IZKOR, Slaves of Memory (1990) https://vimeo.com/
ondemand/izkoreng. For an account of how these national days and their rituals
are translated into educational performances in Israel see: Ben-Amos et al. 1999.
19. Ethnocracy is a term coined by political geographer Oren Yiftachel 2006 to
describe a political regime that facilitates expansion and control by a dominant
ethnicity in contested lands.
20. In the last ten years, there is a growing body of work that from different disci-
plinary angles examines the embodiments of memory. For a philosophical
approach see for example: Casey 2000. In the contexts of commemoration
tours to Holocaust memorial sites in Poland see Feldman (2010) and in the
context of dark tourism see: Phaedra (2009). For thinking of bodies as archives
and research tools see: Zami 2021.
21. For one of these pioneer projects, see Kanaana and Zeitawi 1988.
22. Cf. projects conducted by grassroots Palestinian organizations in Bethlehem
(the BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights),
Ramallah (the Palestinian Diaspora and Refugee Center), and Lebanon (the
Nakba Archive).
23. See, for example, the tour to Beer Sheva and the testimony of Mikki Cohen, a
former Haganah soldier who took part in the expulsion of the Palestinian resi-
dents of the city, gave during the tour. For the report in English: zochrot.org/en/
tour/51116; for the testimony in Hebrew: zochrot.org/he/video/52975.
24. In this context it is important to note the video installation featuring testimo-
nies by Israeli veteran soldiers who fought in 1948. The testimonies conducted
and curated by Eyal Sivan were shown at Zochrot’s gallery in 2012 and consti-
tute a first step in the formation of what Sivan features as a ‘common archive.’
See https://zochrot.org/en/article/54230.
25. The massacre of Deir Yassin took place on April 9, 1948. The one hundred
victims (an approximate count) included children, women, and elders. Several
cases of mutilation and rape were also recorded (Morris 2004). This massacre
spread terror among Palestinians, who were told that they would suffer a
similar fate if they did not leave.
26. The Etzel (also, Irgun), or ‘The National Military Organization in the Land of
Israel,’ was a Zionist paramilitary organization that operated in Palestine
during the British Mandate. The group carried out several terrorist attacks
between 1931 and 1948.
27. Fallah, originally from Arabic fellah, is a word used to refer to Arab farmers.

Acknowledgments
I want to thank Safyyie Shbita and her family for their hospitality and for sharing with
me their story, and Zochrot activists, especially Eitan Bronstein Aparicio, Umar Al-
Ghubari, and Tal Haran, for listening with me to the story of Miska. I am also thankful
to John Louis Lucaites, Susan Lepselter, Eran Fisher, Blake Hallinan, Tal Zalmanovich,
and Katie Lind for their enriching comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
 CULTURAL STUDIES 21

Notes on contributor
Norma Musih is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev where she studies how
new media and digital technologies affect the memory of the Holocaust. Her research
is at the intersection of communication, digital culture, visual culture, and memory
studies. In her book manuscript: Deliberative Imagination she traces a link between
potential histories, activism, art, and digital imaginaries to suggest practices for train-
ing a political imagination in Israel/Palestine.

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