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Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948
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.
280 pages, Hardcover
First published May 6, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 24, 2019
Well, so much for “a land without a people for a people without a land” and/or “making the desert bloom.”
An essential corrective to Israel’s pernicious origin myth (many countries have them; the USA’s a case in point), Noga Kadman’s “Erased From Space and Consciousness” exhaustively reclaims all 418 depopulated Palestinian villages and reconstructs their history. (The appendices/notes/bibliography/ index take up 100 pages of this 250-page book.)
“In America they retained vestiges of important Indian tribes or tribes that are still dwelling. This is not the case here. We have nothing to do with the name of a minuscule Bedouin tribe, and we can assign a Hebrew name here.”
—Yitzhak Ben Zvi, at the Negev Committee meeting, September 29, 1949
Such purposeful erasure — both of the landscape and on maps — can then more easily make Gold Meir’s infamous proclamation, “There were no such things as Palestinians,” a mere twenty years later, seem practically inevitable.
As Kadman states in her conclusion, “The Palestinian villages are remnants of periods in history of the country in which Jewish presence was scant — periods that the Israeli collective memory prefers to marginalize and suppress. This collective memory emphasizes those ancient periods in which there was a sizable Jewish presence in the country, and the resettlement of the country with Jews in the modern era. It ignores a long period of Arab settlement in the country, or frames it as a passing, temporary, and negative episode, all traces of which need to be erased as soon as possible. … After the War of 1948, the newly created State of Israel contained within its borders over four hundred depopulated villages and eleven cities emptied of all or most of their Arab-Palestinian residents. Israel prevented these residents, who had escaped or been expelled across the border, from returning home, making the majority of Palestinians refugees.”
But Kadman also notes recent good news: “The last few years, however, have witnessed an awakening of interest among Israeli scholars in the depopulated Palestinian villages … The growth of Israeli academic interest in the price paid by the Palestinians in 1948 and its place in Israeli consciousness is part of a wider process of awakening to these issues in Israeli society, however marginal…”
As the wise Palestinian polymath Edward Said once said, in referencing the particular complexities of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, “We are the victim of victims.”
An essential corrective to Israel’s pernicious origin myth (many countries have them; the USA’s a case in point), Noga Kadman’s “Erased From Space and Consciousness” exhaustively reclaims all 418 depopulated Palestinian villages and reconstructs their history. (The appendices/notes/bibliography/ index take up 100 pages of this 250-page book.)
“In America they retained vestiges of important Indian tribes or tribes that are still dwelling. This is not the case here. We have nothing to do with the name of a minuscule Bedouin tribe, and we can assign a Hebrew name here.”
—Yitzhak Ben Zvi, at the Negev Committee meeting, September 29, 1949
Such purposeful erasure — both of the landscape and on maps — can then more easily make Gold Meir’s infamous proclamation, “There were no such things as Palestinians,” a mere twenty years later, seem practically inevitable.
As Kadman states in her conclusion, “The Palestinian villages are remnants of periods in history of the country in which Jewish presence was scant — periods that the Israeli collective memory prefers to marginalize and suppress. This collective memory emphasizes those ancient periods in which there was a sizable Jewish presence in the country, and the resettlement of the country with Jews in the modern era. It ignores a long period of Arab settlement in the country, or frames it as a passing, temporary, and negative episode, all traces of which need to be erased as soon as possible. … After the War of 1948, the newly created State of Israel contained within its borders over four hundred depopulated villages and eleven cities emptied of all or most of their Arab-Palestinian residents. Israel prevented these residents, who had escaped or been expelled across the border, from returning home, making the majority of Palestinians refugees.”
But Kadman also notes recent good news: “The last few years, however, have witnessed an awakening of interest among Israeli scholars in the depopulated Palestinian villages … The growth of Israeli academic interest in the price paid by the Palestinians in 1948 and its place in Israeli consciousness is part of a wider process of awakening to these issues in Israeli society, however marginal…”
As the wise Palestinian polymath Edward Said once said, in referencing the particular complexities of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, “We are the victim of victims.”
May 15, 2020
An important exploration into the Zionist settler colonial project of depopulation. Whilst informative in its resources and general thesis, Kadman falls victim to this general narrative of “two sides” in which there is little to no acknowledgment of blatant racism and injustice present. Furthermore, she barely attempts to comprehend that the Jewish individuals who colonized Palestine did so out of their own colonial framework and Orientalist beliefs.
May 20, 2016
A well written history of how Israel is trying to erase history.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews