For years Israeli society has silenced and denied the Nakba and its own responsibility for its consequences, but in recent years the Nakba’s presence has grown. The Nakba’s presence provides educators with many opportunities to include it in their teaching. Teaching the Nakba undermines the act of erasing it from Israeli history and has the potential to create a future of reconciliation and education for critical civic involvement. What happens when teaching about the Nakba in Israel education systems?

It should be remembered that Israel demolished most of the homes that belonged to Palestinians.  Ariella Azoulay notes that Israel demolished more than 100,000 buildings during 1948 and 1949.(2)   But there is no reliable information on how many buildings still exist that haven’t undergone significant structural changes.  The authors estimate they number a few thousand, primarily in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Haifa, and in a few villages like Ayn Hawd and Ayn Karim.

The document is full of holes so fails to answer important crucial questions. But it is important to present to the sides and to the international community ideas and practical proposals for solving the Palestinians refugees issue in a humane manner that respects the human rights of all the sides, based on the principle that the violation of one person’s human rights should not be redressed by violating the human rights of another

But maybe imagine something different: a plane landing in Ben-Gurion airport with some “new immigrants” from the refugee camps in Lebanon. This really pompous politician is out to greet them, smiling from ear to ear. The first refugee comes down the steps and shakes people’s hands

The book reveals that the neutrality is only apparent, demonstrates the degree to which our space is the product of design and control guided by unequal national forces

I believed it would be natural to sing thePalestinian anthem.  I thought that severing the anthem from the Nakba would be ignoring its context, that connecting the Nakba with the anthem would be something that every participant would find natural and understandable.  Sa’ar thought otherwise – that here is where our alternative to the Zionist ceremonies must find expression – those ceremonies which can’t wait to harness every disaster and every trauma to the national narrative without respecting the disaster on its own terms, the suffering as suffering, the people as individuals.  In the Zionist version, suffering becomes an instrument of national propaganda.  When he’d finished we were all silent.  You proposed that Sa’ar say those things from the podium.  No one opposed the idea.

The continuing disregard of the Palestinian Nakba by part of the Israeli public and organizations like Im Tirzu, and, in particular, refusal to accept responsibility for it, makes it possible for the violent repression and the occupation to continue, making the Palestinians suffer, in particular, but also undermines the lives and security of Israeli Jews.

It is difficult to underestimate the role played by Zochrot in transforming the discourse and awareness of the Nakba. While you did not create the conditions that allowed your voice to become so significant, you were there to provide something that is more than a vocabulary or a narrative

The plan is to turn the site into a visitor center for Palestinian refugees who wish to be reacquainted with the land to which they have never been allowed to return

Regarding tomorrow's ceremony, we should note that even a serious study of the Nakba and the civil disaster accompanied the destruction of the obvious existence-together of Arabs and Jews until the founding of the State of Israel, even the little that is addressed regarding the disaster of such magnitude - is outside the fence

On May 15, 2012, Zochrot commemorated the 64th anniversary of the Nakba in the center of Tel Aviv. About 100 men and women participated in a ceremony led by Liat Rosenberg.  The commemoration was identical to the one planned for the eve of Israel’s Independence Day, which the police forcibly prevented

We, Jews and Arabs, have gathered here today to commemorate the Palestinian catastrophe, the nakba.
Those who were killed, those who were expelled from their villages, those who fled for their lives, who were not allowed to return home, who became refugees in their own land and in foreign refugee camps.

The Israeli mainstream, which Heitner faithfully represents, must make a difficult choice between (at least) two alternatives.  One is to ignore the nakba (“It’s inconceivable to provide them with a forum!”), but then it’s clear that the increasing amount of information available about the nakba makes that impossible.  The other is to deny the nakba occurred, but the result is something like the absurd booklet, Nakba Harta (Nakba bullshit) from Im Tirtzu’s workshop

A projective discourse about Israel/Palestine that is very much entangled with the past, however, is apparently not a specifically German phenomenon

They tried to imagine their lives together when the Palestinian refugees returned. They did so with simple drawings accompanied by explanatory text

More and more Facebook pages display photographs of Israeli leftists wearing buttons declaring they’re boycotting products from the settlements

Einat Manoff

Workshop: Einat Manoff, Umar Alghubari, Matan Boord, Eitan Bornstein, Amir Hillel, Ismat Shbeita, Fadi Shbeita, Fat'hiyyeh Shbeita, Tal Haran, Masha Zussman, Adam Freeman, Nimrod Zin, Claire Oren, Rula Awwad-Rafferty

Image Strips: Nimrod Zin

The increasing diffusion of the term "nakba" (‫ (נכבה‬in Hebrew, untranslated but transliterated, nun, chaf, bet, hey, suggest that the politics of solidarity with the Palestinian cause has resources that exceed separatism, or the entitlement of a mere standing apart.

Your return will be a part of the political whole and your induction as full citizens in the state is the base of our future—we have no future but a joint future 

The Nakba as an event that did not occur in the past continues to not occur also today.

Photoessay accompanying the exhibit "Palestinian Houses in West Jersualem," hosted at the Zochrot gallery

The silenced voices of the "Arabs of Herzliya" poke out from the cracks in the museum walls

A photograph from a Zochrot visit to Um a-Zinat shows up in a refugee camp in Lebanon.

A dialogue about conflicting rights is important for framing a rights-based case for Palestinian refugee return, and should be attractive for Israelis who want to remedy the injustice inflicting upon Palestinians without infringing on their own legitimate interests. 

Restitution is the remedy against ethnic cleansing. And it is one of the very few ways you can fix a human rights violation to the point where it is actually fixed.

Salman Abu Sitta, researcher of Palestinian history, writes in response to Eitan Bronstein's question about the existence of labor camps in Palestine during and after the Nakba