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Memoricide

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aliases

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Summary

Pappe’s term, as the title of Chapter 10 of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, for the erasure of memory of the Nakba: the renaming of seized places by a Hebraizing Naming Committee, and the Jewish National Fund’s forests and resort parks planted over destroyed villages, whose signs and narratives deny that Palestinians ever lived there.

Details

  • Dispossession was compounded by the reinvention of Palestinian villages as purely Jewish or ‘Ancient’ Hebrew places: an official Naming Committee of archaeologists and biblical experts, in place since 1920 and reconvened by David Ben-Gurion in July 1949 as a sub-division of the JNF, Hebraized Palestine’s geography (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.261-262).
  • The archaeological zeal to reproduce the map of ‘Ancient’ Israel was, in Pappe’s words, a systematic, scholarly, political and military attempt to de-Arabise the terrain — its names and geography, but above all its history (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.262).
  • The JNF opted mainly for conifers instead of Palestine’s natural flora, in part to make the country look European; forests throughout Israel include only eleven per cent indigenous species, and a mere ten per cent of all forests date from before 1948 (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.263).
  • The true mission of the JNF, Pappe argues, has been to conceal the visible remnants of Palestine not only by the trees planted over them but by narratives denying their existence; the parks do not so much commemorate history as seek to totally erase it (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.264-265).
  • In the Birya Forest, Israel’s largest man-made forest at 20,000 dunam, none of the villages it conceals — Dishon, Alma, Qaddita, Amqa, Ayn al-Zaytun or Biriyya — is ever mentioned on the JNF website (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.266).
  • At Sataf, a Palestinian village expelled and mostly destroyed in 1948, the JNF markets Palestinian terraces and buildings as ‘ancient’ and ‘biblical’ agriculture, and invented the concept ‘bustanof’ for the site (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.269).
  • Pappe concludes that the JNF ‘ecologises’ the crimes of 1948 in order for Israel to tell one narrative and erase another (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.270).

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Nakba, Jewish National Fund, Judaization

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