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← Older: Subjective Atlas of Palestine: Asserting the Right to Narrate
The right to history, to individual and collective memories of the past, and to a self-determined perspective on the future were at the core of …
Newer: The ‘Housing Intifada’ and Its Aftermath →
By Daniel Monterescu
This article was originally published under the title “The ‘Housing Intifada’ and Its Aftermath: Ethno-Gentrification and the Politics of Communal Existence in Jaffa” in Anthropology News, December …
Counter-Mapping Return: Towards Transforming Imagined Geographies into Reality
Following the events of May 15th, grassroots activists and community organisations have chosen June 5th – Naksa Day, the anniversary commemorating the displacement of thousands of Palestinians during the 1967 War – as an occasion for further mobilisation towards actively asserting the Palestinan right to return. In the context of our recent feature, we wanted to support this momentum by further considering the implications and challenges of realising Al-Awda (‘the return’).
The Zochrot workshop included 'present absentees' from the village of Miska (Zochrot)
Last summer Zochrot organised a workshop bringing together Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel with the aim of confronting the practical and pragmatic implications of planning return, taking the village of Miska as a case-study. The first instalment from issue no. 6 of Sedek, A Journal on the Ongoing Nakba, entitled ‘Counter-Mapping Return’, explains the processes, methodologies and assumptions in this exploratory initiative.
View Sedek instalment online
Download as PDF [ English | לערבית | للعبرية ]
An excerpt from Zochrot’s introduction and reasoning behind the workshop is offered below (Arabic and Hebrew follow):
Rula Awwad-Rafferty: on questions of anger and productive engagement (Zochrot)
Masha Zussman: on how to create a strategy that breaks from existing rhetoric (Zochrot)
The workshop purposefully addressed the local level and a particular site, the village of Miska, in an attempt to concretise what return would mean on the ground, thus moving beyond the ingrained reactions of fear and disbelief associated with the return of refugees within mainstream Israeli society. Through the production of counter-maps, as a means to articulate shared space and alternative realities from those presented in the ‘official’ maps, the workshop represents the beginnings of transforming imagined geographies into reality.
A counter-mapping of return to Miska, 2010 (Zochrot)
Through arenaofspeculation.org, we would like to encourage an open discourse that engages with these concepts, and also on a broader level. We are beginning to work with a range of individuals and organisations supporting the Palestinian right to return, including Zochrot and others, to define a collective project for imagining Al-Awda (‘the return’) in its many dimensions. If you would like to contribute, or to find out more, please get in touch at info [at] arenaofspeculation.org.
(Images and text excerpts republished on arenaofspeculation.org with kind permission from Zochrot. Please contact Umar Alghubari umar48 [at] gmail.com and Eitan Bronstein eytanb [at] netvision.net.il for information on further workshops and initiatives.)