Remembering Palestine in 1948: Beyond National Narratives

by Efrat Ben-Ze'ev

Overview

The war of 1948 in Palestine is a conflict whose history has been written primarily from the national point of view. This book asks what happens when narratives of war arise out of personal stories of those who were involved, stories that are still unfolding. Efrat Ben-Ze‘ev, an Israeli anthropologist, examines the memories of those who participated and were affected by the events of 1948, and how these events have been mythologized over time. This is a three-way conversation between Palestinian villagers, Jewish-Israeli veterans, and British policemen who were stationed in Palestine on the eve of the war. Each has his or her story to tell. Across the years, these witnesses relived their past in private within family circles and tightly knit groups, through gatherings and pilgrimages to sites of villages and battles, or through naming and storytelling. Rarely have their stories been revealed to an outsider. As Dr. Ben-Ze‘ev discovers, these small-scale truths, which were collected from people at the dusk of their lives and previously overshadowed by nationalized histories, shed new light on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as it was then and as it has become.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521194471
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/07/2011
Series:	Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare , #32
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Efrat Ben-Ze'ev is Senior Lecturer of Social Anthropology in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at the Ruppin Academic Center in Israel, and a research fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is editor, with Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter, of Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Table of Contents

Part I. Constructing Palestine: National Projects: 1. The framework; 2. The British cartographic imagination and Palestine; 3. Cartographic practices in Palestine: British, Jewish, and Arabs, 1938–48; Part II. Palestine-Arabs Memories in the Making: 4. 1948 from a local point of view: the Palestinian village of Ijzim; 5. Rural Palestinian women: witnessing and the domestic sphere; 6. Underground memories: collecting traces of the Palestinian past; Part III. Jewish-Israeli Memories in the Making: 7. Palmach fighters: stories and silences; 8. The Palmach women; Part IV. British Mandatory Memories in the Making: 9. Carrying out the mandate: British policemen in Palestine; Conclusion and implications.