Month February 2017
Emilio Dabed: The Palestinian national movement was created and sustained by refugees, and it always defined its struggle as a battle not for statehood per se, but for the liberation of Palestine and the return of its people to their land. Everything in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations indicates that a potential Palestinian state will be built, if ever, on the very renunciation of the right of return. This is exactly the opposite of what Palestinians were fighting for.
Eman Abu Hanna-Nahhas: How is the memory of the Nakba sustained by younger generations of Palestinians living in Israel? Unlike Palestinians living in camps or elsewhere in exile, those living in Israel face sustained state efforts to erase this event. Yet the collective memory of 1948 is still mapping out Palestinians’ daily lives so that there is no place to ‘forget’ it – how does this happen?