Three stories
Author: Miri Litvak 08/2011
Great Uncle Garik works at the university now. He and his friends invented a method for electromagnetic measurements that measure something in the water. Grandpa explained to me that this is a very important scientific invention and that they even wrote a story about it in Haaretz. Grandma showed me the story with a picture of Great Uncle Garik's in his lab. "This is excellent", Grandpa concluded after reading the story. "Their research will help to turn Israel's seawater into water we can drink!"
A Longing for the Good Land
Author: Mahmoud al-Rimawi 08/2011
Removing the kufiyya and iqal from his grey head, Abu al-'Abd tossed them onto the dirty blanket beside him. He heaved a deep sigh, for the heat was unbearable and he did not dare to strip the Agency uniform off his thin body. The tent had no door, and there were girls and women across the way. Undoing the laces of his heavy boots, he flung them into a corner; then, stretching out his legs in extreme exhaustion, he lay on an old coat, carelessly folded under his head, resting it on the palm of his dry, chapped hand. Of necessity, he tried to rest from the weariness of the ten hours he'd spent in construction work on the neighboring mountain.
63 Years of the Palestinian Nakba: Notes from the BADIL-Zochrot Seminars on Practical Aspects of Refugee Return
Author: Akram Salhab 08/2011
Over the past 63 years the Palestinian people have continuously and unceasingly been expelled from our homes and properties and forced to live in exile, refugee camps and ever-smaller ghettos in Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. As Palestinians take stock of our struggle for justice over the past 63 years, we continue to dream of the day when we will realize our rights, return to our homes and receive compensation for the loss and trauma we have suffered.
The Chronotope of Refugee Return
Author: Yehouda Shenhav 08/2011
Mahmoud al-Rimawi’s short story, “A Longing for the Good Land,” and three projects included here – Sandy Halal, Alessandro Pati and Eyal Weizman’s “Present Returns: Al Feneiq in Miska” of Decolonizing Architecture, Hana Farah Kufr-Bir’im’s “Re:Form-a Model,” and Einat Manoff’s Counter-Mapping Workshop with Jewish and Palestinian activists – invite a reconsideration of the “nakba” and the “return,” the connection between them, and their combined relationship to history and politics. These texts are the starting point for a discussion leading toward a revised political model of “return,” one that is not subordinated to the utopian modernist narrative that could be called “from destruction to redemption.” In order to formulate a political model of return, we must first begin to think theoretically about the “time” and the “space” of the nakba and the return, as well as about their political basis. These are the fundamentals of the discussion that follows.
Re: Form - A Model
08/2011
Hanna Farah Kufr Bir'im
Text: Norma Musih
Hanna Farah builds Bir'im, the village where his father and grandfather were born, but where he never lived. He reconstructs it in his own name, imprints it in his identity card, and erects it on ruins using models, etchings, various acts, videos, and photographs. From all these he spins a new village, which exists simultaneously as fragmented memories and dreams, and as a detailed, practical proposal for return. Farah’s action joins a long sequence of communal, private, artistic, and legal projects undertaken by the people of Kufr Bir'im as part of their struggle against the obliteration of the village and for their return home.
Hanna Farah Kufr Bir'im
Text: Norma Musih
Al Fenieq in Miska
Author: DAAR - Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency 08/2011
The notion of “return” has defined the diasporic and extraterritorial nature of Palestinian politics and cultural life since the Nakba in 1947-8. Often articulated in the “suspended politics” of political theology, it has gradually been blurred in the futile limbo of negotiations. Our project extends the legalistic approach to the right of return with a projective one that aims to open the political imagination towards the different forms in which a present return could take place.
Bir'im on Caves: Archive of Archives Photo Essay, Epilogue
Author: Ayelet Zohar / Art History Department, Tel Aviv University 08/2011
Landscape of Return
Author: Nina Valerie Kolowratnik 07/2011
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been carried out via landscape, its geography and boundaries from the outset.
