Israeli Memory: From a Moment of Retrospection to Regulating the Past

Abstract

Israeli memory never ceased to be ethno-national, featuring a Zionist ideology and mythical trajectory that leads from the biblical homeland to the resettlement of the Jewish people under a Jewish State. The displacement and dispossession of Palestinians since the 1948 war (known as al-Nakba, the catastrophe in Arabic) and the occupation of the Palestinian Territories (OPT) in the West bank and Gaza since 1967 have not been a part of this narrative, but featured in an opposite Palestinian national narrative. The Nakba has been forcefully forgotten not only by the promulgation of the Zionist national narrative, but also through the destruction of physical remains and a systemic dissemination of a new symbolic geography, replacing the Palestinian names of sites and streets with Hebrew ones. Since the early 1990s, the Zionist discourse has increasingly introspected a deep tension, or outright contradiction, at its heart between its national principle and its liberal (formerly collective and socialist) principle. According to this debate, the tension is inherent to Israel’s self-identification as both Jewish and democratic; while a Jewish state excludes non-Jewish minorities, a democracy is supposed to guarantee equal civil rights to all citizens. Within this Zionist discourse, two alternative approaches to the past and present that emerged since the 1980s have gradually undermined mainstream Zionism, aiming to resolve the core tension by retaining one side of the designation and discarding the other: the ethno-religious Neo-Zionism (Jewish), and the more critical and global post-