Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory: The Appropriation of Palestinian Place Names by the Israeli State

Cartography, place-naming and state-sponsored explorations were central to the modern European conquest of the earth, empire building and settler-colonisation projects. Scholars often assume that place names provide clues to the historical and cultural heritage of places and regions. This article uses social memory theory to analyse the cultural politics of place-naming in Israel. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ study of the construction of social memory by the Latin Crusaders and Christian medieval pilgrims, the article shows Zionists’ toponymic strategies in Palestine, their superimposition of Biblical and Talmudic toponyms was designed to erase the indigenous Palestinian and Arabo-Islamic heritage of the land. In the pre-Nakba period Zionist toponymic schemes utilised nineteenth century Western explorations of Biblical ‘names’ and ‘places’ and appropriated Palestinian toponyms. Following the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, the Israeli state, now in control of 78 percent of the land, accelerated its toponymic project and pursued methods whose main features were memoricide and erasure. Continuing into the post-1967 occupation, these colonial methods threaten the destruction of the diverse historical cultural heritage of the land

Liberating methodologies and Nakba studies: Palestinian history and memory from below as sites of lifelong learning

Historians too often construct frameworks and methodologies which obfuscate social, economic and political oppression. This article explores new historical methodologies that can represent oppressed and marginalised groups in Palestine. In particular the article focuses on the role of indigenous history and memory in critical learning and shaping individual and collective identity in Palestine. It further argues that Palestinian memories ‘from below’ since the Nakba have played a major positive role in the recovery from the traumatic catastrophe and the reconstruction of Palestinian identity. The article critiques the manipulation of collective memory by social, political and economic elites and top-down nationalist approaches. It argues that reconfigured popular memories can be liberating and empowering for embattled Palestinians. The article also calls for the establishment of an interdisciplinary subfield of Nakba Studies that would bring together historians, social memory and cultural theorists, postcolonial scholars and scholars of trauma studies with the aim of documenting and studying the embattled social memory of Palestine as a site of lifelong learning and empowerment