Dispossession Reconsidered: Israel, Nakba, Things

This paper considers the ways that differently situated communities of Israeli Jews have contended with the history of the Palestinian dispossession of 1948.1949 war. The analysis focuses on the ways this history is to formerly Palestinian things and proposes a shift away from a focus on questions of dispossession to those of repossession in order to take seriously the ways that appropriated Palestinian things carry meaning within an Israeli political matrix; to consider the ways Israeli memories attach themselves, or fail to attach, to these things; and to ask what such processes might tell us about quotidian Israeli technologies of settler.nationalism.

Duke Scholars

Author Rebecca L. Stein Cultural Anthropology