This video of the webinar explores what exists in the Israeli archives about the Nakba and the immediate years after the destruction of Palestine. The archives, along with other Palestinian sources, provides an accurate picture of the Palestinian villages, towns, and urban neighborhood, on the eve of their occupation. They also provide forensic insights into the way the pillage of the villages, people’s property and lands were confiscated, and divided between Zionist institutors and Jewish settlers within the first decade after the Nakba. There is a clip containing basic visuals of each destroyed Palestinian village using maps, audio and visual clips and testimonies and how lands and property were confiscated. This fuses the historical narrative of the Palestinians with a decolonized archival work within the settler colonial state. These documents are not available anymore; but were offered by historians who generously shared vital evidence.
THIS IS A TRANSCRIPTION OF THE WEBINAR:
Hassanal: So, I would like to welcome everyone to the MLN webinar Mapping the Nakba, tracing settler colonialism. I’m sure it’ll be a very engaging and interesting look into the history of the nakba and to what the term will mean within the contemporary setting. I’m not going to take too much time, so I would like to pass the floor to our moderator today, Professor Ilan Pappe, Professor Pappe.
Prof Pappe: Thank you very much. Before we begin, I will congratulate and welcome everyone. One of our speakers had some technical issue Dr. Heba Yazbak, so she will join us as the last speaker if that’s okay and if Dr Salman and Dr Rona don’t mind to be pushed ahead, if you’re already. I really appreciate your cooperation on this and I’m sorry that this is the kind of a last moment bureaucratic administrative thing.
Welcome everyone, good morning, good afternoon, good night, wherever you are. The Movement for Liberation from Nakba covers such a huge geographical span that we need to do all these congratulations and blessings from morning to night. We are a group of Han Rights activists and organisations who particularly focus on Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, in order to disseminate information and knowledge both about the nakba, the catastrophe of 1948, but also about the ongoing catastrophe in Palestine. Unlike the United Nations, we don’t only commemorate the nakba one day in a year, we commemorate and talk about it almost every day, every year because we believe that this is something that should be acknowledged, recognized and more important than anything else rectified. We have been doing some excellent webinars in the past and we still hope to do webinars like this in the future.
Before I present to you our speakers, I would like to say a few words for those who are less familiar with the term all the events. Although I’m sure many of our viewers would know quite a lot about the events of 1948. So what I’m going to do in very few minutes. Because I don’t want to take too much time out of the valuable time of our guests, it’s just to draw in very general lines what happened in 1948. I also want to mention that we will devote the whole year for webinars on the Nakba, this is the first one out of others to come, that will cover different aspects, both of the catastrophe itself and the the ongoing catastrophe, but also on the resistance to the catastrophe, what we call the ongoing intifada, next to the ongoing Nakba.
Mapping the Nakba – Tracing Settler Colonialism