Displacement and Erasure in Palestine - by Noa Shaindlinger

About the Book

Explores the ways in which Palestinians negotiate physical and symbolic erasures by producing their own archives and historical narratives

Book Synopsis

Displacement and Erasure in Palestine: The Politics of Hope explores the ways in which Palestinians negotiate physical and symbolic erasures by producing their own archives and historical narratives. With a focus on the city of Jaffa and its displaced Palestinian population, Noa Shaindlinger argues that the Israeli state 'buried' histories of mass expulsions and spatial appropriations. Based on a wide-variety of sources, this book brings together archival, literary, ethnographic and oral research to engage with ideas of settler colonialism and the production of history, violence and memory, refugee-hood and diaspora.
This multi-sited study traces Jaffa's refugee experience beyond 1948 to the West Bank and the diaspora in Toronto and Cape Town, re-inscribing the erased experience of Palestinians into an account of Israeli state practices of dispossession. By integrating rigorous archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, literary and spatial analysis, the book reveals Palestinian's (and their Israeli-Jewish allies') creative responses that challenge displacement and argue for their right to belong to their homeland and their city.

Review Quotes

Displacement and Erasure in Palestine offers a window into the lived experiences of Palestinians and allied Israelis who, despite the crushing impact of state-led erasure and displacement projects, find ways to resist Israeli settler-colonial rule. [...] The diversity of sites and perspectives [explored in the book] allows for the emergence of greater nuance, particularly regarding the ambiguous and multivalent positions in which many Israelis and Palestinians find themselves.--Michelle D. Weitzel, Graduate Institute of Geneva "International Affairs"

This moving historical ethnography is a radical exercise in the political imagination of hope. Unearthing buried archival materials and living testimonies, the book invokes the demons of past and present traumas, but ultimately invites them for a profound dialogue about justice, recognition and decolonisation. This is no liberal manifesto for peaceful coexistence but a bold and honest engagement with the foundations of political thought, and indeed with the very limits of political agency itself.

--Daniel Monterescu, Central European University