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Our Mission
Zochrot is an NGO that has been working since 2002 for exposing and disseminating historical information about the Palestinian Nakba in Hebrew, with a view to promote accountability for the Nakba among the Jewish public of Israel and the implementation of the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees.
Background
The Nakba (نكبة), Arabic for great catastrophe, is the designation of an ongoing process of disfranchisement of the Palestinian people from their land and assets. This process had begun long before 1948, with the Zionist ambition to convert as many lands as possible to exclusive Jewish usage. The 1948 war was its culmination: alongside the atrocities of war, massacres, rape and lootings, the Nakba is also the destruction of over 600 settlements, turning more than 750,000 men and women into refugees, comprising about 85 percent of the Palestinian inhabitants in the territory where the state of Israel was established.
Rather than a mere historical event, the Nakba is a process that still continues today, firstly by the prevention of the refugees' return in violation of international law, and secondly by the continuation of the deprivation and oppression of the Palestinian people in various ways, including their fragmentation into separate units with different legal status (refugees, the subjects of a military occupation in the West Bank, residents of Jerusalem, residents of unrecognized villages), systematic confiscation of lands and property, use of military force, administrative detentions, movement restrictions, discrimination in planning and housing, and more. In the meantime, the expulsion of Palestinians has not stopped with the end of the 1948 war, continuing throughout the1950s, via 1967 – when more than 350,000 men and women were displaced – to the present day (among others, in East Jerusalem, the Negev and South Hebron Hills).
Vision
In recent years, Zochrot and other organizations have achieved remarkable success in instilling the issue of the historical Nakba in the minds of Jews in Israel. Yet the emergence of the Nakba in the Israeli discourse still involves neither a broad recognition and acceptance of responsibility, nor an understanding of the ongoing process of Palestinian deprivation which continues today. Zochrot maintains that peace can only be established following a de-colonization of the land and only when all of its inhabitants and refugees can live in it without the threat of deportation, oppression or prevention of return. Zochrot considers the implementation of the Palestinian refugees' return and a shared existence an integral part of the establishment of a thriving egalitarian society shared by all of the land's inhabitants, as an appropriate amends for the Nakba.
Zochrot regards the return as a long-term multi-dimensional process that incorporates not only the actual return of refugees into the land, but also a fundamental change in society itself – a transformation which would allow every returnee and inhabitant a life in dignity and freedom within an egalitarian and shared framework. Return is at the core of this transformation, to be led by the returnees themselves. In this expansive conception, the return would begin long before the actual arrival of the refugees and continue for a long time after that.
Objectives
To advance Zochrot's vision, the organization acts with a view to challenge and promote a cognitive, political and cultural change among the Jewish public of Israel in order to create the conditions for the Palestinian refugees' return and a shared life here. The focus on the Jewish target audience is derived from its practical and moral responsibility for Palestinian refugeehood and its privileged position of power in the current regime, as well as from perceiving this public as a necessary part of any future solution.
Means of Action
Zochrot makes accessible existing information about the Palestinian Nakba and the Right of Return mainly for the Jewish public in Israel, through guided tours in Palestinian sites that have been emptied of their residents and destroyed during the Nakba, as well as courses, workshops, direct actions in the space, public campaigns and events, and through our tri-lingual database. Zochrot is also engaged in generating new knowledge, learning materials and teaching tools which we provide to Israelis who want to initiate this transformative process through learning and teaching others.
Our Story
Zochrot was founded in 2002 by a small group of Jewish-Israeli activists in order to call for the recognition of the Nakba and the Palestinian refugees' right of return by Israeli society.
In the days following the outbreak of the Second Intifada and the collapse of the Oslo Process, when Palestinian society, even within Israel proper, had lost all trust in political processes, whilst many Israelis had declared that "There is no partner", Zochrot's founders realized that it was the refusal of Israel society to learn about the Nakba, its non-recognition of the oppression under which Palestinians are living under the Israeli regime, and its denial of refugees' rights, that had led to an impasse in a process that right from its inception had lacked any goodwill, honesty or recognition of the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people.
All of these were not even part of the Israeli discourse. Despite the fact that remnants of destroyed Palestinian settlements are scattered across the country, most Israelis were not familiar with the word Nakba, and have never learned to think of the country in which they live as having been established through war crimes that continue to this day. Instead, Israelis are being taught to believe in a mendacious, highly distorted but compelling narrative of "the few against the many" and "a land without people for a people without a land".
Zochrot was born out of the decision of activists who were themselves inculcated within the Zionist paradigm, to refuse and reject the efforts of suppression and repression and to take responsibility for the crimes of the past and for the future. This realization dawned on a tour in Canada Park to learn about the villages Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba, all of whose inhabitants were expelled in 1967, and on whose lands the Jewish National Fund had built the park. It was there that the idea was first raised to put in posted signs commemorating the erased villages, as a way to expose the truth. With the founding of Zochrot, that idea was expanded to include the hundreds of villages, towns and cities destroyed in 1948 and later, with a view to substantiate, in every space where Israelis live, the Palestinian lives that have been wiped out of both the physical space and the Israeli memory.
Ever since its establishment, Zochrot has viewed the exposure of historical truth as a key objective. Although its stance is considered as transgressing the boundaries of Israeli consensus, the organization has managed to open the eyes of thousands of people, and to trigger a rethinking of history and the present among many significant groups. But we are not content with making historical information available and educating about the past. We emphasize that the Nakba is not just a historical event but rather an ongoing process to deprive the Palestinian people of their entire homeland. For us at Zochrot it is important to keep pointing to these facts, as well as to call for the implementation of the Palestinian right of return, which we see as the key for the de-colonization and de-Zionization of the space; in other words, a call to change a regime that grants full rights, including self-determination, exclusively to Jews, and creating a just and sustainable solution. Zochrot was founded at a time when many – Israelis, Palestinians and others – have lost all hope for a solution of peace and reconciliation in the space between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan river. Our position is quite the opposite: we insist on hope as a radical stance and on cohabitation. Yet our hope is not disconnected from reality and historical facts. This is why we emphasize that any sustainable solution obliges Israeli society to look courageously and honestly at the roots of the conflict and to take responsibility for past and present grievances, and that the shared existence we seek would be possible only with the dismantling of a regime that privileges Jews and marginalizes Palestinians.
We know that in order to mobilize a deep change in Israeli society towards return, justice and equality, we must challenge not only colonial, but also gender, ethnic and class relations. We have therefore chosen at an early stage to use the verb form Zochrot (in Hebrew, the plural female form of 'remembering'), as an expression of our attempt to create an alternative for the militaristic memory of the 1948 war that prevails in Israeli society. We are rigorous in consistently listening to and learning from Palestinian women – witnesses, scholars, artists and activists – whose voices we continue to bring to the Jewish public in Israel.
Similarly, because the Zionist project is inseparable from race ideologies, our discussion of the Nakba and de-colonization also refers to white supremacy and practices of differentiation and exclusion. Concurrently, since 2015 Zochrot has been dealing directly with the ways in which the Jewish society of Israel may take responsibility for the Nakba without denying the power relations between Zionist European Jews and Jews from Arab and Islamic countries, as well as the way in which class and gender gaps and racism within the Jewish society can be countered without exacerbating the oppression of the Palestinians. We regard this feminist and anti-racist stance as a pre-condition for full liberation and sustainable equality, and we are committed to it not only in theory, but also in practice, both within and outside the organization.
Zochrot has been and remains the only organization that focuses on the mission of Nakba recognition and support for the right of return among Jewish society. Over the years, despite our reliance on mainly modest donations from the public and from non-governmental funds, Zochrot has been successful in providing access in Hebrew to previously unavailable comprehensive information about the Nakba and the Right of Return.
Tens of thousands of Israelis have participated in our tours of Palestinian villages, towns and cities that have been emptied and destroyed in 1948, thereby learning a history of the space that they inhabit of which they had been unaware, as well as learning to begin to think of a Palestinian return not as a threat, but rather as a key to the solution. Thousands of others have participated in courses, workshops, study groups, conferences, discussion and other activities initiated by Zochrot.
Zochrot's testimony database contains testimonies by dozens of Nakba survivors, as well as by Israelis who have fought in 1948 and recounted war crimes in which they took part. It also contains details about depopulated and destroyed sites and historical documents about Zionist colonialism.
In 2014, Zochrot launched iNakba – a mobile app allowing users to navigate to uprooted Palestinian settlements and learn about their histories. iNakba is a unique tool that draws a map of the invisible country – the one that was destroyed and hidden from view. Many thousands have used and are using the app, including Palestinian refugees wishing to see their settlements of origin once again. The app is being relaunched in 2022, reflecting our vision for de-colonization and the rebuilding of Palestine as a space of justice and equality for all its inhabitants.
Today Zochrot is a registered association with five team members and dozens of members and volunteers, mostly Jewish Israelis, and a broad community base of participants in our activities and supporters in Israel and abroad.
Zochrot conducts workshops, conferences and study and action groups for delving into practices of return, that is, not only a recognition of the right of return, but also thinking about the arrangements and actions that could enable a return and support the lives of returning refugees and of all of the country's inhabitants.
Across the entire spectrum of these activities, Zochrot continues to be one of a handful of groups in Israeli society to outline a radical and coherent vision for justice in Palestine that includes the rights of all of its inhabitants and returnees.