Erased from space and consciousness : Israel and the depopulated Palestinian villages of 1948 /

Nearly seven decades after its conclusion, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War still looms large in the collective memory of both nations. Kadman concerns herself less with the Palestinians who became refugees and their descendants, and more with the physical places they left behind in what became Israel--villages and city dwellings. Following in the footsteps of Palestinian American scholar Walid Khalidi, whose 1992 work All That Remains registered 418 Palestinian villages that Israel occupied and depopulated of their original inhabitants in 1948, Kadman pursues the latter history of these sites. She examines how the State of Israel demolished some homes and expropriated and redistributed others to its Jewish citizens, many of whom had recently arrived as refugees themselves from Arab countries fighting against Israel. She further explores the process whereby some of those former Arab locales became "Judaized," renamed and transferred in the current Israeli collective memory while being erased of their former Arab identities. In an age when each side to this conflict staunchly holds to its narrative of the past, many Israelis are likely to regard Kadman's book as an unwelcome reminder of a part of that past they would like to disregard. For students of that history, however, this study adds an important layer to the story. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and faculty. --Moshe Gershovich, University of Nebraska, Omaha

Kadman, a researcher for Israeli human rights organization B'tselem, relates how the Israeli government systematically erased and obscured the history of the Arab population that once inhabited what is now the nation-state of Israel. She traces the fate of more than 400 rural Palestinian villages, illuminating the application and results of Israeli state policy to remove from history the centuries of Arab presence in Palestine. In order to effectively remove the Palestinians from history, Kadman argues, the physical evidence of their presence has to be eliminated. This began with the removal of the Arab population during the Nakba ("catastrophe") of 1948, when approximately 700,000 Palestinians fled impending violence or were forced from their land. It has continued to the present through a systematic process imposed on the geography, including name changes, map changes, the razing of buildings and ruins, and the deliberate ignoring or diminishing of the Arab presence in Palestine in official publications. Kadman argues that the goal of this policy is to eliminate the written and physical evidence of the Arab presence as part of the legitimization of the Zionist ideology which underpins the Israeli state. Kadman's work is academically focused, but it is crucial reading for understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.