Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Gadi Algazi (bio) This issue of History & Memory has been long in the making. Its guest editor Tania Forte, who initiated and began working on the project, was unable to complete it. Her sudden, premature death last year robbed us of a precious, unique voice in Israeli anthropology. It is to her memory that we dedicate it. Tania's was a voice that listens, an engaged, lively one; she had no need to efface her own presence and engagement to let others speak; it was her own experience that enabled others to speak. In her scholarly work she displayed little interest in transcribing confident official voices performing coherent identities; on the other hand, deconstructing everyday images of the past or history seemed to her, I believe, too easy a task. She reserved her attention to fragile processes of construction—of a home, an identity, some past—by people whose lives had been shattered by history. Her own voice, bearing the marks of history—history endured, remembered, struggled with—enabled her to listen carefully, analytically, to the voices she encountered in this torn country. This issue of History of Memory, entitled Home and Beyond, focuses on sites of Palestinian memory. It expresses our wish to move discussions of memory from monumental and official representations of the past to the manifold ways it intrudes into everyday life, to its lay users, humble bearers, and their ways of coming to terms with history and its scars. It is therefore about homes, families, posters and photos, processions and demonstrations, landscapes erased, books quoted and embedded in the course of weaving stories about the past. Initially, Tania Forte sought papers that "would focus on the projects of persons, communities and institutions to shape the past since 1948, or on particular operations or ways of knowing through which such projects are effected," for as people "shape intimate objects—landscapes, homes, documents, bodies, kinship relations—they also proceed to inscribe pasts within them." [End Page 7] Heightened attention to embodiments of the past, to its materiality, in no way stands in opposition to careful consideration of its cultural meanings. Few objects exemplify this better than homes—built, remembered, imagined and often destroyed, defying facile oppositions between the material and the cultural.1 In Ilana Feldman's analysis of the sense of home among Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the reality of displacement and the materiality of remembered homes are clearly evident, especially in her account of how new political relations—those created in the aftermath of 1948—are created and enacted through border crossings and objects embodying claims to property and home. It is on a particular inflection of the heroic mode of storytelling, connecting the local history of villages in the Galilee to perceptions of Palestinian history, that Tania Forte focuses in her own essay, which explores—to cite a phrase she used in her proposal for the special issue—"how people have organized themselves to 'overcome' the past," to make a place for themselves in an uncertain present. It should perhaps be read together with Lori Allen's perceptive account of martyrs' funeral processions during the second Intifada, for both shed light on the contradictions inherent in attempts to become subjects of history under domination. Both deal with personalized heroism and despair, with betrayal as an explanation of defeat, with forms of contesting domination that often involve glossing over the ambiguities of power. Tania's account of a landscape in the making, of contested sights and signs in the Galilee, contrasts with Aron Shai's account of the systematic erasure of signs from a landscape. Shai's account also draws attention to the dialectic of the effacement and reemergence of layers of the past, for in the case of the remaining traces of abandoned Palestinian settlements, destruction and documentation went hand in hand. In that regard, it is reminiscent of the case of aerial photographs during World War I, which were not only instruments of unprecedented and irreversible destruction of the West European landscapes during that war but also a precious key to the reconstruction of medieval settlement forms and agricultural patterns in its aftermath.2 Ambiguous representations are also the subject matter of Issam...