Lubya – en udraderet palæstinensisk landsby som erindringssted

Abstract

This contribution discusses the demolished, Palestinian villageof Lubya as memory place. Lubya was attacked and occupied byIsraeli military forces in 1948 and its inhabitants had to abandon thevillage. Instead they became part of a world-wide Palestinian diaspora.In Edward Said’s terms, like other Palestinian refugees, they became“nowhere people”, who exploited memories about their village of originin order to construct an identity in the diaspora. This memory workis a problem as memories of individual villages become integrated inthe broader discourse of the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe). Thus, aforceful counter-narrative is emerging, which negates the dominant,Zionist master commemorative narrative on which the state of Israel isbased. The theoretical background of the contribution includes PierreNora’s notion of lieux de mémoire, Paul Connerton’s ideas about bodymemory, as well as a phenomenological approach to landscape, place,and space.