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The Holocaust and the Nakba are foundational traumas in Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian societies and form key parts of each respective collective identity. This book offers a parallel analysis of the transmission of these foundational pasts in Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian societies by exploring how the Holocaust and the Nakba have been narrated since the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. The work exposes the existence and perpetuation of ethnocentric victimhood narratives that serve as the theoretical foundations for an ensuing minimization - or even denial - of the other's past. Three established realms of societal memory transmission provide the analytical framework for this study: official state education, commemorative acts, and mass mediation. Through this analysis, the work demonstrates the interrelated nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the contextualization of the primary historical events, while also highlighting the universal malleability of mnemonic practices.
List of contents
Introduction; The post-oslo period: a historical overview; Part I. The Textbook of Memory: 1.The holocaust in Israeli textbooks: death and deliverance; 2.Teaching the nakba: old wounds, new textbooks; Part II. The Landscape of Memory: 3. Recreating and reclaiming the lost homeland; 4. A past that does not pass; Part III. Scoop on the Past: 5. Never forget and never again; 6. Preserving the past, mobilizing the past; Conclusion; Bibliography; Interviews.
About the author
Grace Wermenbol is a Middle East-focused analyst for the US government and a non-resident scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. She holds a Ph.D. from St Antony's College, University of Oxford where her research focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is the recipient of numerous academic grants and awards, including from the University of Oxford, the Council of British Research in the Levant, the University of Cambridge's Woolf Institute, and the Dutch Prins Bernhard Foundation.
