emaining parts of the coffee shop, meanwhile Zakout went to do a job he never managed to finish in 1948. Filled with emotion, and determined to finish it 55 years later, he and the group hung a sign saying “Boys Elementary School in Isdud,” written in both Arabic and Hebrew, on the remaining walls of the boys’ school that residents of the village had just finished building before they were expelled in 1948.
Commemorating the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe) in Isdud is part of a wider campaign initiated by Zochrot (Hebrew for remembering) to bring knowledge of the Nakba to the Israeli public to raise the issues of historic responsibility and the Palestinian right of return. The initiative to commemorate the Palestinian Nakba did not come from an Israeli leftist politician but from an ordinary computer programmer.
“I was a Zionist” says Uri Zachem, “until I read the book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, by Benny Morris. I learned what I never wanted to learn before: that there was a nation who lived in Palestine before 1948. I realized the notion of ‘a country with no people’ is only a myth. I was told lies.”
“I started to drive around and looked at the landscape from a different point of view. Going through ruined villages I felt the sorrow and pain of Palestinian refugees. The Nakba is the mother of all sins,” said Zachem.
Zachem who lives in Kufur Saba (Kfar Sava in Hebrew) insists calling the town by its Arabic name, which he says “are the real names of villages and towns. What exists now is built either on the ruins of those places or next to them.”
Zachem explained that remains of Palestinian villages were being removed by Zionist groups and the Israeli government, but that groups like Zochrot were fighting to preserve the remaining parts of Palestinian villages and towns. Although Zachem does not feel personally responsible for the Palestinian catastrophe, he does feel that “as a Jew, it is my duty to do the best I can to change the beliefs of other Jews and correct all the bad deeds of our actions.”
Telling the untold story
Truly, Isdud represents one of the villages referred to by former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who said in 1969 in a talk to Jewish students in Haifa, "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
Asad Ghanem, head of political science at Haifa University, is one of a number of Israeli educators who have been distributing a new textbook to Arab-Israeli schoolchildren, to tell the untold history of places like Isdud. He says, “We are trying to break the stranglehold of the Education Ministry on the information given to our children, which is always presented from a Zionist perspective". Arab-Israelis, former Palestinians who managed to remain in Israel after 1948, now represent 20% of the Israeli population.
The idea for the booklet came in response to increasing efforts by the Education Minister, Limor Livnat, to force schools to emphasise Jewish heritage and Zionism in the national curriculum. One of her first acts on joining the government in 2001 was to threaten Arab schools with financial penalties if they failed to fly the Israeli flag or play the national anthem during morning services, ignoring arguments that the anthem’s words and the symbol of the Star of David excluded Arab citizens.
In September 2003 she launched a new initiative, requiring all schools to participate in a weekly study program based on “100 terms in Jewish Heritage, Zionism and Democracy”. In particular, all pupils were expected to learn about important Jewish figures, including Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Baron Edmond de Rothschild, as 