Displacement and Erasure in Palestine

Displacement and Erasure in Palestine: The Politics of Hope explores the ways in which Palestinians negotiate physical and symbolic erasures by producing their own archives and historical narratives. With a focus on the city of Jaffa and its displaced Palestinian population, Noa Shaindlinger argues that the Israeli state ‘buried’ histories of mass expulsions and spatial appropriations. Based on a wide-variety of sources, this book brings together archival, literary, ethnographic and oral research to engage with ideas of settler colonialism and the production of history, violence and memory, refugee-hood and diaspora.

This multi-sited study traces Jaffa’s refugee experience beyond 1948 to the West Bank and the diaspora in Toronto and Cape Town, re-inscribing the erased experience of Palestinians into an account of Israeli state practices of dispossession. By integrating rigorous archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, literary and spatial analysis, the book reveals Palestinian’s (and their Israeli-Jewish allies’) creative responses that challenge displacement and argue for their right to belong to their homeland and their city.