ABSTRACT

The village of Miska is one of the 530 Palestinian localities destroyed during the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for great calamity, catastrophe, or devastation). Although the ruins of these places are part of the Israeli landscape, and most Israeli Jews have some knowledge about the Nakba, they do not understand its meaning. In this paper, I deploy Hannah Arendt’s distinction between knowing and understanding to answer the question of how the Nakba can at once be known but not understood by Israeli Jews. Drawing on the tours conducted by the activist organization Zochrot (Hebrew for ‘we remember’) to the ruins of Miska, I argue that the embodied and symbolic practices conducted during the tours to Miska can work to challenge the gap between knowing and understanding by creating a different perspective on the Nakba. From this perspective, the Nakba is not only understood as the memory of the ‘other’—that is, the Palestinian memory of the place—but is understood as a complex memory that embodies a dialectical relationship between Jewish and Palestinian remembrances: a potentially common memory of the place and the basis for the imagining of a common future.

摘要

米斯卡村是在巴勒斯坦灾难（阿拉伯语中的大灾难、灾难或破坏）期间被摧毁的 530 个巴勒斯坦地区之一。虽然这些地方的废墟是以色列风景的一部分，而且大多数以色列犹太人对大灾难有一定的了解，但他们并不理解它的意义。在这篇论文中，我运用汉娜·阿伦特 (Hannah Arendt) 对知道和理解的区分来回答以色列犹太人如何能够立即知道灾难但不理解这一问题。借鉴激进组织 Zochrot（希伯来语“我们记得”）对米斯卡遗址的游览，我认为在米斯卡之旅期间进行的具体和象征性实践可以通过创造来挑战知识和理解之间的差距不同的观点大灾难。从这个角度来看，Nakba不仅被理解为“他者”的记忆——即巴勒斯坦人对这个地方的记忆——而且被理解为一种复杂的记忆，它体现了犹太人和巴勒斯坦人记忆之间的辩证关系：一种潜在的共同点地方的记忆和想象共同未来的基础。