Zochrot

Zochrot — the Hebrew feminine plural of “remembering” — is an Israeli organisation working on Israeli society, and that is the whole point of it. Its founding proposition, stated on its own front page, is that learning about the Nakba, the catastrophe that turned more than eighty per cent of the Palestinian population living on the land where Israel was established into refugees and destroyed hundreds of their towns, “represents an opportunity to break free from the limitations of the skewed Israeli perspective.” It works in Hebrew first. For a researcher, this makes it a distinctive kind of source: not a Palestinian archive, but a body of Nakba documentation produced in the language and the legal jurisdiction of the state that carried it out.

The centrepiece is the Nakba Map, a locality index that runs to several hundred destroyed villages and towns and lets you move from a place name to whatever material exists for it. Alongside it sits a testimonies archive, filterable by nationality (Palestinian or Israeli), by generation (first or second), by medium (video or text), and by village of origin — a structure that quietly encodes Zochrot’s method, since it collects the accounts of Israeli participants as well as Palestinian survivors. The organisation also maintains a refugee camps map, a historical maps archive of Palestine, a separate site devoted to the Jewish National Fund at jnf.zochrot.org, and the iReturn app, which is built around the practical question of what return would actually look like.

The publications are as useful as the databases. The “Remembering” booklet series produces a short, sourced dossier on a single locality — Remembering Lifta, Remembering Haifa, Remembering al-Haram (Sayyidna ‘Ali), Remembering al-Ghubayyat — and the journal Sedek carries longer essays. Zochrot also runs tours to destroyed villages, a film programme, and an annual Return conference, all of which generate documentation that ends up on the site.

Two things to know. The Hebrew site is the fullest; English and Arabic versions exist for most sections but lag, and some material has no English version at all — the language toggle in the header is the only reliable way to check. And Zochrot’s own position is openly political: it argues for return, not for commemoration alone, and its publications are written from that position. That does not make its documentation less usable; it means the documentation should be read as what it is — a partisan Israeli archive of a Palestinian catastrophe, valuable precisely because of who assembled it.

Sources

• Zochrot — From Nakba to Return, English home
• Nakba Map — Zochrot
• Testimonies — Zochrot