Zochrot — testimony and remembering projects on the Nakba
An Israeli organization, founded in 2002, that documents the Nakba for a Hebrew-speaking audience through refugee testimony, tours of destroyed Palestinian villages, and filmed interviews with both displaced Palestinians and Israeli veterans of 1948.
Zochrot — Hebrew for “remembering” — is an Israeli organization founded in early 2002 whose stated goal is to bring knowledge of the Palestinian Nakba to Jewish-Israeli society, on the premise that acknowledgment of what happened in 1948 is a condition for any just future. Since 2003 it has organized tours to the sites of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948, where displaced residents and their families recount the villages’ histories at the ruins themselves, and it produces commemorative booklets in Hebrew and Arabic built around those testimonies.
The organization also maintains a testimony database and has produced several filmed testimony projects. Its “Towards a Common Archive” project collected video testimonies of Zionist fighters from 1948, exhibited at Zochrot’s Tel Aviv gallery in 2012–13, and in 2014 it convened a public “truth commission” in Beersheba at which Palestinian Bedouin survivors and Israeli veterans testified about the conquest and expulsions in the Negev between 1948 and the early 1950s. Video testimonies and village materials are published on its multilingual website.
Why it matters
- It brings Palestinian refugee testimony directly into Hebrew-language public space, where the Nakba is most systematically denied or ignored.
- Pairing refugee accounts with filmed testimony from Israeli veterans of 1948 creates a rare two-sided record of the same events.
- Its village booklets and tour documentation preserve localized memory of destroyed communities, in Hebrew and Arabic, free to download.
- It demonstrates that testimony work can be carried out by institutions inside the perpetrator society, not only by its victims.
Key resources
Cited work
The summary above is written by FALASTEEN.AI. The document itself is published by Zochrot and is linked here in full.