Abstract
Each year, on the 14th of May (5 Iyar on the Hebrew calendar), the state of Israel celebrates Yom Ha’atzmaut, or “Day of Independence,” commemorating the state’s 1948 declaration of sovereignty. On May 15th, Palestinians mark Yawm an-Nakba, “Day of the Catastrophe,” mourning their displacement from and within the newly founded state in the aftermath of the 1948 war. Excluded from the official national narrative, which is dominated by Jewish-Israeli collective memory, the experiences of Palestinians have been silenced by the state and forgotten by the majority of Israel’s citizens. Yifat Gutman’s Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine considers the efforts of three different organizations in Israel to document and bring these marginalized Palestinian memories to the attention of the public. Zochrot (Hebrew for “we remember,” in the plural female form), is a Tel Aviv-based group which facilitates tours of destroyed Palestinian villages for predominantly Jewish Israeli participants (p. 1). Autobiography of a City, a Jewish Palestinian artists’ collective in Jaffa, features an online archive of digital testimonies of the city’s residents prior to 1948 (pp. 2–3). Baladna (“our homeland” in Arabic), is an all-Palestinian youth organization in Haifa which coordinates a leadership program for Palestinian youth, involving tours of destroyed villages and hearing the testimonies of older generations (pp. 2–3).
These three groups are Gutman’s “memory activists,” and they advocate for the inclusion of Palestinian citizens into Israeli national memory through the reappropriation of traditional Zionist practices intended to foster Jewish-Israeli collective identity, namely guided tours and survivor testimony. “Memory activism,” as Gutman defines it, involves “the strategic commemoration of a contested past outside state channels to influence public debate and policy” (pp. 1–2). “Memory activists use memory practices and cultural repertoires as means for political ends, often (but not always) in the service of reconciliation and democratic politics” (p. 2). For Gutman, what ultimately “distinguishes memory activism from formal political initiatives is the idea that collective memory as a medium for consciousness-raising is the only weapon available for Palestinians in Israel that the state cannot disarm” (p. 83).
Based on seven years of ethnographic field research, discourse analysis, and comparative-historical sociological analysis, Gutman’s study demonstrates how memory activists deploy local mnemonic practices of tours and testimony, framed within a broader, transnational paradigm of historical justice and reconciliation, to not only bring the contested past to light but achieve acknowledgment of Palestinian suffering and political accountability from Israeli society (pp. 9–10). She illuminates the possibilities and constraints of this paradigm, challenging the foundational assumptions that “airing a contested past is indeed a crucial condition for reconciliation” and that the production of this knowledge inevitably “leads to public acknowledgment and responsibility in both active conflict and in postconflict cases” (p. 11).
Against the backdrop of the failure of the Oslo Accords to bring peace to the region in the 1990s and the surge of ethnic violence in the early-2000s, unlike other cases which inspire the memory activists’ practices (e.g., South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the transitional justice and human rights discourses in Latin American in the 1980s, and the political measures intended to resolve ethnic tensions in postconflict Serbia and the former Yugoslavia), airing the contested past in public did not accomplish the Israeli-Palestinian memory activists’ goal of acknowledgment and accountability. In fact, their efforts resulted in further state repression, public denial, and the passing of the “Nakba Law” and other “memory laws,” criminalizing commemorations of Palestinian suffering. Paradoxically, the memory activists saw this as a victory, as the state’s reaction drew more attention to the very past it seeks to obliterate (pp. 90–95).
Following the methodological introduction, the internal chapters are structured in five parts. Chapter 1, “The Activist Tour as a Political Tool,” is an ethnographic account of Zochrot’s guided tours of destroyed Palestinian villages, analyzed as redeployments of pre-state, Zionist national education forms, to forge an understanding of Palestinian national history and memory among mainly Jewish Israeli participants. Chapter 2, “The Activist Archive of Survivor Testimonies,” considers the digital archive of the Jaffa-based, Jewish-Palestinian group, Autobiography of a City. Gutman shows how these memory activists reappropriate another dominant, Jewish-Israeli commemorative form, survivor testimony, highlighting the arbitrary nature of all survivor testimony and memory narratives. Chapter 3, “Similar Practices, Higher Stakes: Palestinian Memory Activism in Israel,” focuses on the all-Palestinian memory activist group, Baladna, which further engages Zionist education practices to cultivate Palestinian consciousness and solidarity.
The second half of the book pivots from the ethnographic study in the first two chapters to comparative-historical sociological analysis of the state’s reaction and the specific memory laws. Chapter 4, “The Shift: The Nakba Law and the Memory War on 1948,” juxtaposes the case to memory laws passed in France and Russia. Chapter 5, “From Reconciliation without Truth to Truth without Reconciliation,” examines the memory activists’ efforts to appropriate truth and reconciliation beyond state channels amidst active conflict. She demonstrates the failure of the project to achieve accountability and responsibility, proposing that “knowledge of a contested past is best disseminated only after acknowledgment and responsibility are in place” (p. 26).
Gutman’s conceptual approach utilizes cultural sociology and memory studies frameworks. She advances Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz’s idea of “moral entrepreneurship” to show how memory activists “‘seek public areas and support for their interpretation of the past’” (qtd. p. 17) as they “[advance] moral and political agendas that extend beyond commemoration” (p. 18). She also draws on Bernard and Kubik’s concept of “mnemonic actors” to show how memory activists differ from the three types of actors most commonly studied among scholars of memory. Gutman maintains that first, memory activists often lack personal ties to the events and their goals exceed the scope of commemoration to address a “larger political issue and influence the dominant public debate” (p. 18). Second, unlike other memory practitioners and pragmatic experts who use commemoration to mediate struggles among different memory groups or “[implement] transnational ideas and norms in domestic debates,” memory activists do not aim to mediate, but to “make a stand and intervene” (p. 18). Third, as opposed to political elites and other “instrumentalist” actors who advance specific versions of a past with the aim of gaining or legitimizing their own political power or social status, memory activists do not present highly controversial versions of the past to advance their own stakes, and they “more often attract public rejection and denial” (p. 19).
To show how memory and memory activism contribute to a broader understanding of culture, politics, and the concept of “the political,” Gutman’s framework extends Goldfarb’s understanding of power, rooted in a “Weberian politics of legitimacy,” an “Arendtian community-based cultural liberation project,” and a “knowledge-production project of ‘reliable information’ on the Nakba” (p. 87). She argues “for the real political work done by memory activism, not as simply building support for Palestinian statehood but as a pervasive strategy for raising consciousness among Jewish Israelis” (p. 19).
This overall framework is comprehensive and theoretically rich, but it also constrains Gutman’s analysis. On one hand, her methodological rigor and care bring to light a case wrought with complexity, indeterminacy, and uncertainty, yet at times, the framework streamlines and covers over these nuances and complexities. In Chapter 3, for example, the discussion of Baladna and its understanding of what is and what is not political becomes muted by the voices of other theorists. This stands in stark contrast to Chapters 4 and 5, where her casework and analysis lead the way, guiding the reader through riveting, political history and dramatic tension.
Gutman concludes with the chapter, “The Future of Reimagining the Past,” following the memory activists to their present-day practices and offering lessons for other cases. “Dominant collective memory can be fused with imagination, allowing different participants to construct their own new temporal links between different pasts, presents, and futures” in order to reform political culture” (p. 152). Carving out a space for commemorative practices in the study of political activism, memory, she writes, can “reshape mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion [. . .] revealing as it does the current power relations and the democratic capacity of the moment as well as potentialities and possibilities for the future” (p. 152).