Contested Land, Contested Memory Quotes

“The cemetery was part if the landscape of Daphne's childhood. Raised as she was in a culture of memory, its silent destruction shocked her into asking why the dead beneath those familiar gravestones were less worthy of remembrance than others.”
― Jo Roberts, Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel's Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe

“Israeli national identity oscillates between the poles of the Holocaust and the Six-Day War, victim and vanquisher - the latter is the antidote too the former. Permanently vulnerable, Israel must respond to any attack with massive force. For a nation with genocide as a central political referent, security is paramount, and it trumps all other considerations. "Never again!" puts Israel's militaristic policy choices into a place beyond debate.”
― Jo Roberts, Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel's Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe

“Perhaps the strongest reason for the razing of the villages was the desire to purge their ghosts. The presence of the exiles still lingered in the architecture and the carefully tended olive groves and the pots and pans hastily buried in the yard. It was easier simply to bulldoze the villages and start afresh.”
― Jo Roberts, Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel's Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe

“The landscape of al-Kabri has been completely transformed to tell a story of its past, and to tell that story as if it were the only one to tell. This process is an inherent part of a nation's self-construction. The physical landscape, although it seems to be natural, neutral, and permanent, is not. Its soil, trees, and stones are malleable, open to playing a role in the re-creation of a collective memory”
― Jo Roberts, Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel's Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe

“Manipulated or not, trauma is a volatile substance. How is a community to make sense of its shattering by a shared disaster? The myriad individual tragedies out of which it is constituted both bind and separate its members. Too terrible to be remembered, it is is also too terrible to forget. New generations grow up, often in anguished silence of their elders, trying to make sense of trauma which they never experienced but yet. has indelibly shaped and scarred them.”
― Jo Roberts, Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel's Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe

“Memory holds us fast in what we are unable to forget- acts of violence or disaster, personal and communal. The shared memory of violence, or collective trauma, is a particularly strong adhesive in the construction of a national identity.”
― Jo Roberts, Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel's Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe