Remembering the Nakba in Hebrew: Return Visits as the Performance of a Binational Future

This essay examines the memory practices of the Zochrot Association, an Israeli organisation committed to, in its words, ‘remembering the Nakba in Hebrew’. Giving particular attention to Zochrot’s actions at the destroyed village of Miskeh, the essay explores how Zochrot provokes memories in Hebrew about the Nakba, making present through embodied performances what had been rendered absent. These performances of memory, it is contended, might appropriately be called sacramental, in that through memories of the past they embody in the present a hope and vision for a bi-national future.