About Us
Preserving history, fighting denial, and promoting Palestinian arts and culture
The Nakba Memorial Foundation is a charity formed in 2024. We are a group of scholars and activists who are dedicated to preserving the history of the 1948 Nakba and promoting Palestinian arts and culture. Our initial goal is to build the Centre for Documentation on the Nakba in London.
The NMF Perspective
The Critical Importance of the Documentary Record of the 1948 Nakba for the Palestinian National Narrative, which Underpins the Contemporary National Culture of the Palestinian People and the Survival of Palestinian Communities Worldwide:
It is an established practice of settler colonial regimes to embed themselves in the colonised territory not only by seeking the removal of the native population from the territory concerned, or the subjection of those who remain, but also to remove the historical memories and the historical narratives of the native population. History has to be the history of the incoming rulers. No other narrative must be allowed to survive which might challenge the supposed legitimacy of the settler-colonial regime. Key events in history, as experienced and remembered by the local peoples have to be denied. This practice was followed in virtually all territories where settler colonial regimes established themselves, from the Americas, to Africa and Australia. The historical memories and perspectives of the local populations were denied, and in some cases the documents and cultural relics which supported local narratives were destroyed. The same applies to the Israeli settler colonial regime which became established in Palestine.
In Palestine, the 1948 Nakba and its aftermath have constituted the fulcrum both for the denial of locally-experienced history and for the attempt to remove the local population physically from the territory. What has been widely described as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been presented as an unintended consequence flowing from the irrational intransigence of native communities. Yet there has been a wealth of documentation, and of historical memories, which point to the deliberation with which this process of ethnic cleansing was orchestrated.
The Palestinian national narrative has based itself on an understanding of the events of 1948 which draws on documents and memories from that time. The narrative lies at the centre of Palestinian identity and culture. There is now evidence that the government of Israel is undertaking what may be referred to as “Nakba denial”. This involves, on the one hand, the reclassification since 2016 of documents in the Israeli archives, such that access is no long given to a significant part of the documentary evidence on 1948 and its aftermath; and on the other hand destroying centres of documentation in areas controlled by Palestinians (as, for example, has been done with the deliberate destruction of Palestinian universities, research centres and libraries in Gaza).