Charles Clore Park, located between the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv and Jaffa and named after the British billionaire who funded it, was built atop the ruins of an Arab neighbourhood, Manshiya, in the early 1970s. After Manshiya’s residents fled during the war that followed partition (and were blocked from returning), the village was demolished, its rubble tossed into the sea and later used as reclaimed land.
Formerly home to 13,000 people, Manshiya was just one of the roughly 400 villages cleansed of its villagers and identity and absorbed into the nascent state of Israel. The period, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, saw 750,000 Palestinians scattered across the region.
Manshiya is just one of these many sites whose history is being lost to time, argue Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson in their new book, Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials, an exploration of what Palestinians have lost, and lost access to, since their displacement.
Shehadeh and Johnson, a married couple based in Ramallah, began the book as a way to explore the landscape during the pandemic. The resulting work, Forgotten, is a heartbreaking, hopeful look at how Palestinian culture endures in spite of the occupation and the Israeli government’s attempts to remove all traces of it from the land that they “share unequally”.
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Whether wandering around the ruins of disappeared villages, visiting the sites of markets that once drew crowds from across the region, or stumbling upon sombre memorials to fallen soldiers, Forgotten remains “interested in losses that can be recovered, and memories that can be restored”.
“This was not an exercise in nostalgia,” they write, “but a search for a usable past that might take us beyond our fragmented land and occupied lives.”
Forgotten was written before the current war but notes that the destruction of Gaza’s “rich cultural heritage is not only a war on Gaza’s present but on its past”. Its loss, they remind us, is a loss for us all.
Surveying the visitors passing through Charles Clore Park, the pair surmise that if only the park had not been built atop the ruined village of another people, “Israeli efforts at establishing and maintaining such areas would be admirable”.
