The geography of dispossession

JVL Introduction

 Among the many crimes perpetrated in the years surrounding 1948 and the foundation of the state of Israel, fictitious land “sale” of 372 Arab villages to the Jewish National Fund ranks high.

To obliterate their memory these were demolished and subsequently covered in parks and forests – part of the strategy of preventing any return.

That their memory lives on as current reality is in no small part due to the work of Palestinian geographer Dr. Salman Abu Sitta who has worked tirelessly to restore their original names and histories.

For him the JNF Parks and Forests are but an overlay on the authentic Arabic identity of Palestine, their borders demarcating the extent of their theft, giving the lie to the Zionist idea that Palestine was ever a “land without people”.

For Annie O’Gara Abu Sitta’s work has triggered many connections with what happened in Ireland when it was mapped by the English crown in C19th.

She explores these through a discussion of Brian Friel’s play Translations about the obliteration of the original Gaelic names as they were renamed – much as Palestinian villages were all accorded Hebrew names – in “an act of cultural imperialism, erasing local history and identity and replacing it with a new, imposed reality”.

RK

This article was originally published by Palestine Chronicle on Tue 14 Apr 2026. Read the original here.