Zochrot

Reviewed by: Alexandra Millatmal

Review date: April 2, 2025

Site Link: https://www.zochrot.org/welcome/index/en

Archive Link: https://archive.ph/jutnl

Keywords: First Nations and Indigenous Studies, History, Postcolonial Studies, Access, Activism and Advocacy, Public Humanities

Data Sources:

In the “Remember” section:

• Nakba map
  
• Booklets
  
• Oral Histories
  
• Digitized maps
  
• Historical profiles of stolen homes in occupied Yaffa and Al-Quds

Processes:

• Research and synthesis: Collecting, collating, digitally publishing, and translating new – largely unpublished – information
  
• Mapping
  
• Documenting

Presentation:

This is an informational website It provides background on their work and history, and it publicizes their educational resources, events, and various projects like the Nakba map, iReturn app, and a dedicated sub-domain focused on the Jewish National Fund. The home page divides their offerings into the categories of “Remember,” “Resist,” and “Return.” There is also a moving carousel of recent publications, a YouTube embed of one of their recent lectures, and a “Displacement and Occupation Calendar” that shows villages that were occupied on the current date. At the top of the page, the user can select to view the site content in Arabic, English, or Hebrew.

Digital Tools Used:

• PHP
  
• jQuery, HTML, CSS
  
• MapsGISrael, Google Maps
  
• YouTube

Languages:

• Arabic
  
• English
  
• Hebrew

Review

In 2002 — on the heels of the end of the Oslo Accords and start of the Second Intifada — a group of Jewish-Israeli activists founded Zochrot to respond to the observation that Israeli discourse on the conflict with Palestine failed to acknowledge or incorporate the facts of past, ongoing war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Their mission is to “expose and disseminate historical information about the Nakba [the violent displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War] in Hebrew” with a larger aim of Jewish Israeli accountability and eventual right of return for Palestinian refugees. Zochrot’s work started with in-person interventions at sites of ethnically cleansed villages that were destroyed, including one as recently as 1967–upon which a park was built.. The project has expanded to include multiple in-person tours, courses, workshops, and study groups. They also have created a digital database of destroyed villages and testimonies from both Nakba survivors and Israeli soldiers who committed war crimes. Maybe most relevant to our Digital Memories course, the project also created and maintains an app called iReturn (formerly iNabka), which seems to sync these records with GPS navigation data.

A major organizational touchpoint to Zochrot’s work appears to be an assembled database of information about the occupation and decimation of individual Palestinian villages. Across the whole of the country, Zochrot has gathered information on these sites including the date of occupation, the occupying military unit, population of the village pre-occupation, images, written history of the village, and oral histories and testimonials of villagers. When they are available, additional resources like conference talks or publications that reference the villages are also featured on their detail pages. An example of a village entry that is populated with a lot of data is the page for Iqrit, though there are many others — like al-Sawalima — that are scant on information. From a high-level, it is difficult as a user to see the differences between which entries are fully filled out and which are missing information, and it’s unclear whether not surfacing that information is a conscious design choice on the part of Zochrot or a limitation that they hope to address. It’s disappointing, because the work of going through and tagging their entire corpus of publications and presentations with the locales is an impressive feat, and a likely-unparalleled resource for researchers. This information appears to be the same data that powers the iReturn application and, at least with what is observable as a user located outside of the borders of Palestine, there is little that distinguishes the presentation of the data in the app from the website (other than a slightly differing user interface).

Other, stand-alone projects from Zochrot include:

• A genealogical survey of actual houses taken over by settlers in Yaffa and al-Quds. The site features summaries of the research into specific, individual properties, and provides a download of the entire research materials, often containing scans of documents like deeds and blueprints.
  
• A sub-domain of the website dedicated to detailing how the Jewish National Fund systemically develops national parks over ethnically cleansed villages.
  
• A phased study guide about the Nakba for both “formal and informal Israeli-Jewish educational systems.”

Even without much additional data, the iReturn application feels like it could be modernized to respond to more fine-grained location and advanced augmented reality technologies since its initial inception in 2014. (I think of a couple of hyper-localized projects: Soundwalk, which plays music for a user as they walk through parts of Central Park in New York City; and Pleasure Gardening, which provides audio tours of site specific locations.) What would the iReturn app look like if it insisted on intervention based on a user’s location, rather than having an interface that relies on the user taking initiative to select and interrogate for themselves? Perhaps this was a conscious design choice of the creators, but if so it would be nice to read about their reasoning.

It is clear that Zochrot fills a crucial gap in the work towards and conversation around Palestinian liberation and right to return. The organization does well to think about a specific and central facet of this supposedly-unthinkably-complex conflict – the Nakba, the evidence of ethnic cleansing – and examine it deeply and from many angles. Their work is meditative and unflinching, which it likely needs to be given its unwilling and often hostile audience, one that has a vested stake in not heeding the message. In many ways here, “success” is a multimodal and multidirectional metric, not reliant solely on what Zochrot can control. In that sense, Zochrot’s presence and persistence is their success, despite any nitpick critiques for finesse.

How are the collaborative aspects reflected in the project and are there elements that work particularly well?

In addition to individual donations, the 2024 annual report thanks the following partners, sponsors, and project supporters: Misereor, HEKS-EPER, IHL Human Rights fund, Kurve Wustrow, the Rockefeller Brothers foundation and Christian Aid; St. Het Solidariteits fonds, AFSC, MCC, Kaleidoscope fond, FMEP, CCFD, Aktion Hoffnung and Pax Christi. Israeli law requires that the organization disclose all of its foreign funding.