Paper short abstract:

Based on Paul Connerton's typology of forgetting (2008) as well as on other studies in the field, this paper will explore changes in the identities of Israel's Palestinian Arab citizens through the prism of forgetfulness and silence.

Paper long abstract:

The field of memory studies focuses primarily on how societies remember and on insights drawn about social groups through an analysis of the ways in which their members remember the past. Less is known, however, on how societies forget.

Based on Paul Connerton's typology of forgetting (2008) as well as on other studies in the field, this paper will explore changes in the identities of Israel's Palestinian Arab citizens through the prism of forgetfulness and silence. The analysis will take into account 'Jewish-Israeli' amnesias, silences and acts of erasure, but first and foremost it will attempt to examine the concept of forgetfulness, its various types and its different agencies, through an examination of changing 'Israeli-Arab' attitudes towards the past.

The paper will discuss differences between explicit acts of cultural erasure and implicit ones. It will deal with how Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel forced themselves to forget, but also with how (and what) they chose to remember and under which circumstances they decided not to keep quiet. Differences between resistance and remembrance will be discussed in the paper, but its emphasis will be on forgetfulness and its relations with neglect, repression, denial and shame.