Nakba Quote Of The Day: Milan Kundera

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting".

-- From The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, chapter 2, part 1; by Milan Kundera.

Photo: Vandalized sign in Canada Park, near Latrun in the West Bank; by Tomer Noiberg via Ha'aretz.

Canada Park was created in part on the ruins of the Palestinian villages of Dayr Ayyub which was captured and destroyed by Israel in 1948, and Yalu and Imwas, which were captured and destroyed by Israel in 1967. In 2005, following a protracted campaign by the Israeli advocacy group, Zochrot, the Jewish National Fund agreed to acknowledge the existence of Dayr Ayyub, Yalu and Imwas on park signs (which had previously described the history of the area without mentioning the Palestinian presence).

The new signs were vandalized within two weeks of being set up. The sign in the photo was stolen; the other was spray-painted with black paint over the part of the text referring to the area's Palestinian history, and subsequently stolen.

A spokesperson for Zochrot notes: "This vandalism against official JNF signs reflects how much the act of signposting the villages touches on a raw nerve for Jews living in the country. These signs were posted by the JNF, not by Zochrot in some "extreme" act. The very fact of their existence on the landscape, of the reminder that there was Palestinian life before the Nakba, is what challenges Israelis".