CONTESTED LAND, CONTESTED MEMORY

1948: As Jewish refugees, survivors of the Holocaust, struggle toward the new State of Israel, Arab refugees are fleeing, many under duress. Sixty years later, the memory of trauma has shaped both peoples' collective understanding of who they are.

After a war, the victors write history. How was the story of the exiled Palestinians erased — from textbooks, maps, even the land? How do Jewish and Palestinian Israelis now engage with the histories of the Palestinian Nakba ("Catastrophe") and the Holocaust, and how do these echo through the political and physical landscapes of their country?

Vividly narrated, with extensive original interview material, Contested Land, Contested Memory examines how these tangled histories of suffering inform Jewish and Palestinian-Israeli lives today, and frame Israel's possibilities for peace.

Trained as a lawyer and anthropologist, Jo Roberts is now a freelance writer. For five years she was managing editor of the Catholic Worker in New York and has frequently contributed articles to it. Her reportage from Israel and from the West Bank has appeared in Embassy, Canada's foreign policy weekly.