“An Apartment to Remember”: Palestinian Memory in the Israeli Landscape

Abstract

This essay offers a site-specific reading of Jaffa Slope Park, a newly opened public space on the city’s coastal border, in relation to both Ajami, the largely Arab neighborhood upon whose ruins it was built, and Ayman Sikseck’s memoiristic novel, To Jaffa (Hebrew, 2010). The park is analyzed within the broader discourse of Israeli landscape architecture, particularly the proliferation of memory-sites, while the novel is considered in relation to Hebrew literary history. Analyzing the production of Palestinian memory within Israeli culture allows us to rethink memory in a transnational setting, and to consider how the Nakba is remembered across different discursive realms shaped by geography, history and language.