Section II of this volume centers on the collective mnemonic invocation of the two watersheds under review. The focus in this part lies on national memorial days – Yawm al-Nakbah (Arabic: Nakba day) and Yom ha-Shoah (Hebrew: Holocaust day) – and on places of commemoration. Through differentiating between non-physical and physical mnemonic acts, the two chapters that make up this part testify to the different mnemonics that have arisen as a result of the diverging political reality that exists in both societies under review. Within the 1948 borders, access to former Palestinian villages has meant that Nakba commemorations encompass physical mnemonics that center on former Palestinians localities, whereas restrictions on Palestinian movement into Israel have meant that non-site-specific commemorative acts dominate in the West Bank. The existing political circumstances have created a further disparity in the official nature of the Israeli and Palestinian institutes and organizations involved in commemoration. In the Israeli context, the three main Holocaust memorial institutes under examination in Israel, namely Yad Vashem, Lohamei Hagetaot, and Yad Mordechai, conform with the official state narrative. Conversely, the absence of Palestinian governance in Palestinian society inside the 1948 borders and post-Oslo hostility toward the PA has meant that an overt state-sanctioned narrative has largely remained absent in Nakba commemorations, leading civil society organizations on both sides of the Green Line to adopt a dominant role in mnemonics.

Post-Oslo Nakba anniversarial mediation became a means of expressing the communities’ concerns in coherence with the readerships’ cadres sociaux, forming the inverse of Israeli-dictated mediation in the wake of the 1948 War and Six-Day War in 1967. Accordingly, this chapter posits that Kul al-Arab has presented the Nakba as an interpretative framework for contemporary grievances resulting from Palestinians’ status as an involuntary minority in Israel. Inside the West Bank, application of the Nakba as an interpretative framework and, simultaneously, an analogical tool testifies to the mediated expression of what Dennis McQuail defined as “national problems” and “national goals.” Through repeated usage of previously censored symbolic terminology, the readership of the semi-independent Al-Quds and the PA’s mouthpiece, Al-Hayat al-Jadida, is admonished to adhere to these national objectives, which call for an end to “the permanent Nakba.” Invocation of the so-called fixed national principles is equally meant to challenge the main actor deemed responsible for their suspension: Israel. The chapter’s identified mediated convergence of the Holocaust and the Nakba testifies to the actualization of the previously-discussed defensive victimhood theory; the fallacious negation of the former’s historical veracity is symptomatic of its deemed discursive incompatibility with the Palestinian narrative. Incongruously, the Holocaust has also been conjured within Nakba media output as a means of highlighting the depths of Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israelis. Forming a powerful realm of collective social mobilization against “the Zionist entity,” Nakba mediated output thus, at times, makes use of the most tendentious charge to debunk the Israeli aggressor and the perceived “Zionist colonial project”: the execution of a Palestinian Holocaust.