Ongoing Return: Mapping Memory and Storytelling in Palestine

In Palestine, a walk across the landscape is a journey of return that defies time, layered with sediments of personal experience and collective peoplehood. For Palestinian scholar Rana Barakat, the experience of place is guided by the stories and memories of her grandmother, who was among the 750,000 people forcibly displaced in 1948 by the newly formed Israeli government. Since then, the violence of settler colonialism has actively prevented the return of Palestinian refugees, including those from Lifta, her family’s ancestral village. In the present, the settler state of Israel controls the fate of the remaining structures in Lifta, enforcing so-called development plans that limit access and leave the valley appearing frozen in time. By gathering stories from family and community members alongside archival sources and lived experience in the West Bank under Israeli occupation, Barakat reveals how storytelling provides a form of ongoing return to a once-thriving village and to Palestine itself.

One of the first books to position Palestinian studies within Indigenous studies, Barakat offers a rich perspective on Palestinian history and the lives of its people today. Embedded in a deeply personal journey, Ongoing Return takes the reader through the past via the present and dares to imagine futures for Palestine and its people.

Rana Barakat is associate professor of history at Birzeit University and director of the Birzeit University Museum.