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Photography by Ahmad Al-Bazz, unless otherwise noted.
The Erasure of Palestine was never meant to be a photo-book. This project was born out of multiple trips into the heart of the occupied territory, what is now considered to be Israel. As someone from the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, I was only able to cross into those parts of Palestine with an Israeli military permit. During those visits – which began in 2021 – I photographed almost a third of the 600 depopulated villages, towns, and urban neighborhoods ethnically cleansed and destroyed during the Nakba in 1948. I also went to the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967, where Zionists wiped out almost all 345 Arab villages.
In total, I spent over three years photographing parts of the occupied homeland, creating a visual record of the elimination campaign wrought on the Palestinians throughout history and up to the present day, including villages that have been ethnically cleansed in the occupied West Bank, where I live.
Zionism’s obsession with geography has been central to its mission of colonizing Palestine from the start. That is why the settler-colonial project continues to swallow land in Palestine and beyond, and it is also why refugees – those still in camps and scattered across the globe – are still waiting to go back home. These images are an effort to unify these different stages of our erasure, across all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea.
Qira – Haifa District
Date of occupation: April 1948
The ruins of the Palestinian village of Qira and the Israeli settlement of Yokne’am Illit.
An internet search for the Israeli settlement of Yokne’am Illit, south of Haifa, describes it as Israel’s Startup Village, a bustling high-tech hub surrounded by forests and ‘small communities’. Unmentioned are the Palestinian villages on which this settlement was built and developed, including the ethnically-cleansed village of Qira, whose Palestinian residents are banned from return.
