History & Memory

This article explores the "refrain of home" among Palestinian refugees in Gaza in the first years after their displacement in 1948. Relying on narrative accounts of the 1948 war and its aftermath, it traces people's changing relations with their lost homes. It explores people's memories of home before 1948 and considers four principal moments in the post-displacement transformation: exile itself, returns across the armistice line to retrieve possessions, crossings to steal from Israeli settlements, and fida'iyyin attacks. Each of these practices of connecting with home both reveals and shapes people's understanding of their relation with these lost places.