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Abstract Violence against persons and places may result in profound and radical transformations in the cultural landscape. In Palestine, political processes during war and its aftermath resulted in radical changes in culturescape. While the 1948 plight of some three-quarters of a million Palestinian refugees has been the subject of considerable analysis and controversy, far less attention has been paid to the physical destruction of the spatial world they inhabited. Using recently released classified material on the 1948 Israeli-Palestinian War, this paper seeks to interpret the war and its aftermath from the Palestinian civilian perspective. Particular attention is given to the enforced uprooting of the Palestinians and the obliteration of their rural villages. Empirical findings based on visits to all Palestinian villages (418) depopulated during that war corroborate the radical transformation of the Arab cultural landscape and its concomitant de-signification. The paper postulates six different categories of state intervention in the Arab cultural landscape; these range from obliteration (hardly any physical remains are discernable) to the selective survival of Arab houses currently occupied by Jewish families. This paper delineates what is essentially a “forgotten landscape” concealed under the palimpsest of the countryside of modern Israel/Palestine.
Ghazi Falah (1996) studied this question.