As I passed houses in the neighborhood, I could “see” Hala Sakakini and her sister Dumia’s birthday party, a tea at the Moushabeck’s, and Marina’s mother, Anna, posing as a cocky teenager, wearing shorts, a sailor’s cap, and a cigarette in hand. All of these I came to know by the way of photographs, and slowly but surely, I became an embodied archive of the Palestinian history of Katamon, an odd experience, given that it was not my ancestral history, and that many of the Palestinians from Katamon who grew up in the diaspora had no access to those memories. I started wondering how to share this knowledge with Palestinian descendants, and how to make visible that which most Israelis have no interest in knowing.

But then a different process started, and this one caught me by surprise: the more I learned about the Palestinian history of the neighborhood, the more Israelis wanted to know. It took me a while to realize that humanizing the Palestinians, educating Israelis about them, and sharing their stories, was a necessary, but utterly insufficient condition to evoke change. I realized that I wanted to bring the Palestinian past into the Israeli present, to trouble the notion of ultimate and ethnically singular sovereignty, and to try and imagine a different future for us all. In mainstream Israeli discourse, the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees equals the destruction of the State of Israel and is thus a “no-go” discursive zone. For most Palestinians, the Right of Return is at once a personal right and a collective right, without which no solution to the political impasse can emerge. For a long time I wasn’t sure if I could make an intervention into this seemingly zero-sum perception of territorial control. But slowly, organically, a non-didactic path forward emerged.