A Palestinian photographer’s ‘search for what remained’ from 1948
Remains from the village of Tantura, between the buildings of Kibbutz Nachsholim, south of Haifa.
Yahel Gazit writes in +972 on 12 May 2026:
This month marks a personal milestone for me: five years have passed since I first became an anti-occupation activist. Growing up in West Jerusalem, I had spent most of my life in a homogenous Jewish Israeli milieu, barely encountering Palestinians. But the events of May 2021, coined the “Unity Intifada” — Palestinians rising up en masse across Israel and the occupied territories, intercommunal violence engulfing Israel’s so-called “mixed cities”, and the Israeli army launching a devastating assault on Gaza — pushed me into the streets.
**** ****
A mosque in the now-destroyed Al-Manshiyya in Jaffa, with Tel Aviv’s David Intercontinental Hotel in the background, from ‘The Erasure of Palestine’
It was through Activestills that I first met Palestinian photojournalist, filmmaker, and writer fellow member Ahmad Al-Bazz, who has been a member of the collective since 2012. During our first encounter in May 2023 — in Sheikh Jarrah, fittingly enough — he told me about the iReturn app, a tool developed by the Israeli NGO Zochrot that maps the hundreds of Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba. This suggestion led me on a personal journey of photographing depopulated Palestinian villages and cities, and unlearning the Zionist narratives about the “War of Independence” I grew up with.
For Al-Bazz, this method is an everlasting pursuit. He recently returned to the West Bank from a book tour of his latest publication, “The Erasure of Palestine,” the culmination of a three-year project documenting the remnants of hundreds of Palestinian villages and cities depopulated and destroyed from 1948 into the present. I sat down with him to discuss his transformed understanding of historic Palestine, the narratives that structure how Jewish Israelis relate to Palestinian ruins, and the ambiguous relationship between photography and memory.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
First of all, congratulations on the publication of your new book. In the past, you wrote for +972 Magazine about the practice of returning to and photographing the Palestinian villages and cities depopulated in the Nakba of 1948. Could you tell me how this project began?
I live in Nablus in the West Bank, which is surrounded by a wall that prevents me from traveling to see the rest of the country. To do that, you need the golden ticket: the Israeli military movement permit. Before late 2020, I had only received random short-term permits, but that year, for the first time, I got a permit for six months. I felt this was an opportunity to go beyond the 18 percent or less [of Israel-Palestine] where I can typically move.
I also come from a family that lost properties in 1948. My grandmother was originally displaced from Beisan [now the Israeli city of Beit-She’an], where her family owned banana farms along with their house. And my grandfather lost a shop that he rented in downtown Haifa. I had both a personal and a communal connection to the Nakba — I grew up hearing about it and learning about it, but I had never seen these depopulated sites myself.