Rose Asaf
Zochrot
Jaffa, Israel
My name is Rose Asaf, and I am a Junior in the College of Arts and Sciences studying American studies in the social and cultural analysis and comparative politics departments. As an Israeli-American Jewish woman, I grew up with a strong sense of attachment to the nation-state of Israel, never once learning about the Palestinian narrative. Not until I pursued independent research near the end of high school did I begin to recognize how lopsided my prior education had been.
As my family and I used to joyfully celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut, I did not know that millions of Palestinians in Palestine and in the diaspora commemorate al-Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic. I did not know that my celebration coincided with another’s mourning. I did not know that the land I once found so holy and pure was actually seized through forced evacuations, ethnic cleansing, and total destruction.
I struggled with the process of unlearning the ideological imperatives of Zionism that once seemed inseparable from my identity, and now I commit myself to working against the injustice that was hidden from me for so long. For many years, I have been in solidarity with the Palestinian people as part of a greater nexus of the Palestinian solidarity movement. I have worked both within and outside of Jewish communities to bring awareness to the Palestinian narrative that I find to be so intentionally suppressed in many institutional Jewish spaces. As the co-founder of NYU’s Jewish Voice for Peace chapter, I have worked with intention to confront the criminality and brutality of the State of Israel head-on. Additionally, as the incoming secretary for Students for Justice in Palestine, I have worked with my comrades to educate our peers on the Palestinian struggle and to educate people about ways in which they can show solidarity from abroad.
This summer, in Israel, I plan to continue that work I have already started. I will be working with an Israeli organization called Zochrot, which means “remembering” in Hebrew. As an organization, Zochrot commits itself to addressing the Nakba denial and erasure that exists in Israeli society while simultaneously advocated for the right of return of Palestinian refugees and just compensation and reparation for those whose homes and possessions were destroyed in the Nakba.
Zochrot’s slogan is “to commemorate, witness, acknowledge, and repair,” which gets at the core of its work. Using forensic and archeological approaches, Zochrot documents Palestinian localities that were destroyed during the Nakba and leads tours throughout Israel to bring attention to the destroyed villages that have been intentionally covered by national parks and forests planted by the Jewish National Fund. Focusing on the past to bring forth a just future, Zochrot centers the power of acknowledgment in their work as a necessary precondition to reparations. I look forward to researching the physical and intangible denial of the Nakba through archeology, oral histories, and archival studies.