Without a trace: the buried history of Rehovot and the Palestinians who lived there

The recently renovated Sister Cities Bridge in downtown Rochester is designed to convey connectivity. Spanning the Genesee River, the pedestrian bridge features a dozen national flags, each representing a Rochester sister city. Beneath each flag, a plaque provides a brief history and notable facts about the corresponding city. Each of these elements, architecture, visual imagery, and written word, communicate a curated story.

Public space is a powerful platform for immersive storytelling, a physical manifestation of what we value, built to engage and inspire. Since it is physical, absence can be as telling as presence. For example, the Russian flag flies above the bridge without any acknowledgment of the ongoing war in Ukraine. As the war approaches its third year, the specter of normalization could be seen as an affront to the significant population of Ukrainians who call Rochester home.

Similarly, the small plaque for the city of Rehovot in Israel omits any mention of Palestine or Palestinians, as if they never existed. Maybe that’s the point. Palestinian stories have been so removed from our public discourse that they only seem to exist in protest. The erasure of Palestinian stories diminishes our humanity and undermines our understanding of the world. The story on the bridge is not entirely untrue, but it is wholly incomplete.

Settlement and displacement  

Rehovot, like Rochester, was established by European settlers on indigenous land. In 1890, exactly 100 years after European settlers laid claim to the Haudenosaunee homeland that became Rochester, European settlers, mostly from Poland and Belarus, bought the land of Khirbet Duran out from under the Palestinian clan of Al-Sataria.

The Clan petitioned the governing Ottoman administrator to oppose the establishment of the Rehovot settlement, noting “This tribe, since the days of our fathers and grandfathers, has known no land other than the land of Khirbet Duran… we make our living from it, and we have no other home… They [settlers] started expelling us from our place of residence and preventing us from plowing the land.” Tensions persisted between the people who lived on the land and those who had newly acquired its title.

Colonial contradictions

In 1917, empires shifted beneath peoples’ feet as the British seized control of Palestine from the Ottomans. In true British fashion, they made contradictory commitments by assuring the occupied indigenous Arab population a path to independence while also promising European zionists “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.

Only one of those promises was kept. The British facilitated immigration and settlement, empowering the European arrivals as colonial agents while lording over the native population. By 1945, the population of Rehovot exceeded 10,000 and the neighboring Palestinian villages of Zarnuqa and al-Qubayba had a combined population of roughly 4,300. The popular zionist slogan “A land without a people for a people without a land” rhetorically erased the Palestinians and made it possible to deny their claim to contested space.

Forced to flee

The villages around Rehovot came under attack by Israeli troops in late May 1948, after the British relinquished their Mandate and Israel declared independence. An account from soldiers published in the Israeli newspaper ‘Al ha-Mishmarrecounted how they captured the village of Zarnuqa, house by house, and rounded up the villagers. One soldier, armed with a British submachine gun, reportedly killed an entire family while raiding their home. The rest of the villagers were gathered under the heat of the sun all day, without food or water, until they were expelled.

Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote that these villages initially attempted to surrender, but the advancing army’s goal was clear, to force an exodus. The presence of Palestinians was irreconcilable with the vision of the new state and its ambitions, there could be no shared space.

An account of one surviving couple from Zarnuqa, Abu al-Walid Muhammad Eid and his wife Um al-Walid Eid, remembered: “We heard that the Zionists stormed the mosque and threw a grenade inside… I was so frightened that I forgot to pick up my son, Walid, who was only ten days old and wrapped in swaddling clothes. My sister helped me by picking him up and we all headed for Gaza to begin living far away from our homes, farms and lives.”

From the cities to the countryside, over 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their homes. This has become known as the Nakba, the “catastrophe” in Arabic, a systematic and violent depopulation of Palestinians that continues to this day.

Exile and erasure  

In 1973, Abu al-Walid Muhammad Eid was able to return to Zarnuqa for the first time since he fled with his wife and newborn. He and a friend got a cab from Gaza and went to search for their abandoned homes. They were approached by an Israeli couple and were told they needed permission to see their homes. Abu al-Walid was distraught and wondered, “how fate had turned us from the owners of the houses into mere visitors.” He never set foot in Zarnuqa again.

Today, the land of Zarnuqa and al-Qubayba sit within the expanded city limits of Rehovot. The homes, markets, mosques, and schools have long been destroyed. New suburban developments have been strategically built over the buried ruins. Residential towers and manicured parks have reshaped the landscape to mask any traces of the Palestinian villages.

Many of the families from these villages fled to Gaza and became refugees in their own homeland. Over half of Gaza’s 2 million residents are registered refugees, displaced from their cities, towns, and villages in what is now Israel. The al-Walid Eid family that fled from Zarnuqa rebuilt their life in the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza.

Enduring violence

Since their exile in 1948, they have been unable to escape the violence that forced them from their homes. Living under decades of occupation and then being besieged, Palestinians living in Gaza have endured at least a dozen military assaults on the enclave. Since October 2023, the Maghazi refugee camp has been routinely attacked: the UN school was bombed, hundreds killed in airstrikes on residential homes, and eye witness reports describe civilians being targeted by Israeli snipers and crushed by tanks.

In late August, the residents of Maghazi were ordered to evacuate, once again expelled from their homes with nowhere safe to go. According to a list published later that month, at least 96 people with the family-name Eid had been killed, from infants to the elderly, including Walid Muhammad Eid, whose family fled Zarnuqa 76 years ago.

The space we make

We are more connected than we know, but we have buried the stories that hold these truths. Irreplaceable stories of the beautiful and the ordinary, carried in the memory of generations, are at risk of being lost. How might our conversations have been different this past year if our sister cities included Rafah or Ramallah? Not only to consider connections across the world, but here at home. Palestinians are our neighbors, they live, work, study, and worship here in Rochester. What if we made space for them to tell their stories? 

Consider the recent events at the University of Rochester. The voices of Palestinians and their allies have been so thoroughly repressed that in order to have their message heard they have to protest, take over space, and plaster posters on the walls. These disruptive forms of communication are a direct result of being ignored. Instead of responding to a pointed critique of the institution’s entangled investments with the state of Israel, the university deflected by labeling the action as antisemitic and bringing the full force of the criminal-legal system down on its own students.

Predictably, national news and politicians unquestioningly parroted the university’s framing even though the Public Safety Chief admitted that the “students’ actions do not currently meet the legal threshold for a hate crime.” Despite that fact, the students’ message was already delegitimized and dismissed, and that is the point.

The Palestinian perspective has been so forcefully marginalized and mischaracterized that the associations of antisemitism and extremism are almost automatic in our public consciousness. There is a cost to silencing their voices. To make Palestinians invisible is to diminish our own humanity, but as we have painfully witnessed, the greatest cost of all are the thousands of lives cut short because we’ve refused to see them as deserving our attention.  

Brennon Thompson
Urban planner and fair housing advocate

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