Palestinian displacement was founded and simultaneously repressed from Israel’s official record.

Evidence

Thus Meron Benvenisti reports that something like 200 Arab villages were abandoned in May 1948, and another 60 in June. By the time the dust had settled, nearly half a million Palestinians had been reduced to refugees, fleeing expanded Israel, never to be allowed to return. Israel came into being, came to be, by virtue both of Jews staring at their own individual and collective extinction and of Palestine’s constriction, if not cessation, at least of its realization if not of its idea. That latter deathly denial, rationalized in the name of the former, is as much a part of Israel’s history as it is repressed in, if not excised from, its official record. It is this tension between denial and repression that fuels Israel’s sense of Palestine, and so of itself also. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 576

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the ‘denial and repression’ dynamic grounding the chapter’s concept of racial Palestinianization.