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How to break open the silence of injustice and of multi-layered oppression, a key question faced in Palestine, is a crucial dimension in building truth and effecting reconciliation.

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu remarked, 'it wasn't possible to move forward in South Africa without listening to the painful stories of victims of apartheid in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission'.

The massacre of between eighty and one hundred villagers was carried out at the end of October 1948, not in the heat of the battle but after the Israeli army had clearly emerged victorious in the war.

Truth-telling projects must be part of the solution in historic Palestine.

Remembrance should be an act of hope, liberation and decolonisation.

But while the Holocaust is an event in the past, the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank are continuing.

The Nakba is the turning point in the modern history of Palestine - that year over 500 villages' and towns and a whole country and its people disapeared from international maps and dictionaries.

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Ilan pappe, commenting on the massacres carried out by Jewish forces during the Nakba, writes:

Palestinian sourees, combining Israeli military archives with oral histories, list thirty-one confirmed massacres - beginning with the massacre in Tirat Haifa on 11 December 1947 and ending with Khirbat Illin in the Hebron area on 19 January 1949 - and there may have been at least another six. We still do not have a systematic Nakba memorial archive that would allow one to trace the names of all those who died in the massacres. (Pappé 2006: 258)

The rupture of 1948 and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine are central to both the Palestinian society of today and Palestinian social history and collective identity.

In the course of the 1948 war and immediate post-Nakba period the name 'Palestine' was wiped off the map.