Many acts of remembering are site-specific, but they are not all site-specific in the same way. Consider, for instance, the following two cases.

My first example comes from the experience of contemporary Palestinians, for whom the primal event in their collective memory is the catastrophic uprooting of 1948, the dispossession and occupation brought about by the establishment of the state of Israel. Hundreds of their villages were destroyed, virtually all their homes and buildings demolished, and the sites reshaped by the new occupiers. In documents, in short stories, in paintings and in memory maps the fate of trees yields a condensed image for the catastrophe of uprootedness and the longing for rootedness. The emblematic status of trees is grounded in the actual fate of trees. The booklet Olive Trees under Occupation documents the experience of the village of Midya in 1986 when, after more than 3,300 olive trees were uprooted, black banners were raised at the entrance to the village and on individual homes, as when mourning the death of a person. In Ghassan Kanafani's short story ‘Land of Sad Oranges’ of 1987, the narrator, a young boy, on seeing his uncle's pain when he thinks of the orange trees ‘abandoned to the Jews’, recalls that a peasant back home once told him that the orange trees would shrivel and die if left in the care of strangers. In a painting by Amin Shtai of 1977 the combined figure of an olive tree and a man are represented, marked as Palestinian with traditional headgear; the arboreal trunk and the human torso merge into a single gestalt, with one tree leg and one human leg forming the lower part of the trunk. When Palestinians try to reconstruct memory maps of their destroyed villages, trees provide the leitmotif of their mnemonic quest; indeed, Palestinian pilgrims to these sites have little else but trees with which to do the work of memory and mourning.