When I first began exploring the memories of Palestinian refugees in the mid-1990s, I did not think that it would lead to a long-term research project. At the time I was immersed in what was for me a new experience: exploring the Palestinians' viewpoint after having been raised as a secular, Zionist Jew in Israel. My choice to study three villages south of Haifa was not accidental. These three villages – Tirat Haifa, ‘Ein Hawd, and Ijzim – were located on the slopes of Mount Carmel, where I had worked during my army service as a tour guide for the Israeli Society for the Protection of Nature. When I got to know their remains in the 1980s, these settlements consisted of a few old Arab houses, now populated by Jews, and sparse traces – trees, fences, graves; all very neglected. For me, researching Palestinian histories of these villages was a journey of rediscovery, one that allowed me to see the Arab landscape, alongside the Jewish one I had earlier been made to see. The post-Oslo accords and the peace agreement with Jordan made it fairly easy to make contact with those Palestinian refugees living in the occupied West Bank and Jordan.

My encounters with the refugees turned what was initially abstract knowledge into concrete life stories. My Palestinian interviewees were patient enough to tell me these stories in great detail. Theirs was not merely a tale of national disaster but also a painful description of villages and families disintegrating.