Casa Árabe organized a conference by Palestinian historian Nur Masalha to commemorate the Nakba, and screened the documentary “The Earth Speaks Arabic”. The event was moderated by Teresa Aranguren, a journalist and member of the Board of Directors at RTVE. Why doesn’t the destruction of a large number of Palestinian towns and villages appear in the Western story about the consequences of Palestine’s partition? Commemorating the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of 1947-48 means making an effort to recover a collective memory and the formation of a group identity, in which Palestine’s oral history holds a special place. Masalha calls it “social history from the bottom up” and argues that writing more sincerely about the Nakba does not mean just practicing professional historiography, but is also a moral imperative. Historians and intellectuals play a basic role when it comes to constructing a national narrative, something which has created yet another battlefield in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since it first began. About the documentary The 61-minute film by Maryse Gargour, The Land Speaks Arabic, documents the founding of the Zionist movement and the expulsion of the Palestinians in the first part of the twentieth century. The historical narrative is reconstructed using archival materials such as photographs, films, news reels and official documents, with testimonials from Palestinian survivors of the forced expulsion in 1947-48, known as the Nakba, and the conclusions by British-Palestinian historian Nur Masalha. Nur Masalha is a Palestinian historian and former director of the Centre for Religion and History at St. Mary University in London. He is currently a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. He is the author of many books on Palestine and Israel, including Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought 1882-1948 (1992); A Land Without a People (1997); Imperial Israel and the Palestinians (2000); The Politics of Denial (2003); Catastrophe Remembered (2005), and The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (2012). He is also the editor of Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, published by Edinburgh University Press. More info: http://en.casaarabe.es/event/seven-decades-of-nakba