A Palestinian right of return? There’s an app for that

From a P.R. point of view, Benjamin Netanyahu’s timing may not have been optimal: At the end of a week in which the U.S. Mideast conversation focused on Secretary of State John Kerry’s application of the term “apartheid” to Israel, its prime minister announced a new legislative initiative that would declare his country “the nation state of one people only – the Jewish people – and of no other people."

One in five Israeli citizens is not Jewish, of course, but Palestinian Arab. And then there’s the matter of the millions more Palestinians over which Israel maintains sovereign control in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

But even as the more-liberal Israeli ‘peace camp’ expresses alarm at Netanyahu’s plan, a small group of left-wing Israelis wants to remind their countrymen of the now mostly hidden history of the land on which this state the Prime Minister would define as  “of one people only” was built – via a smartphone app.

No, this is not some anthropological guide to possible Biblical sites; instead, the non-profit organization Zochrot has created an app that maps the villages and towns from which Palestinians fled in what they call the “Nakba” (“Catastrophe”) of 1948, and to which Israel prevented them from returning. Most of those towns and villages were then leveled and built over, the homes to which Palestinian refugees have kept front-door keys no longer extant.

Zochrot, an organization whose members include Jews and Arabs, supports the right of refugees – many of whom still languish in camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and also the West Bank and Gaza – to return to what is now Israel.

Needless to say, that’s not a popular point of view in Israel; it’s opposed even by the vast majority of those who favor a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. Undaunted, Zochrot has for years sought to keep alive memories of the pre-1948 past – often using innovative media strategies, such as posting life-size cutout photographs of Palestinian refugees now living in Lebanon in the Israeli towns and shopping malls where their homes once stood.

It’s a quixotic quest, to be sure, in a political climate moving further to the right. Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbascaused a stir in 2012 by appearing to renounce any claim to a right to live in Safed, the town of his birth.

Former participants have noted how efforts to negotiate a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines have until now evaded the uncomfortable legacy of 1948; Zochrot appears determined to use whatever media platforms it can to draw attention to the elephant in the room.

The Middle East’s past is fiercely contested, of course, and electronic representations of Israel and Palestine on Google and other platforms having long been a theater of hacker warfare and internet activism.

So, it’s safe to predict that Zochrot’s i-Nakba app will elicit a similarly tech-savvy response from those who agree with Netanyahu’s view of who owns the Holy Land.

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Any views expressed on The Scrutineer are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.