This paper deals with the employment and exploitation of the past in the Palestinian children's literature and its internalization by the Palestinian writers, especially after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. It focuses on the manner in which the writers managed to invest this literature in the formation and crystallization of the collective national identity.
The paper diagnoses and examines the purposes of the use of history and its impact on the character and nature of children's literature and on the formation of the collective identity and the people - consciousness among the younger Palestinian generation. 
The hypothesis that stands in the center of the study maintains that in the twentieth century, the Palestinian society has undergone a process of national revival and construction of their national identity and the collective memory. The Palestinian society saw the construction of the past an important medium in creating a collective identity and achieving its vision about the future. It also believed that the young generation, who is free of the traumas of the past, has a central role in achieving that vision. The main hypothesis is that educating the young generation on the heritage of the past is vital for the society as it enables it to examine itself in the present and prepare itself for the future.
The past in the Palestinian children's literature is recruited for the needs of the present. The imagination and aesthetic enjoyment connect the ancient foundations and motifs with their traditional images and metaphors in order to build up a new identity. Thus, children's literature not only reflects social and cultural changes but takes part in forming and shaping them. The study shows how this literature serves as a medium between the tradition and the narratives of the past on the one hand, and the modern realities and values, on the other. Besides, it serves as an important tool of knowledge, education and social change.
Interest in children's literature stems from the central role of children and the young people that society devotes to them as a preferred target audience that will form the new social identity, internalize hegemonicnarratives, adopt them and pass them to the future generations. However, the hegemonic groups were not the only groups who were interested in children and youths. In certain events, marginal groups tried to recruit them to pass subversive messages. 
Because of the unifying role of the narrative of the Palestinian past, the writers made effort to abstain from criticism to the past and even tried to see it as a 'paradise lost'. The representations of the popular culture in the Palestinian children's literature are reflected in the use of popular tales, songs , proverbs, characters and popular games that have been passed from generation to generation through the integration of the special Palestinian dialect, which enabled this type of literature to serve as a tool to adopt the narrative of the Palestinian past and the formation of the collective Palestinian identity. 

At the 2019 MSA conference in Madrid, Spain, I gave a presentation on Jonas Dahlberg's scrapped July 22 memorial originally planned for a small peninsula jutting out into Tyrifjorden near the island of Utøya. Utøya is the small island where on July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 67 people and wounded 32 in one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern history. Doomed by controversy, almost from the very outset, Dahlberg's memorial has been replaced by a very different memorial, inaugurated just this year in June. While the controversy surrounding the Utøya memorial has seemingly faded now from attention, the issues that gave rise to the controversy have not. And in fact the Utøya controversy continues with the renovation and rebuilding of the Oslo Government Quarter, where Breivik detonated a bomb prior to his attack at Utøya killing eight and injuring over 200. The various memorials planned for the Oslo area have run into public and private disagreement, populist outcry, state funding problems, architectural and city planning problems, concerns surrounding renovation and the re-siting of art works such as Picasso's large concrete murals, and certainly not last or least, the aesthetic and memorialization issues tied to the questions about how and what to memorialize at the Oslo location. 
Tying the above to the questions of the conference is the looming question of the "we" in Norway and these memorialization projects. In the immediate aftermath of July 22, the question of who this "we" is was announced by Jens Stoltenberg, the then prime minister of Norway. Given the current political landscape, the rise of populism, immigration as well as an increasingly diverse citizenry, Nordic happiness, the wealth of the welfare state, and so on, the issues of the collective and collective belonging have risen even more starkly to the fore under the pressures of memorializing July 22. Borrowing Michael Rothberg's notion of "multidirectional memory" and Ann Rigney's "scalar memory," my paper will describe Norway's frustrating and perhaps frustrated attempt to adequately memorialize July 22 and the related question of identifying this collective Norwegian "we."


I could see my paper fitting into any of the three following categories mentioned in the cfp: 
Conflict, Violence and MemoryMemory and Diverse BelongingsMemoryscapes (digital, locational, imagined)

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 marks a turning point in recent Iraqi history, often pointed to as having led to the institutionalization of a sectarianized consociational power-sharing political system (Mako & Edgar, 2021). As such, the U.S. led intervention is a key event in the constitution of a collective Iraqi narrative on the current Iraqi state. At the same time, the Iraqi case highlight the overlapping and mutually entrenching influences that give shape to a complex dynamic of memory and violence that draws on recent and historical memories of colonialism, but also precolonial identities (Makdisi & Silverstein, 2006). But in what ways does the memory of the U.S.-led invasion shape current Iraqi politics? And what is the relationship between official and unofficial histories and how do these support political and security governance practices in the Iraqi context? Further, how has the memory of the 2003 US invasion been shaped by and interacted with the articulations of histories of other cases of extreme violence in the Iraqi context? As discussed by authors such as Dina Rizk Khouri, the militarization of Iraqi society and politics was already in place in 2003 (Khoury, 2013), but the U.S.-led intervention did not only lead to a systematic overhaul of Iraq's governing institutions but transformed Iraqi society, in the process creating and recreating subjects and societal groups. Finally, while the US continues to be involved in Iraqi politics, so in what ways does the different memories of the intervention in Iraq and the US interact and (re)construct the present Iraqi-US relationship? This paper will explore these questions based on data collection in Iraq. 

Lebanon's civil war lasted nearly seventeen years from 1975 to 1991, and until today there is no official discourse on what happened during this time. The war ended with the signing of the Taif Agreement and the General Amnesty Law of 1991, which forgave all crimes that occurred during the war period and silenced survivors. It also forced history books to stop at 1975. As a result, post-war generations do not fully comprehend what happened during these dark years of Lebanon's history. 
This historical void is gradually being filled with sectional memories, contradictory memories that belong to different groups. Some romanticize the war and argue it was necessary to defend the Lebanese identity, others blame the eruption of violence on foreign presence in Lebanon. In short, there is no one narrative about the war. In this chaotic scene, competing memories coexist within the public and private spheres. 
Hezbollah, an Iranian-funded paramilitary group in Lebanon, is aware of this gap and is diligently working on imposing its own memories and narrative on the Lebanese people by either dismissing some memories or silencing others. For instance, Hezbollah erected statues in public spaces to commemorate its fighters and celebrate Iranian leaders. It removed the Lebanese flag from some historical monuments and replaced it with their own flag. It imposed holidays on the Lebanese people to remember events important to their ideology. It renamed streets and public squares. In the absence of recorded history, Hezbollah is gradually altering Lebanon's national identity and crafting a new one that matches its agenda. Through an analysis of memory laws and photography, this presentation seeks to examine the competition of sectional memories of the Lebanese civil war, the hegemony of Hezbollah's memory narrative, and its impact on Lebanon's national identity. 
Mireille Rebeiz, Ph.D.
(She/Her)
Associate Professor of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies & Francophone & Middle Eastern Studies at Dickinson College 
rebeizm@dickinson.edu