iReturn – Navigate Palestine, Imagine The Future, is an upgraded version of the famous trilingual iNakba App first launched in 2014.
The App is designed to enhance understanding of the Palestinian Nakba, it’s manifestations in the landscape and the possibility for redress.
With the iReturn app, Zochrot aims to use technology to re-tell a suppressed history and to reveal Israel’s hidden landscape of ethnic cleansing and forced expulsions. It gives users and beneficiaries a tool through which they could learn that history but also envision a just, viable, and peaceful solution to the ongoing crisis facing Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs).
This App is a direct continuation of Zochrot’s groundbreaking work to push forward a public discussion about a future of return. We are not only remembering the ongoing injustices of the Nakba but we have a vision of hope for the future which includes the return of all refugees and a just society, inclusive of all who live here. By upgrading iNakba app and turning it into iReturn, a vehicle for a future of return we hope not only to provide thousands of users an access to new knowledge but to amplify the voices of more new members into a dynamic community of the return movement.
With this unique and cutting-edge project, we create a space in which conversations can be held about the Nakba as an ongoing process. As the Nakba also destroyed the Palestine culture that existed here until 1948, iReturn will encourage users to think about the oppression of the culture that tried to survive afterward and how creativity, too, is an act of resistance.
With the project of iReturn Zochrot will provide a unique tool through which we could further crack the taboo around the issue of the Nakba and the return of the Palestinian refugees. The app users and beneficiaries will use the iReturn app in creative ways to discuss vision of return and to propose different inputs. It will enable users to interact, give input in the app and as such will enable its audience to be part of the creation of knowledge, hope and a vision for the future.
iReturn app opens new channels for teachers, activist communities for social change, artists, tour guides, youth movements and other change agents to explore and examine the events of 1948 with more criticality and intentionality. Centering the return along the repressed histories of the Nakba, as part as Zochrots goal of encouraging society, and specifically the Israeli public, to adopt a vision of hope for a future of return and consider the return of Palestinian refugees as an opportunity rather than a threat.
With the iReturn app Zochrot will create novel opportunities for visitors and users to not only reexamine the local landscape and prevailing suppressed histories but to introduce a new language of vision, hope and return. From the most extensive Hebrew archive on Nakba we wish through this project to use our app to create a sustainable dialogue between the hidden past and an imagined future to overcome a painful and unjust present.
The application was developed with the support of the german international organization “Kurve Wustrow”, however the content does not necessarily reflect their views.