Noga Kadman

My name is Noga Kadman, I was born and raised in Jerusalem, Israel, and currently live in Tel Aviv. My Jewish forefathers arrived at Palestine from Eastern Europe: from my mother side on the 1860s, and from my father's side in the 1930s, escaping the fate of their relatives who stayed and Europe and were murdered.

For years I am involved in the fields of human rights and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, through work, research and volunteering. I have been working for 6 years in B'Tselem, the Israeli information center for Human rights in the Occupied Territories, and currently I work for Gisha, the Legal Center for the Freedom of Movement, writing a report on the blockade of Gaza.

My master degree is in Peace and Development Studies, a special program conducted in Israel/Palestine by a Swedish university to Israeli, Palestinian and Scandinavian students, focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My master thesis deals with the marginalization of the depopulated Palestinian villages of 1948 in the Israeli discourse, and was recently published as a book in Hebrew.

I am active in Zochrot, an Israeli organization that is devoted to spreading information about the Nakba among Israelis. I believe that understanding and acknowledging the past is important to fully deal with the present and for thriving for a just solution in the future. I believe that Israel should acknowledge the uprooting, dispossession, oppression and human rights violations it caused to Palestinians, take responsibility on it, and act for reparation and compensation.

Through my research I visited some 230 sites of depopulated Palestinian villages from 1948. I have a big collection of photos from those visits, some can be seen on this website.