In May 2014, Zochrot led a day-long Nakba tour promoted under the title ‘From Yafa to Beirut’. Signalling a departure from their trademark Saturday tours to a specific site of a former Palestinian village, this event highlighted the refugees’ path to their forced exile. The meet-up spot Ê¿Umar, the tour organiser, chose, was symbolically ironic: 48 Hakovshim (Hebrew, ‘conquerors’) Street. Located in the heart of what used to be Manshiyyeh, it is named after the Irgun Zionist militants who the Israeli state credits with the occupation of Jaffa that began with the shelling and depopulation of Manshiyyeh in the spring of 1948 (see Chapter 1). From there, the group of middle-class Israeli tour participants walked to two local key sites: the Hasan Bek Mosque, the only complete surviving pre-Nakba structure that still functions as a house of wor-ship for Jaffa's Muslim community, and Beit Gidi, currently occupied by the historical museum of the Irgun (see Chapter 7). After a relatively brief historical introduction by Ê¿Umar, the group was led to a bus parked by the mosque, and began the journey north, making brief stops at Qaysariyah (Caesarea), Birʾim and al-Bassa (inside the Jewish settlement of Shlomi in the Acre district), all Palestinian communities that were ethnically cleansed in 1948. Our destination was Rosh Hanikra, or as it is known in Arabic, Ras al-Naqurah, the northwestern (closed) border crossing to Lebanon.

The narrow passageway leading to the locked gate was the end point of our tour; we did not reach Beirut after all. Ras al-Naqurah became our ‘unfulfilled destination’, where a large sign directs visitors to Beirut and Jerusalem in three languages,3 but the path north leads nowhere. By virtue of settler colonial conquest and war, Ras al-Naqurah became a site of closure: even the locked gate is covered so visitors cannot get a glimpse of what lies beyond. Moreover, tunnels blasted in the rocks during the late British Mandate, designed to connect Istanbul and Cairo via rail, were sealed by Israel in 1949, ending its railway in the Jewish town of Nahariyah, just south of Ras al-Naqurah.