From Moroccan Jewish Memory to Israeli Settlement: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Palestinian Erasure in Yamit Armbrister’s One Moroccan Woman

This article offers a Palestine-centered reading of Yamit Armbrister’s One Moroccan Woman, a Moroccan Jewish-Israeli novel that has not yet received sustained standalone analysis. The article argues that the novel produces settler countermemory, a form of minority recollection that recovers Moroccan Jewish-Muslim intimacy and exposes Ashkenazi racism while remaining complicit in Zionist erasures of Palestine. Drawing on Ella Shohat’s critique of Arab-Jewish dislocation, Olivia C. Harrison’s transcolonial reading of Maghrebi literature through Palestine, and recent work in settler colonial memory studies, the analysis follows Tamar Ben Zaken’s movement from Marrakesh to Kiryat Gat as a process of de-Maghrebization and settlement incorporation. In Morocco, Tamar’s Jewishness is formed through Muslim foster motherhood, Arabic sound, and shared domestic ritual; in Israel, that formation is cast as incompatible with full citizenship, while Palestinian presence is displaced into the language of intrusion and terra nullius. Sephardic displacement, the article shows, is redirected into Hebrew, labor, land, and state-building at the very site of Palestinian dispossession. The novel’s political value lies in its unresolved contradiction; it remembers Morocco against Israeli erasure while muting the Palestinian history that made its Israeli chapters possible, and it thereby exposes the workings of the settler narrative it inhabits.