On media, memory and laws: The Israeli ‘law commemorating the exile of Jews from Arab countries and Iran’ (2014) as a case study

This study joins the ongoing, yet marginalized, scholarly attempt to connect between law, memory and the media. We focus on a unique memory law: The ‘Law Commemorating the Exile of Jews from Arab Countries and Iran’ enacted in the Israeli parliament in 2014. The law aims to make official a long-silenced memory of the dispossession and suffering inflicted on Jewish residents of major Arab states and of Iran by local authorities as a reaction to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. By a systematic analysis of the law, the mediated discourse that followed its enactment and of the media fare on these commemoration days, this study uncovers the complex interrelations between law, media and society’s memory. This study highlights an interesting process. At the ‘negotiation stage’, which precedes the actual enactment of the law, different memory actors promote varied narratives and create a public atmosphere that might support the political processes that lead to the enactment of a new memory law. When the law is enacted and by dictating special commemoration events and designated memorial days, the law creates signified temporal structures that the media, in turn, identify as important and highlight