Muhammad Abu al-Hayja is a resident of ‘Ayn Hawd al-Jadida, an ‘unrecognized’ Palestinian village that sits atop Jabal al-Wustani on Mount Carmel in Israel. When asked by filmmaker Rachel Leah Jones in 2001 about the structure of the village mosque, Abu al-Hayja explained, “…we built the mosque in the new ‘Ayn Hawd with a tall minaret so we would be visible from the trees, so people will know that there are Arabs living here” (Leah Jones 2001). This insistence on being seen emerges constantly in press releases and interviews with residents from the ‘unrecognized’ Palestinian villages, articulated with a sense of urgency that makes obvious the existence of forces seeking to expel them from sight and mind. With a focus on ‘Ayn Hawd al-Jadida, as well as the ‘unrecognized’ Bedouin villages of al-Naqab, This paper will examine the forces at work against this category of villages, where residents have struggled against a double-negation stemming from the strategies and master-narratives of both the state and neighboring Jewish colonies. Taking a cue from Susan Slyomovics’ landmark study "The Object of Memory," I will examine cartography, the deprivation of services, ‘folk narratives’ of origin, the activities and structures supporting the tourist economy, and even planting as tools for exercising dominance over the ‘unrecognized.’ However, this study will not assume a passive subject but stress the individual capacity to manipulate and even destabilize these schemes, thereby framing the villages as spaces that embody the tensions of power relations. It will be shown how residents of the unrecognized villages actively ‘invade’ colonial narratives of erasure from more surreptitious forms, such as return visits to their original homes/sites and counter-mapping, to organized grass-roots action that directly addresses and challenges the policies of the state. By examining the tactics used by residents of the unrecognized villages in resisting domination, it will be shown that the totalizing power of state projects may be overestimated.