In May 2013, hundreds of human remains were discovered in a mass grave at the local Muslim cemetery in the city of Jaffa. As the news of the grim discovery circulated in the city, many residents turned to their elders for answers to the question on everyone’s mind: who are those buried in a nameless tomb and how did they get there? The consensus reached by Palestinian historians, dignitaries and Islamic movement officials is that the remains should be traced back to 1948, to the period just before and following the fall of the city to Zionist hands and the mass exodus of its residents. In the age of ‘free flowing information’ and the opening up of public access to knowledge about the past, how come, then, that a local story of massacre remained hidden and unknown so long, claimed doubters? Indeed, just like the skeletons, this buried history of catastrophe and trauma had to be excavated and revealed in order to become public knowledge. This paper is about the ways in which the post-Nakba Israeli state enabled these processes of public forgetfulness that produced, on the one hand, a tangible reality of occupied urban spaces and the ability to “bury” histories of mass expulsion, organized violence and en-masse appropriation of material goods, houses and lands, on the other. These processes, produced through the projection of the state’s military and political powers, aspired to reshape material realities, reconstitute Jaffa, a Palestinian-Arab urban centre, into a Jewish-majority decrepit suburb of Tel Aviv, and moreover – make this transformation assume the guise of normality. The making of the “new normal” in Jaffa, then, constitutes normalizing occupation, in ways that convincingly submerged the “newness” of a rapid and radical urban transformation. The work that the “new normal” does is turning urban residents into active agents in maintaining the status quo on behalf of the state; at the same time, this project also aims to foreclose alternative visions for the city and its people.