ABSTRACT Under the Forest of Text: 1948 De-populated and Largely Destroyed Palestinian Villages More than 418 Palestinian villages were depopulated and largely destroyed by Zionist/Israeli forces in the aftermath of the issuance of the 1947 UN Partition of the country and the 1948 war. The sites of quite a few were made invisible by covering them with forests. This paper, however, focuses on the textual erasure, partial or complete, of these villages from Israeli texts. I examine strategies of covering, of covering up, of making forget, including absenting, truncation, and misleading selectivity of villages' histories in these texts. And if we think of re-naming also (many sites were re-named) as an act of erasure, of replacement of what will be the target of displacement, then could we conclude that the Zionist movement had even begun rendering the Palestinian landscape at large invisible before the war? I compare the entries of selected villages in Encyclopedia Judaica, especially volume 9, and All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and De-populated by Israeli n 1948 (edited by Walid Khalidi). But for two peoples who are haunted by what lurks beneath the surface of things, I also examine the villages' "present absence," especially in the short story of Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua, "Facing the Forest," and the poem "The Eraser," in the collection Flawed Landscape: Poems 1987-2008.