To help advance an understanding of settler colonial studies beyond its main axes of development for Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada, the 1998 ethnography entitled The Object of Memory, awarded MESA’s Albert Hourani and the Chicago Folklore book prizes, is reconsidered sixteen years after its publication. The book recounts a signature achievement of Marcel Janco, an artist and a founder of the Dada movement in Europe, in establishing in 1950s Israel a Jewish Israeli artist colony: Ein Hod occupied the spaces of ‘Ayn Hawd, a depopulated Palestinian Arab village, replacing an agriculturally based Arab village without the complete physical destruction of its traditional Palestinian stone houses, unlike the fate of more than five hundred destroyed Palestinian villages within the 1948 borders of Israel. ‘Ayn Hawd was both destroyed and preserved. There are many ways to make the Palestinian Arab native disappear and therefore, one compelling cultural studies inquiry is to trace those elements of settler colonizing ideology that define spaces currently inhabited by Jewish Israeli settlers seeking to forget the original settler colonial displacement. This approach to questions about space, land, ownership, and indigeneity in Israel/Palestine investigates varied re-fashionings in the arts that serve to designate Jewish Israelis as natural occupants. By focusing on this 1998 ethnography about the decade of the 1950s during which specific settler ideologies of ownership emerged in Israel after the establishment of the state in 1948, this presentation also charts the importance of settler colonial studies to the Palestine/Israel conflict.