There was no denying its challenge, at least not for Deborah and me who had been researching the war of 1948. In our eyes, the minaret loomed as a spectral witness to the Palestinian village that used to be here before the Nakba. For me it was also a shocking reminder, quite unexpected, that shortly after that war I had seen this very village and its mosque emptied of people and lying in ruins.

Perhaps it was the sensation of the humid air depositing a thin film of salt on my arms that brought back a rush of memories. Certainly it was the minaret. The vaulted gift shops, I now realized, had been a row of derelict village buildings when I last saw them, back in 1950. The minaret had been this village’s pumping heart, the tower for the muezzin who would climb it five times a day to call the believers to prayer. Now it stood purposeless, ignored by the tourists who were mainly intent on getting to the archaeological site.

The entry to the minaret, I now noticed, had since been sealed with concrete, as was the low doorway that opened on to the balcony at the top. “Then,” I told Deborah, “when I was still a kid, shortly after the war, both the entry and the balcony were open. I climbed this minaret more than once,” I said, my voice trailing off as bits of memory returned to me.

One memory won’t let go: a small black-and-white snapshot, now long gone, taken a year or two after the war. It captured a gangly me, in shorts and a white tank top, waving from that balcony, up there at the top.

“There was this photo my dad took . . .” I told Deborah.

I see him now, yet again, and I miss him achingly, beyond words. There he is, his hair ruffled by the breeze, standing in his dark bathing trunks way below me, near the mosque, still young. My little sister, looking spindly, is standing nearby as he aims the camera up toward me yet again.

It was just an ordinary beach day, with a father amused by the feat his daughter had just accomplished. “Look at me, Dad,” I may have called out, waving.

Though none of us made much of it at the time, it was unsafe to climb this minaret back then, when my parents took us to that beach where the abandoned village houses still gaped, empty and forbidding. Like many Ottoman village minarets in Palestine, this one is chunky as it rises above the one-story mosque it touches at one end. An interior spiral staircase, windowless and narrow, opens up under a small cupola on to the narrow balcony that encircles it, where the muezzin chanted his call to prayer, reminding the believers of Allah’s greatness and merciful presence.

The spiral staircase was already crumbling when I ventured in, shortly after the war, and the opening to the muezzin’s balcony was so low that even as a 12-year-old I still had to duck as I stepped over the threshold. I would grope my way up a stone shaft in total darkness, each foot searching for the wider part of the next triangular step that clung to the central core, my palm tracing the dank inner curve of the encircling outer wall, seeking reassurance while fragments of stone crumbled under foot.

While this climb was creepy, stepping out on to the narrow muezzin’s balcony took even more courage because it had no guardrail. It was scary every time I braved those steps, but it was also exhilarating. With the sea glistening behind and salty breezes beguiling the scorching sun rays, I’d be enthralled by the vistas spread out far below. Clustered nearby was the abandoned village, looking peaceful as it lay empty at the rim of the bay, with its sandy dunes edging the sea as far as I could see to the north and to the south. Further inland was a wide ribbon of green farmland sliced by a coastal road that shimmered in the bright sunlight, and finally, demarcating the eastern horizon were the dun, carob, and oak-dotted edges of the Carmel mountain range, vaguely chunky against hazy summer skies.

When I look back at that young me, feeling triumphant as she steps on to the muezzin’s balcony, I wonder about her elation. Yes, I loved measuring my young body for the task and loved the burst of light that dispelled the darkness. But now that I have paused many times since to gaze at panoramas, I wonder whether this sweeping, bird’s-eye view might not also include, hidden in its folds, a sense of dominion—the raw power bestowed by heights—practiced in a child’s game of “King of the Mountain.”

What is there, in those vistas that spread below us, beyond beauty, awe, and geographic knowledge? Doesn’t their allure lie, at least in part, in a sense of possession similar to the way S. Yizhar’s Israeli soldiers survey the Arab village they are about to capture in his extraordinary novella, Khirbet Khizeh? Yizhar’s village, surveyed by these young men from above, seems miniscule, its people doll-like, its fields a distant patchwork carpet. In the gaze of the soldiers as they survey the village resting on the still-populated Palestinian village of 1948, there is admiration for the cultivated valley and its fertile availability. But there is also, in this gaze from above, a coveting, a drive to possess, and also, already, an inkling of incipient ownership. The land that stretches before us is available to be known, husbanded, and mastered.

I can’t imagine that any of this was on my mind as I felt my way up the steps of that dilapidated minaret at the cusp of adolescence. In 1950, the people I knew did not comment on abandoned villages, and still rarely do. Many years will have trickled by before I’d clutch Deborah’s elbow when faced with this phantom from my own distant past, still standing, irrevocably present.

Looking at that minaret, I could once again see my parents and sister settling into a day at the beach: a ground cloth spread out, picnic basket at hand, the smell of sunblock, a beach ball already being tossed. Now, welcoming Deborah and me, were the same lazy waves lapping the sands, the same salt-laden humidity frizzing my hair, and the same harsh sun burning its way into my skin. All of it the same and yet so different now, as the churning of tourists around us reminded me.

I wonder what became of that photo my father took. I’d have liked to show it to Deborah, and I wanted to see it myself yet again. But what would that old snapshot have accomplished? Would it be anything more than a shadowy effigy of an elusive truth? Would a small black-and-white snapshot taken at a distance convince you, my readers, that I’m telling the truth? Isn’t the standing minaret proof enough, finally, visible as it is to anyone who cares to notice it and wonder what it is doing here, so incongruously, amid the hubbub of tourism?

I need no such proof. I remember vividly, in my body, climbing that minaret. What I am less sure about and urgently want to recall is what that half-inch of a child, tiny at such a great distance, might have understood of those outings to a fishing village so recently vacated by its people. I invoke that image so that I might scrutinize that child that was and still is me, snapped by her father in an ordinary moment of parental bemusement. Scrutinize her? Yes, but also accept her into my being, because even at age 12 she already knew, or at least sensed, something of the place where she was standing.

None of us knew at the time that the people who were expelled from Arab Qaysaria (as it was called until 1948) were actually Bosnians who settled in Palestine in 1884 during one of the Ottomans’ many “transfers of population.” For us, Israeli Jews, they were just generic “Arabs”—see-through transparencies whose contours vanish when a new image gets superimposed on the old. Printed, I imagine these images already faded, already archival, a thing of the past. There may be some bitter irony in the fact that they were displaced Bosnians, not “real Arabs,” but does it, finally, make any difference?

It was not proof of the Nakba that rattled me that day in Caesarea as Deborah and I stood staring at the minaret. By then we needed no proof. We had already seen the lingering detritus of the Nakba scattered around the country, gradually swallowed by forests, sinking into the ground, and assimilated into new construction. We had studied the history and perused maps. What struck me most that summer morning was the indifference of passers-by to this relic of a disastrous past—a past that is unseen even when it is in full view. Shouldn’t at least some of them pause to wonder what a mosque is doing there, on the way to Herod’s palace?

At a time when much of our archaeology was preoccupied with biblical discoveries that aimed to prove our ancient Jewish presence on the land (and hence our “right” to reclaim it now), a wider, cosmopolitan horizon suddenly beckoned. Renewed excavations unearthed Caesarea’s Crusader fortifications, its Roman aqueduct, King Herod’s seafront palace, and the amphitheater and hippodrome. King Herod, whom we as children were taught to dismiss as a troubled puppet of Rome, an Edomite half-Jew and a “bad man,” now seemed one of us after all.

It is especially the Herodian findings that are now billed prominently in Caesarea’s tourist literature. His sprawling beachfront summer palace in particular now stands as a fitting counterpart to his famed cliff-top winter palace in Massada. Edged by the Mediterranean, Caesarea was home to a pleasure palace, while Massada—austere, inviolable—has become a symbol of Jewish heroism, as it withstood Rome’s siege for three years and chose mass suicide over defeat. Caesarea still retains some of that lightheartedness. Its hippodrome now houses equestrian acts in period costume, its cafés and restaurants are full, its boutiques booming, and, as sunset approaches, crowds stream to the huge amphitheater to attend musical events of international standing.

I happened to attend two such events in the early 1970s: one by New Orleans’s Preservation Hall Jazz Band and another by Mikis Theodorakis, a Greek composer and activist then in political exile. Thousands of mostly young people crowded the amphitheater’s stone benches, holding our breath as Preservation Hall’s aged black musicians walked onto the stage, the tiny lead singer leaning on a walker. The sound, once it came, swept us away. This happened in the Theodorakis concert, too, where a large band and a powerful lead singer inspired the audience with rousing political songs that spoke of freedom.

In both concerts, awash in euphoria, I felt at one with this audience of strangers. We had arrived at sunset, early enough to see the sky reddening behind the amphitheater’s ancient open-air stage, its pinks and mauves gradually turning velvety black behind centuries-old, spot-lit columns. As the starlit darkness closed in on us, we were all transported by the music, drawn closer to one another and to the history that was alive in this place some two millennia earlier.

It was only years later that I came to reconsider this euphoric feeling. It has something to do with the rhetoric of the occasion, I realized, and with nostalgia too. We were all under the spell of Caesarea’s ancient grandeur and endurance and we were all, or at least many of us, drawn also to the communal aspirations to which this music spoke. For all their frailty, Preservation Hall’s musicians traveled thousands of miles and played magnificently, drawing us into the vitality of the black experience in America, and Theodorakis’s music did likewise, with its powerful and uncompromising rejection of tyranny, as the program notes emphasized.

We—mostly an audience of native-born sabra Israelis, mostly of European descent and middle class—were swept away by the alchemy of identification with the indomitable spirit that came through this music. Many of us grew up on songs of freedom and justice—Soviet, Yiddish, American, Spanish, and more. We admired the American civil rights movement and knew that Theodorakis, a former communist and heir to the anti-fascist partisan spirit of World War II, had been a political prisoner and was now, even as he played in Caesarea, in political exile. His music spoke to our own history—to the fighters of the ghettos, our underground’s fight against the British, and the socialism that inspired our early pioneers.

And yet, for me at least, something changed. I don’t know when it happened, but at some point my memory of the inspiration that suffused those evenings gave way to another realization: beneath our shared elation at ideals of freedom and justice lurked the absence of the Palestinians to whose situation, by 1971, when I sat in that amphitheater, that music spoke most urgently. The Nakba was within living memory at the time; Bosnian Qaysaria’s recent ruins were still in plain view, barely reclaimed for tourism. In 1982, I learned later, Theodorakis, who had previously composed the acclaimed “Ballad of Mauthausen” in response to the Holocaust, had responded to Yasser Arafat’s invitation and composed the PLO hymn.

I don’t know why or when this sense of audience—of the ones present and the ones absent—struck me. I know that this awareness came before I ever met Deborah. By the time she and I came to Caesarea, in 2007, we had been tracking the Nakba for some time. But something else struck me as I looked at the tourists streaming by the old village mosque: how comfortable we are with oblivion. I was thinking of the child I used to be, climbing the minaret, gazing from its high balcony across lands that were becoming mine, giving no thought to the people whose home it used to be.

“A minaret?” I remember my American friend Carol saying. “Was there a minaret? No, I didn’t see any.”

Linda Dittmar grew up in Israel during its formative years, 1939–60. In the U.S. since 1961 and now professor emerita, she taught literature and film studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston for 40 years. Her co-edited works include From Hanoi to Hollywood and Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism and she is now writing a memoir, “Tracing Homelands: A Memoir of Israel’s Becoming,” that focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian war of 1948 and its aftermath.