As a young child my dad used to take us to what is now known
as West Jerusalem. That area used to be where affluent Palestinian professionals and businessmen resided
before 1948 (Al Nakbeh) around 50,000 of them were expelled from their
homes, including my Grandfather and his family. My dad used to take us
on tours and showed us our family’s properties; the house that my grandfather and
grandmother lived in until they were forced to leave, it is now turned into a
home for the elderly. Then he took us to what is currently the Greek Consulate
building, which was until 1948 known as the Egyptian Consulate. My Grandfather
built it in a grand luxurious style to fit the great kingdom of Egypt at that
time. When the Egyptian consul left Jerusalem in 1948 my Grandfather handed the
keys to the Belgian consul to care for it and who in turn handed it to the
Greeks. My Grandfather who after the reoccupation of the rest of Palestine
(West Bank) in 1967 went to court to get it back, and after having won the
case, the Israeli attorney general refused to abide by the court’s decision. The Sansur building w is another building created
by my grandfather in the center of commercial Jerusalem. After reading Dwyer
and Alderman’s article (2008) “Memorial landscapes: analytic questions and
metaphors”, I started looking at West Jerusalem differently; I started seeing
it as a struggle of memorializing that area. A struggle between what Israel want
to show to the world, and a struggle of the Palestinian oral history, and
efforts of documentation. This struggle is materialized in the “blue plaques”
such as this one below, that retells the stories of these buildings.
The
Sansur building according to my family’s history and other documentations was a
very successful building with business and cafes prominent prior to 1948. The struggle in this blue plaque is the text,
Like Dwyer and Alderman (2008), “Textual approach understands memorials… as a
process of manifesting stories on and through the landscape”.(p169) The simplified
version on this plaque eliminates or hides the story behind the success of the
building, the only focus for the Built Heritage institute was that there occurred
interactions with the Jews and Arabs to reemphasize their discourse of
belonging in the Holy land. The text here fails to mention who are the Sansurs?
They were just mentioned as a family from Bethlehem although my Grandfather
lived in Jerusalem for almost his entire life(with origins from Bethlehem). This indicates that this
governmental institution is denying an Arab existence prior to 1948. Arabs
according to the Israeli discourse live in East Jerusalem, and that’s where
they have been all the time. Therefore
we can also see this as an arena, because this text has been politicized, and reflects
a political struggle between the written history of the winner the Israelis, and
the oral history of the loser, the Palestinians. Another example in West Jerusalem is the
Italian consulate which is another building that my grandfather built. There is an arena in this building seen in this paragraph taken from
the website of the Italian consulate:
“The main building of the Italian Consulate in
Jerusalem is located in Katamon, a residential neighborhood in the western part
of the city, partially built during the British Mandate. At that time it was
meant to host officers of the British army. The three-floor edifice was
built at the beginning of the 40s and subsequently rented by the Italian
Consulate. Michel Samacha is the architect who designed the villa according to
the style of the period: straight and basic forms, a terraced roof, a round
window on the upper corner of the facade, art-deco lamps at either side of the
main entrance. The Consulate also owns another building in east Jerusalem, in
the Sheikh Jarrah quarter, where most foreign Consulates are located. The
building is next to the offices of the Italian Cooperation where the ICE
department is also situated”[1].
As
one can tell in this little paragraph, there is a denial of an Arab
population in the entirety of West Jerusalem. There isn't even a struggle in this
text, there is an imposition of a narrative on the Palestinians that is too
painful to even consider reading. As Dwyer and Alderman (2008) mention in their
article, the political struggle here tended to reinvent national history. The
consulate always rented out the building from my grandfather, yet there is no
mention to that at all. The only mention
of an Arab is the architect that my grandfather always had business with:
Michel Samaha who is of Lebanese origins.
The
denial of the Arabs in the west of Jerusalem is manifested in texts, and discourses
of the media but the evidence can be seen in the architecture itself; there is
an Arab print that cannot be erased, which creates a conflict for the Israeli
government that tries to reinvent a history by using texts to describe these
buildings, failing to mention any Arab identity. I also realized that the
actions my father took as he toured us around this area was an act of resistance
to that discourse of denial and belonging.
I don't necessarily have anything to add but this was really interesting. Thanks for posting it!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.dropbox.com/lightbox/home/Camera%20Uploads
ReplyDeleteTo continue on the conversation of places of memorials, here(the link above) is another example how archeological sites in Palestine/Israel have been used over and over to reemphasize the Israeli discourse of belonging (text and arena). This is a poster of a study abroad program in Tel Aviv in Israel from Ohio University, in the background image, is an old archeological site, that I know too well as I visited it a hundred times when I was a child, it is nowhere near Tel Aviv, it is an old city called Caesarea, that dates back to thousands of years. (It is also mentioned in the New Testament, as being the place where Peter was imprisoned, and had escaped with the help of an Angel).
You can see this poster all over campus, but to people who don't know Israel and Palestine all too well, they just assume this is how it looks. Tel Aviv in reality is a new city, which was built over an old Palestinian city called Jaffa, if you look at Tel Aviv today, you can tell it is a modern city, with skyscrapers and concrete buildings that were built after Israel was established in 1948. To show that there is an old place in this new one, is to hide the truth that Israel is a new state created in 1948, and this image was purposefully used because as I mentioned earlier it reemphasizes the discourse of the Israeli people as having been here for thousands and thousands of years and how Tel Aviv was created on a land with no people, while the city of Jaffa was a major sea port for citrus products that were sold in Europe and a cultural landmark. This movement is so popular in Palestine, especially in the field of Archeology, were the Israeli’s Ministry of Antiquities only aim at biblical archeology, ignoring other artifacts (or selling them in the black market) that date prior or after the Jewish arrival to the Holy Land thousands of years ago, in order to deny other people’s existence.
It is also the systematic process of constructing a collective memory by using the landscapes. Landscapes contribute to construct narratives and memories. This can be seen through the change of names of places, cities, and events. The first Israeli government led by Ben Gurion established a committee to change all names of places and cities from Arabic into Hebrew and Biblical names. Even Jerusalem became known as Urshalim. People who visit the West Bank can easily notice the names of places in three languages: Arabic, English, and Hebrew. The process as some scholars urged had two aims: First, to "nativize" Israelis by showing a deep historical and religious ties with places. Second, to eliminate the presence of Palestinians (Suleiman, 2004). This has been re-emphasized by different Israeli governments. After the War of 1948, Ben Gurion said about Palestinians refugees that "we should make sure that they will never return. The older will die and the younger will forget."
ReplyDeleteTherefore, the process of re-naming of places, changing its history, and excluding its indigenous people legitimized the hegemonic control of space (Curti, 2008). Curti (2008) also added that the process of renaming in Palestinian-Israeli conflict “was not only a symbolic value; it also involved (and still involves) a geographic overhauling of the entire country. Archeology became the guiding principle of Israel’s transformation of Palestine” (p. 112).
References:
Curti, G. H. (2008). From a wall of bodies to a body of walls:: Politics of affect| Politics of memory| Politics of war. Emotion, Space and Society, 1(2), 106-118.
Suleiman, Y. (2004). A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tel Aviv was founded in 1911. There is no attempt to obliterate the memory of Jaffa, as evidenced by the continual and continuing use of the Tel Aviv Jaffa postmarks. Tel Aviv is famous for its Bauhaus architecture, the style of which dates from pre-Nazi Germany, another group that wished to obliterate the Jews and their rights, aided and abetted by the Mufti of Jerusalem.
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