The Materiality of Presence and Erasure: The Returns of Memory and Historicity in Palestine and Israel
Panel 022, 2015 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 22 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
Every political claim made about Palestine and Israel always contains within it implicit or explicit claims about the past. Every political act, including narrating the past, thus involves multiple, sometimes contradictory, framings of memory and historicity. As many scholars have shown, the materiality of landscape and built environment today is read in terms of these framings. Zionist colonial positions as well as Palestinian nationalist resistance involve mobilizing such signs to claim national presence. For example, the dominant Zionist colonial enterprise famously claims territory based on archaeological materiality that is deemed to display national presence going back to sacred biblical times. Against this colonial historicity, Palestinian nationalists consider the material remains of pre-1948 villages to instantiate a continuing presence, one which can act against the attempted historical erasure after the forced exile of al Nakba. From out of these historical processes, the idea of presence and erasure has become a prominent framing both in scholarly and nationalist understandings of land, place, and built environment. On the one hand, as the colonial occupation and dispossession of Palestinians continue, and, on the other, as new political fronts open up both locally and globally to establish national claims, the practices for engaging the materiality of presence and erasure are wrenched in new directions.
This panel examines the complex returns of memory and historicity as part of the ongoing struggle between colonizer and colonized in Israel and Palestine. Based on ethnographic evidence in four distinct sites, we consider how claims to material presence and erasure generate experiences of memory and historicity as part of political action. The paper “Rooting and Uprooting” analyzes the material qualities of olive trees, and how these qualities help produce the trees as an emblem of resistance in a Palestinian imaginary. “Re/Markable Landscapes” looks at how Jewish-Israeli activists seek out material signs of the pre-Nakba Palestinian past and place new kinds of markers as a means to sacralize and re-member them within the Zionist landscape. “Beyond Solidarity” examines the recent protest practices of Palestinian citizens of Israel, discussing how such a public presence draws on shared history with other Palestinians as a means to overcome fragmentation. “Buying Houses in Silwan” studies the East Jerusalem settler organization El-Ad, and its claim to be returning a Jewish presence to the City of David. Together, the papers explore the unfolding links of materiality, memory and historicity in the continuing constitution of Palestine and Israel.
The settler group El-Ad is today one of the foremost non-state organizations working to cement Israeli state control over East Jerusalem. It conceives of its project as trying to undo the erasure of Jewish presence in the district of Silwan, just south of the Old City walls. In the underserviced and impoverished Silwan is found the famous and heavily excavated City of David archaeological site. In the Israeli historical imaginary, the City of David site is associated with the biblical foundation by King David of the first Jewish state (generally dated to 1000 BCE). El-Ad considers the continuing archaeological excavations to be unearthing a pre-existing material presence that can produce in Jews a desire to return to this sacred site. To help this “return,” El-Ad pursues several linked strategies: (i) taking control of properties in Silwan to settle Jewish residents, leveraging a juridical apparatus that weakens or nullifies Palestinian land tenure; (ii) expanding archaeological excavation, often on lands it controls; and (iii) giving tours of the archaeological site with the expressed intention of strengthening Jewish national ties to (East) Jerusalem. Silwani Palestinians actively resist these efforts, and their resistance is met with violent state repression. In response to this resistance, and to international condemnations, El-Ad elides the bureaucratic and institutional mechanisms that enable its settlement, claiming that it is only “buying houses” for Jews. This claim has been echoed by Israeli government officials in international arenas, most recently by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu while speaking to American journalists in Fall 2014.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the late nineties with El-Ad’s Visitor Center, as well as follow up visits, this paper examines the claim of “buying houses,” as it came up on tours and continues to resonate in international arenas. I situate the claim within a longer history of claims made by Zionist organizations about land purchases during the Mandate period. This colonial historicity—and the constant re-appearance in local and global sites of such historical narratives—is central, I argue, to how El-Ad reframes the materiality of Silwan’s current landscape. While this landscape currently displays the uneven development characteristic of East Jerusalem’s complex, colonial history, the claim to “buying houses” suggests a more benign process. The claim of buying houses is thus crucial to establishing support for Israeli policy in East Jerusalem, both at national and global scales.
This paper discusses how the materiality of olive trees make them refractory actants in presences and absences in Palestine/Israel. My field research with Palestinian olive farmers and olive oil producers and ongoing archival research highlights the material qualities of olive trees: their longevity, their rootedness, their tenacity and their productivity. These material qualities are drawn upon in arboreal imaginaries which are implicated in practices of asserting presence or attempting erasure in the Holy Land. The processes of rooting and uprooting trees in the land has long been a part of making historical claims and invoking memory. In Palestinian imaginaries, the olive tree is understood as an actor, a kind of co-producer of its own product, olive oil; this productive capacity, a result of human-tree co-generativity, questions a Zionist claim about an empty, barren landscape. Historian Simon Schama opens his tome Landscape and Memory, where trees figure prominently in his general assertions about history, landscape and memory, with a specific example: the charitable efforts of the Jewish National Fund's campaign to encourage school children to donate their pennies to planting trees, their “proxy immigrants” in Israel. The Palestinians, however, have competing arboreal imaginaries involving differing personification of trees in their struggle with the Israeli colonizers. The rootedness and longevity of olive trees, the older ones imagined as grandparents and the newly rooted/planted ones as children, stand as a testimony to longstanding Palestinian presence on the land they own. Israeli settler attacks against olive trees in the West Bank sometimes proceed as if olive trees are a stand-in for Palestinians whose presence ought to be (and can be) uprooted from the land. Shoots coming up from the base of an olive tree devastated by a settler's axe or poison are the material sign of tenacity and refusal to be erased from memory that is central to the Palestinian concept of sumood, steadfastness. As Irus Braverman’s work (2009) indicates, sometimes trees are depicted as threatening presences, as "enemy soldiers," to Israeli occupiers in the West Bank, and in certain contexts, as her discussion with Jewish National Fund representatives indicate, the lives of trees are depicted as considerably more important than Palestinian lives. This paper investigates the myriad rooting and uprooting practices of living, material presences on the land, in staking claims to history and the right not to be erased.
Palestinian citizens of Israel are on the periphery of the dominant Palestinian nationalist movement. They are also severely marginalized by Israeli policies that privilege the Jewishness of the state of Israel. They struggle for their civil, political, economic, and cultural rights as minority citizens in Israel. However, much of their public activism would also seem to be about other Palestinians whom they can hardly meet face-to-face due to Israeli policies of closure and fragmentation. During the spring and summer of 2014, Palestinian citizens of Israel participated in a series of rallies, processions, and protests, including for Nakba Day, in solidarity with political prisoners on hunger strike, and in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza during Israel’s attacks on Gaza. In this paper, I draw upon participant-observation during several protests and processions during this period to analyze the assumptions and assertions of voice and presence in these events. I examine the locations and routes of the protests, the signs, chants and visual symbols, and how protesters positioned themselves in relationship to other Israelis, including security forces. I argue that these protests work in three ways to assert Palestinian presence and thereby contest dominant Israeli arrangements of space and power. First, they make visible their own marginalized community by occupying public space in mixed cities and on main roads. Second, they bring the suffering of absent Palestinian communities into Israeli public space by talking about prisoners, refugees, and Palestinians in Gaza under attack. In effect they protest on behalf of people who cannot speak in the Israeli public sphere or act Israeli public space. Yet, these are not simple acts of solidarity. Third, these protests are also assertions that they are part of a collectivity with these other Palestinians. During these protests, Palestinians use chants and visual symbols that link them to older histories of Palestinian protest, articulating a collective memory of struggle. They rename spaces as Palestinian using placenames that predate the establishment of Israel. Through these protests they expose the ways in which Israeli strategies of colonization fragment Palestinians and re-assert a shared past and present of struggle.
