Jerusalem's Landscapes of Loss, 1900-2014: Memory and Spatial Politics
Panel 090, 2015 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 22 at 4:30 pm
Panel Description
This panel will explore the centrality of Jerusalem in the construction of national and cultural identities through various phases of its modern history, from the late Ottoman period to the British and Israeli colonial periods. Panelists will look at present spatial configurations and existing places but it will also detail and chronicle lost landscapes and spaces of memory, as well. Participants will examine how Jerusalem has been the site of budding national movements and shifting cultural identities. It will also explore how they have been affected, erased, and transformed by colonial power. In doing so it will emphasize not only what can be seen in the city--what is present--but also critically what is not seen, what is absent, and what has been lost. How, for instance, have the politics of memory and urban space been central to shifting notions of the national "homeland" or of cultural "authenticity"n
Panelists will address concerns related to the urban fabric of modern Jerusalem, its competing nationalist identities, and the cultural discourses and practices that have brought the city into existence (and disappeared elements of it). One paper will illustrate how Jerusalem's history of libertine thought and practice of the early twentieth century has been ignored by much of the literature on Jerusalem in subsequent decades. It will examine how former inter-communal and gender relations were differently organized and the ways in which social life, sexual politics, and transgressive behavior was sometimes engaged in. A second paper will focus on the dispossession of Palestinian Jerusalemites before and after 1948, as they were forced to leave their homes and became, in thousands of cases, refugees in their own city. Tracing that movement between East and West Jerusalem and the memories of sites and properties from which they were separated will be detailed. A third paper will explore the politics of space, place, and Arab-Jewish inter-communal life at the specific site of the Western Wall area (the Kotel). This paper focuses on the post-1967 era, but seeks to connect the past with contemporary ways of remembering Jerusalem and symbolically potent religious sites like the Kotel. Panelists will draw from an array of sources and methodologies in their papers, from life histories and semi-structured interviews to photographs and memoirs. Participants will access documents from British and Israeli city-planning designs and will draw from other archival sources, too, in engaging the many experiences of loss in Jerusalem.
This paper will examine the ways in which Israelis and Palestinians have inscribed national identities on Jerusalem’s urban landscape since 1967. I will focus principally on the contested area of the Western Wall and the site of the former Palestinian Moroccan Quarter that lay before it. I argue that with the conquest and occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967 the Israeli state sought to project the city as its “eternal” and “undivided” national capital through the appropriation and transformation of particular Palestinian-owned locales.
Israeli colonial power, I demonstrate, has not simply been forged through sheer coercion and force, but just as importantly through the use and (re)invention of potently symbolic sacred places and mythologies. In this paper, I detail how Israeli efforts at altering the Kotel area (including the 1967 destruction of a 1300-year-old Arab neighborhood that existed immediately before the Wall), has been integral to Zionist assertions to exclusive control over the whole of the city. Such Arab losses under the new military regime were all too often what enabled a city made in the image of the Israeli state. With such assertions of colonial power have come forms of resistance among Palestinians, who also attempt to project their own claims and histories at this site of displacement and elsewhere in a post-1967 Jerusalem.
This paper draws primarily from 45 interviews and life histories collected over the last decade with former Palestinian residents of the demolished Moroccan Quarter, other Israeli and Palestinian residents of the Old City, and Israeli city planners. In addition to work with these oral sources, I have also dealt with primary documents, such as Israeli planning schemes.
This paper will exemplify the multi-faceted character of a complex urban center at a crucial time, one that has been vital to Israeli and Palestinian nationalist self-fashionings. My methodological trajectory has allowed me to record hidden histories of Palestinian families who once resided in the area, not simply dominate, Israeli ways of representing Jerusalem. How has the Old City been reconfigured spatially as well as discursively in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? What do these practices tell us about the ways nationalist sentiment has been inscribed on this landscape of loss?
Edward Said described his native city as the city of death—a grim town of pilgrimage, fanaticism, and unbearable provincialism. This portrayal was reinforced by a large number of visiting luminaries, including Mark Twain (Innocents Abroad), Falih Rifki (Zeitundagi, 1915), and Selma Ekrem (Harim Days). Yet in the work of native writers like Serene al Husseini, Khalil Sakakini, and Wasif Jawariyeh we see an alternative Jerusalem—a libertine and even hedonistic city of jois de vivre and abandonment. Jawhariyyeh in his two volume memoirs (released in English lately as The Storyteller of Jerusalem) introduces us to the city of the carnivalesque. It includes the syncretic religious celebrations of Nabi Musa, and St George (al Khader); the religious ceremonials of Sabt al Nur, and Sitna Mariam; the bordellos of the old city, and the garconcieres (dur al hawa) of the bachelor patricians; the musical bands and theatrical groups; and the literay cafes fashioned after the Vagabond Café of Is’af al Nashashibi and Khalil Mutran). We will examine these features of the ‘grim city’ and try to answer the question as to why libertine Jerusalem has been camouflaged, ignored or repressed in the majority of writings by social historians and travel literature.
My presentation will examine the loss, and the transformation, of Jerusalem from an urban Palestinian center during the late Ottoman and British Mandatory periods into a periphery following the 1948 war. While the city’s western part was colonized by the newly created state, the eastern part came under Jordanian control. With the partition, the Arab section of the city lost its commercial and economic center, previously located in the west, and what became the Jewish section lost its connection with the sacred sites and the historical city.
The city in the east was reduced in size to what it was around a century before, and its residents included a large number of refugees from the western section. The city in the west was in no position to compete with the urbanity of Tel Aviv and was reduced largely to a locality on the frontier. The historical transformation of the city’s economy was related to its expansion towards the west in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was connected with the faster transportation system that included the train line between Jerusalem and Jaffa. As it happened, the city hall, along with the government house, train station, and the post office were now under Israel’s control. The religious sites had become, once again, the center of the eastern side, and thus transformed the city into a mirror image of its distant past.
The presentation will highlight the urban changes that took place before Israel through the extensive use of memoirs from the period. The memoirs include those of musician Wasif Jawhariyeh, educator Khalil Sakakini, and businessman Jiries Salti among others. It will highlight the period of transformation and speculate on the possible impact of the loss of the city’s centrality in the lives of the Palestinians.
A recent study of the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 492/1099 by Konrad Hirschler (“The Jerusalem Conquest of 492/1099 in the Medieval Arabic Historiography of the Crusades: From Regional Plurality to Islamic Narrative,” Crusades 13 [2014]: 37-76) reduces the study of this event to a second-order process that concentrates on how this historical event was transformed into a product of a collective historiographical tradition in the Islamic world. The concern of a second-order investigation of events is with the conditions under which events were “forged” and “created” in transmission and diffusion, and the inherent limits to factual knowledge gleaned from such a process, rather than with the events themselves. The special interest of the historian of the Crusades, however, is with crusading events themselves, not with the way they happened to be reconstructed later on when the events were transformed into something cultural in the sense of representing the past to fit a latter-day intellectual environment or to serve social and political purposes. The main emphasis of a second-order examination of events is on explanation of occurrences as they have come to be known, whereas the chief aim of the historian is interpretation or understanding of the events of the past that were experienced first in all their singularity and uniqueness before they were interpreted and reinterpreted from all their many different perspectives. By engaging in a first-order examination of the Arabic sources for the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 492/1099, this paper will provide new understanding of this event and how it was first perceived in the Islamic world. Since the methodology that we employ in examining this event determines the results that we get, the implementation of a first-order examination of the Arabic sources for the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 492/1099 will provide a very different result from that obtained by a second-order evaluation of this event.
