Israeli Routes Through Nakba Landscapes: an Ethnographic Meditation Pedagogy.1 His Denial Was Categorical and There the Conversation Ended
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Israeli Routes While conducting research about the history of northern Israel, an Israeli friend Through Nakba of mine stumbled across the story of a Landscapes: mosque whose remains were situated on the grounds of her father’s childhood kibbutz. An Ethnographic She learned that the mosque’s structure Meditation had remained relatively intact long after its Palestinian client population had fled or been expelled during the course of the Rebecca L. Stein 1948-1949 war, while its lands had been folded into the territory of the nascent Israeli state and subsequently redistributed for the expansion of Israel’s rural Jewish communities. She called her father at his Tel Aviv home to confirm the discovery. Did he remember the mosque, she asked? No, he responded, he did not. She pressed him a bit. I have its coordinates, she insisted, and its remains are located on kibbutz land. But he was certain, reminding her that he knew every inch of kibbutz territory, having Hanna Zananiri house, Talbiyeh c.1940. spent his childhood hiking its environs Source: Matson Collection, Library of in accordance with prevailing Zionist Congress. [ 6 ] Israeli Routes Through Nakba Landscapes: An Ethnographic Meditation pedagogy.1 His denial was categorical and there the conversation ended. A few days later, he called her back with a set of belated memories. It seemed that in discussion with his sisters who had also grown up on this kibbutz, a forgotten landscape had slowly come into view. Yes, the mosque was there, he confirmed. Indeed, he recalled watching Palestinians harvesting fruit from its adjacent fields when he was a young boy, a memory he presumed to be a 1949 post-war scene from the moment when Palestinian families recently exiled from Israel returned to harvest their crops and inspect their property. This memory process disturbed him. How could such an intimate knowledge of one’s homeland simply vanish only to come suddenly and vividly back into view? This paper is an ethnographic exploration of Jewish Israeli encounters with formerly Palestinian landscapes, places, buildings, artifacts, and histories. It is a portrait of Israeli travels and routes of varying kinds – alternately as soldiers, looters, tourists, immigrants, and activists – through sites that are now legally ‘Israeli’ but which carry the traces, in varying degrees of visibility, of their pre-1948 Palestinian pasts. Grounded in incomplete snapshots from the lives of several different Israelis, from very different walks of life, this paper meditates on the highly political nature of Israeli itineraries within the borders of their nation-state and the ways these itineraries have, at different historically moments, intersected with the history of the Palestinian dispossession of 1948.2 Through the lens of these routes and biographies, this ethnography attempts to raise questions about the ways that Israeli Jews have interfaced with the Palestinian history of their nation-state and contended with the abundant material evidence of pre-1948 Palestinian life that remains within Israel’s borders – this despite Israeli state efforts to remove this evidence through both physical means (predominantly the razing of villages in the aftermath of 1948) and pedagogical projects of state-sanctioned forgetting.3 Most of these incidents chronicle Israeli routes in what is now West Jerusalem. As such, this paper also aims to draw attention to the everyday ways in which Israeli Jews have participated in the erasure of the urban history of Palestinian West Jerusalem, even as it document the efforts of some Israeli activists to reconstitute an Israeli historical imagination of this urban geography and its exiled communities. Itineraries of Loot I met Moshe Amira while conducting fieldwork in the Palestinian village of Abu Ghosh – a village situated inside Israel’s borders along the Tel-Aviv Jerusalem highway, a mere ten minutes by car from downtown West Jerusalem. He was the only Jew living in the village at the time of our first interview in 1995, having moved from the Jerusalem suburbs in search of more affordable real estate and “a simpler and quieter life.” Amira lived in one of the oldest houses in this medieval village, purchased in the early 1980s and renovated a decade later. During the course of one afternoon, he escorted me through the history of his renovations, narrating the Jerusalem Quarterly 43 [ 7 ] progression of his basement from stable to now ornate guest room, replete with twelve-foot windows, inlaid marble benches, and a “specialty staircase” designed by a prominent Tel Aviv artist. My tour of the house was punctuated by stories about things taken, found, and given by others—stories told openly and in rapid succession. Amira “discovered” the red rock that had been inlaid in his first floor in the Ramallah area. The inlaid marble and bits of mosaic which decorated the living room had been unearthed from the site of an archeological excavation in downtown West Jerusalem from which he also secured a tympanum and ceremonial wooden table. He had received the ornate pillar in his master bedroom “from some kids in the village as a present” and dated it as some 300 years old. By his own account, Amira brought home new pieces all the time and then determined if “the house would accept them.” While he was aware that he faced the threat of fine and even imprisonment if such “finds” were discovered by the Antiquities Authorities, this threat did not seem to dissuade. Indeed, his account of a lifetime of pillaging was not merely unapologetic but explicitly authorized by a salvage narrative, the notion that “if I didn’t take it, it would have been destroyed.” Our tour paused in front of a radio which Amira had granted prominence on a marble ledge in his living room. It was a fantastic piece with high modernist lines hewn into caramel colored wood. No, he clarified, this he didn’t steal. But his mother had at his grandmother’s behest during the course of the 1948-1949 war. “She said to my mother, ‘everybody is going and taking something… Why don’t you go?’ So she went to Qatamon and took this radio.” For years it was the only radio in the family home and his parents continued to use it through the 1970s. Indeed, he told me, “it still gets great reception.” This meeting with Amira was my first encounter with the history of Israeli looting and spolia as told from the vantage of the Israeli looter.4 In subsequent years of fieldwork and archival research, Amira’s story would be augmented and substantiated by others: stories of looted goods presented by the Haganah as gifts to kibbutz children in the war’s aftermath, goods that were subsequently buried on kibbutz property in fury and protest by kibbutz elders who objected to profiting from the dispossession (Bronstein 2007); the memories of a middle-aged Israeli woman whose childhood kibbutz friends watched goods mysteriously appear in their home after the war’s cessation – including furniture and carpets – replete with unanswered questions about their provenance;5 accounts of the books, indeed of entire collections, taken from “empty” Palestinian homes in the war’s midst and aftermath, many of which were transferred to Israeli university libraries, where they remain today (Amit 2006, 2007). 6 War-time looting was particularly fierce in the middle class Palestinian neighborhood of Qatamon from which Amira’s radio was taken.7 As we learn from the memoirs and memories of Jerusalem residents who lived through the war, acts of plunder and theft in this neighborhood were highly public practices. Consider the following account of looting as narrated by a Jewish resident of Jerusalem, then a teenage girl: [ 8 ] Israeli Routes Through Nakba Landscapes: An Ethnographic Meditation I remember the looting in Qatamon very well… At the time, my family lived in Rehavia [a Jewish neighborhood immediately adjacent to this Palestinian area, and one that connected Qatamon to other Jewish neighborhoods in the city]… For days you could see people walking by carrying looted goods. I would stare through the window of our apartment and see dozens of people walking past with the loot… Not only soldiers, civilians as well. They were looting like mad. They were even carrying dining tables. And it was in broad daylight, so everyone could see… One night a solider took me out and showed me around the [adjacent Arab neighborhood]. I was stunned by the beauty of the houses. I went into one house – it was beautiful, with a piano, and carpets and wonderful chandeliers… One solider wanted to please me, and brought me a handkerchief and earrings. I was flattered, but he didn’t tell me he had looted them… When I showed them to my father, he looked at me and said, “Throw it away! How dare you take anything.” (Krystall 1998, 102). This testimonial speaks in several voices. It both points to the prevalence of looting as a popular practice in which both Jewish civilians and soldiers participated – a practice observed by all and prevented neither by cover of darkness nor by a prevalent ethos of shame – even as it identifies those who refused its allure. Indeed, the remainder of this narrative describes the family’s fierce objections to this widespread and seemingly sanctioned public practice. This passage, with its ambiguous account of flirtation triangulated through looted objects (handkerchief, earrings), is also suggestive of the erotic charge with which theft and stolen property was sometimes imbued. In so doing, it reminds of the sexual violence that was a part of this post-war scene of plunder, violence which was explicitly discussed, although not condemned, by the Israeli cabinet of the period. 8 A travel narrative is also lurking here.