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Archaeology and Nation-Making in Palestine/Israel

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Archaeology and Nation-Making in Palestine/Israel Excavating Zion: Archaeology and neighborhoods” and “revitalizing” the Nation-making in Palestine/Israel landscape – a narrative of the redemption of the nation and its national territory. What Peige Desjarlais she didn’t mention is that the archaeological park and its “Jewish neighborhoods” were In a recent article in Time Magazine, readers built on illegally occupied land in the center are encouraged to reformulate any negative of the Palestinian town of Silwan where, for conceptions they might have about Jewish Palestinian residents, this “revitalization” settlers in the occupied West Bank. The equates to a process of continued article’s author insists that: colonization and dispossession. The guide’s “Sitting around their kitchen table, narrative erases, from both history and the with grandchildren's plastic toys landscape, the past and current existence of scattered on a deck beyond sliding- the Palestinian people and the violence of glass doors, the Katz family doesn't their displacement. However, archaeology in look or sound militant. Indeed, to the “City of David” produces more than American ears, their version of the narratives of the “redemption” of territory national narrative sounds rather assumed to be Jewish by Biblical right; it familiar...How did communities start also participates in producing this territory out in the American West? With one as a material reality. log cabin. When we bought this land, The City of David Archaeological it was a rocky hillside. Look what it Park is part of a larger nation-making looks like today” (Burleigh 2009:3). project, which imagines its boundaries as The narrative is indeed familiar, conjuring Greater Israel – the land between the Jordan images of the American nation-building River and the Mediterranean. This territory frontier, and the resulting “civilization” of we know today as Israel was built on the the wild, “empty” spaces of the American ruins of Arab Palestine during al-Nakba (the West (Tsing 2005). The two examples are Catastrophe), the term used by Palestinians also similar in what they erase, namely, the to describe the destruction of their society in history and current occupancy of the land by 1948, when three-quarters of a million 1 other people. Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from The pioneer narrative of the 1 Ethnic cleansing is a crime under international law, “civilization” of frontier land is integrated defined as the intention to create an ethnically into guided tours at the City of David homogenous territory through the expulsion of an Archaeological Park in occupied East ethnic or religious group. It is often related to, but Jerusalem, run by a militant settler not the same as, the crime of genocide. The United organization by the name of Ir David (Emek Nations defines acts of ethnic cleansing as the “separation of men from women, the detention of Shaveh, n.d.). Last year, while travelling men, the explosion of houses” and repopulating through Palestine with a friend, I joined one homes with another ethnic group. Israeli historian such tour through the Archaeological Park. Ilan Pappe (2006), like other members of the dubbed The tour guide stopped on a hill overlooking “new historians”, counters the dominant Israeli the Palestinian houses of Silwan and pointed narrative that the Palestinians fled voluntarily or out Jewish biblical and historical sites to the under the orders of Arab leaders of surrounding group of mostly young, Jewish-American countries. His study of Israeli military archives tourists. She praised Ir David for its work in reveals a deliberate and systematic plan by the Zionist militias to ethnically cleanse the Arab re-populating the area with “Jewish population of Palestine by occupying villages and 1 their homeland and some 530 Arab villages settlement. This article proposes that Israeli were destroyed and depopulated along with archaeological practices not only help to other urban centers (Qumsiyeh 2004:). A reproduce these narratives, but also society descended from people who settled participate in the inscription of the national the region as far back as the Canaanites territory as Jewish, and the consequent (Qumsiyeh 2004) was destroyed in a matter dispossession of the Palestinians. Israeli of months in the process of making the archaeological practice produces not just borders of the Jewish state. historical narratives but the “facts on the ground”3 (Abu el-Haj 2002a, 6), which are Indeed, the borders of Israel are vital to colonial expansion. made most obviously and violently through wars (in 1948 and 1967), conquest, and I will begin by demonstrating what I colonial settlement. However, nation- mean by a “nation-making project” and making projects also come into being describing the particularities of the Jewish through a variety of social, cultural, and nation-making, or Zionist4 project using institutional practices, like archaeology, tree-planting as an example of an which not only help to maintain the “everyday” technology of nation-making. A “imagined community” of the nation, but second part will examine how Israeli also participate in the production of the archaeological practice participates in national landscape. It is my contention that it producing the “national territory” as Jewish, is within these practices of Jewish nation- and in dispossessing the Palestinians, 2 making that Israeli archaeology should be employing the examples of Zionist properly situated. archaeology during the British mandatory period 5 and in East Jerusalem following the This paper will demonstrate that 1967 occupation.6 archaeological discourse and practice in Palestine/Israel is intertwined with a nation- making project of settler colonialism that contains both spatial and temporal dimensions. This project primarily serves to 3 invent a link between the ancient Israeli past “Facts on the ground” is an expression used to refer to Israeli settlements in the West Bank which, and the modern Israeli state, presenting though illegal under international law, by their very colonization as a “return” to “the homeland” existence create a territorial foothold in the West through familiar narratives of frontier Bank. Abu El-Haj (2002) argues that archaeological practices create similar “facts on the ground” in Israel and the West Bank. driving out the population through either the threat 4 Zionism is a political ideology/movement initiated of military force or the commission of massacres. in late 19th century in Europe, aimed at the creation 2 In Israel citizenship and nationality are distinct. of a Jewish state. Israeli citizens do not have Israeli nationality but are 5 Following WWII the League of Nations divided the instead defined through Israeli law as either Jewish, former Ottoman territories among European Arab or Druze. The state of Israel is not a state of its imperial powers as “mandates.” Britain ruled in citizens (of which 20% are Palestinians who Palestine from 1917 until the end of the mandate on remained within the borders after the 1948 war) but May 14, 1948. of the “Jewish nation” consisting of all Jewish people 6 Following the 1967 war between Israel and regardless of whether they live outside the borders neighboring countries, Israel began a military of the Israeli state. Access to land, housing, occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West acquisition of citizenship and marriage, among other Bank and Gaza where the government began things, are defined by nationality and not citizenship. building Jewish settlements. 2 Producing the “Nation” white men to democracy” (Tsing 2005:31). Challenging conceptions of the The idea of the frontier played an important nation as natural or primordial, scholars of role in the making of Vancouver’s Stanley nationalism like Eric Hosbawm (1990) and Park, where natural spaces were imagined as Benedict Anderson (1991) emphasize that wild and empty, and made to reflect this nations are modern constructs, historical image through the removal of indigenous phenomenon, and not the expression of inhabitants and the traces they left on the organic entities. Nations must be produced, landscape (Mawani 2007). These natural brought into being, and then constantly spaces and the cold climate in general were reproduced through symbolic acts of said by Canadian politicians and public nationhood. Anderson (1991:224) asserted figures to produce a “hearty race of northern that the rise of print-capitalism made people”, and a system of moderate laws and possible the development of a monoglot7 balanced government (Mawani 2007:718). press, which fostered a sense of belonging to Prior imaginings of the frontier were an “imagined community”; imagined integrated into the Canadian context, and because most of the members will never combined with racialized theories of meet each other but “maintain in their minds climatic determinism and protectionist the idea of their communion”. In Europe, environmentalism. A national project was according to Anderson, print capitalism was produced through articulations with one of the factors that contributed to the travelling knowledge. genesis of an imagined nation, helping to delineate its boundaries and expanse, Like the Canadian example, other represented by a territory and a sovereign- national projects involve particular state. combinations of nation-making techniques, determined in the specific historical context Nations are also made through of each project. The next section will engagement with ideas, theories and review the historical context in which Israel
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