Of Palestine

Visual Anthropology 165 it shipped and displayed in their location and many fewer Alsultany, Evelyn, Rabab Abdulhadi, and Nadine Naber, eds. people would have seen it. As an online exhibit, it is free 2011 Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and (if you have access to a computer). I have received e-mails Belonging. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. from people all over the country who have used it in their Alsultany, Evelyn, and Ella Shohat, eds. classrooms. So, yes, I do think that the digitalization of visual 2013 Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural media has made museum exhibits and archives accessible to Politics of Diaspora. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. wider audiences. McAlister, Melani 2001 Epic Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press. REFERENCES CITED Shaheen, Jack Alsultany, Evelyn 2001 Reel Bad Arabs. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. 2012 Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam after 9/11. New York: New York University Press. 1994 Unthinking Eurocentrism. New York: Routledge. Photo Essay The “Architectural Cleansing” of Palestine Ariel Sophia Bardi curating the transmutation—at times slow, at times very sudden—of Palestine into Israel. If constructions by early settlers helped to Judaize Pales- Quand l’image est nouvelle, le monde est nouveau. tine with the signs and symbols of a Jewish population on [When the image is new, the world is new.] the rise, then the War of 1948 helped to de-Arabize it. —Gaston Bachelard, La poètique de l’espace (1989) Indeed, much like prestate housing projects, demolitions nationalized and majoritized territories in dispute, inflecting Spurred by European pogroms and galvanized by the the landscape with a distinct new nationhood. Spaces were growth of modern nationalism, Zionist immigration to Ot- cleared of their communal heritage and scrubbed of their toman Palestine began in the 1880s with a wave of Russian Palestinian pasts. Farms and family houses were bombed settlers who were known, with a whiff of the American while schools, cafes, urban centers, and political and cul- Old West, as pioneers, or chalotzim. Cities had maintained tural institutions were leveled, converted, or destroyed. A consistent Jewish numbers, but rural Palestine, host to an millennia-old presence was reduced to rubble as Palestine’s entire constellation of Arab towns and villages, lay virtu- built environment became the battlefield for Israel’s Judaiza- ally undisturbed. Nineteenth-century settlements began to tion campaign. checker the countryside with population blocs, outlining the Sociologist Sari Hanafi has coined the term spacio-cide parameters of a nascent Jewish state. Under British manda- to describe the “entire Israeli project since 1948,” which tory rule, state-building became a literal endeavor: between has produced devastating losses while causing relatively few 1918 and 1929, some 60 additional compounds were built. casualties. Argues Hanafi, “In every conflict, belligerents Soon, the Jewish minority doubled to about a fifth of the define their enemy and shape their mode of action accord- population. Watchtowers surveyed vulnerable borders, ingly. In the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, the Israeli target is now patrolled by a civilian army. Much like the towns that the place” (2009, emphasis added). After the onset of war, preside, fortresslike, over the contemporary West Bank, it was clear that the Jewish state-building project would prestate settlements annexed lands to Israel’s national imag- not succeed through the construction of a national home inary. Buildings waged a shadow war, appropriating territory alone. In 1947 and 1948, Israeli operatives devised a set of in anticipation of the state. military campaigns that would defend the Yishuv, Israel’s By 1948, Israel’s shadow war had come to light. The prestate community of Jews, against local resistance while United Nations’ proposal to partition Palestine, at the end they continued to convert Palestinian spaces into the swelling of 1947, led to six months of intense fighting. Snipers threw contours of a Jewish state. daily life into a frenzy as explosives decimated whole quar- Plan Dalet, an amalgam of three former campaigns— ters. Bombs in Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem razed Plan B, from 1945; the May 1946 Plan, otherwise known urban targets, disfiguring the shared space of the city. In as Plan C; and the Yehoshua Plan, from 1948—began oper- the retaliations that volleyed back and forth, the First Arab– ations in early April 1948. Under “Assignment of Duties,” Israeli War began. It was under these conditions that, by late Dalet states that operations “against enemy population cen- spring, Israeli paramilitary forces pushed for and eventually ters” can include “destruction of villages (setting fire to, obtained full control of the state. During and after the war, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris).” In the culturally mixed landscapes were renewed and rebranded, “event of resistance,” Dalet notes, “the armed force must 166 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 1 • March 2016 FIGURE 1. Jewish students gather outside an empty house in Lifta, a Palestinian village that lies in ruins just outside of Jerusalem. It was attacked by paramilitary forces in early 1948 and mostly destroyed, and its 3,000 residents were all expelled to East Jerusalem. In 1953, Jewish Kurdish immigrants to Israel were housed in Lifta’s surviving residences. The few intact structures have been taken over by squatters in recent years, but Lifta remains a popular picnic spot with Israelis. (Source: Zochrot, photo courtesy of Ariel Sophia Bardi) FIGURE 2. Israeli tourists visit the ghost village of Lifta. Dozens come daily to swim in the village spring. There are now 30,000 descendants of Lifta residents worldwide. Sari Nasir, who was a child in 1948, still recalls being evicted from the family home by Israeli troops. “I remember that my mother wouldn’t leave, we had to force her. She was forced to leave. She cried, I remember her tears.” (Source: Zochrot, photo courtesy of Ariel Sophia Bardi) be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside Plan D helped author Israel’s “architectural cleansing” cam- the borders of the state.” But “in the absence of resistance, paign, coding the landscape with a visual history of victor garrison troops will enter the village and take up positions and vanquished. in it or in locations which enable complete tactical control” If Israeli paramilitaries sketched a portrait of a (Khalidi 2010:24). With its focus on property destruction, de-Arabized, Jewish majority state, then Dalet was the brush Visual Anthropology 167 FIGURE 3. Political graffiti in Lifta. “Eyash cavashnu,” it reads, “eyash” being shorthand for Judea and Samaria, itself the biblical name for the Occupied Territories of the West Bank: “We conquered the area of Judea and Samaria.” (Photo courtesy of Ariel Sophia Bardi) FIGURE 4. A blue-and-white tag—the colors of the Israeli flag—marks a Palestinian ruin as Jewish. The arched doorways were a classic feature of traditional stone homes, while the stones themselves were carved and laid by hand. (Photo courtesy of Ariel Sophia Bardi) that painted it. Palestinian flights took place under condi- litions and depopulations formed twin strategies of erasure: tions of extreme reluctance and fear amid a landscape of spurred by property attacks, many Palestinians considered vanishing villages. The Arab League urged Palestinians to their exodus to be a temporary displacement, a lull in the stand their ground against attacks, but it was difficult to storm of war. But by March 1948, the state had already pro- stand on ground that was so unsound. Some villages, like duced some 50,000 refugees, the majority of whom would Khirbat ‘Azzun, near Ra’anana, were deserted by terrified never return. residents, who set out in somber processions toward safer Between 400 and 600 villages were sacked during grounds. Others, like the Christian village of Al-Rama, in the war, while urban Palestine was almost entirely extin- the Galilee region, were forcibly emptied by troops. Demo- guished. The devastation wrought was breathtaking. As Lila 168 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 1 • March 2016 FIGURE 5. Old homes in the port city of Haifa, which was part of an April 1948 expulsion campaign by the Haganah, one of Israel’s leading paramilitary brigades. Out of more than 60,000 Arabs who inhabited Haifa at the time, only several thousand remained after the war. Some 50,000 Jewish immigrants were then settled in Haifa, forming a de facto population exchange. (Photo courtesy of Ariel Sophia Bardi) FIGURE 6. The remains of a mosque in an industrial zone near the northern Israeli town of Shelomi, along the Lebanese border. The town was built in 1950 on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Al-Bassa, which was stormed by Haganah troops in May 1948 and almost completely razed. Its residents were either internally displaced, given the dubious legal category of “present absentee,” or expelled to neighboring countries. (Photo courtesy of Ariel Sophia Bardi) Abu-Lughod and Ahmad H. Sa’di have put it, “For Pales- persisted of a barren, sparsely populated region, Palestine tinians, the 1948 War led indeed to a ‘catastrophe.’ A so- was already considerably developed before Jewish immi- ciety disintegrated, a people dispersed . communal life gration. Hundreds of villages extended down the bottom- was ended violently” (2007:3). The new state built over heavy sliver of land, connecting the clay-colored canyons and Palestine’s remains: atop more than 400 Palestinian villages, deserts of the south to the flat coastal plains and up to the over 400 Israeli settlements were founded. Though the myth verdant north. Teeming port cities—Acre, Jaffa, Gaza, the Visual Anthropology 169 FIGURE 7. Two Jewish schoolchildren run along a road in Old Tsfat, Israel’s capital of Kabbalah, which is known in Arabic as Safed.

Load more