Deconstructing the Hegemony of Nationalist Narratives through Landscape Architecture

Abstract

Landscape is often a repository of nationalist ideologies. In such circumstances, landscape architecture can act in a conforming manner and perpetuate the hegemony of nationalist narratives, or become a liberating agent and challenge prevailing ideologies. This paper focuses on one such example in Israel: the landscape of the Palestinian 1948 Nakbah (catastrophe). A major formative event of Palestinian identity and at the heart of an on-going Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the memory of Nakbah is very much alive in the everyday life of Palestinians but repressed in Israeli Zionist society's psyche where an entire landscape layer is denied. In the midst of a country that was constructing a new homeland, the presence of ruins and rubble of a destroyed landscape were either ignored or adopted to reconstruct an ideological Jewish historic return to the land. Design professionals, swept along by Zionist ideology of nationhood-building, contributed to the erasing of a whole layer of landscape by an unacknowledged appropriation of the Palestinian vernacular landscape elements often euphemistically referred to as ‘biblical’ or ‘traditional’. Opportunities for ethnic reconciliation necessitate letting the repressed layers surface into Israeli consciousness. This paper calls for the deconstruction of the hegemony of a Zionist nationalist narrative in the Israeli designed landscape.

Key Words:

• Middle Eastern landscape
• landscape ideology
• nationalist hegemony
• political landscape
• Israeli landscape architecture

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments.

Notes

1 One might argue that in this case, an ideological denial of ‘the other's’ landscape is shared by both people; nevertheless, it also needs to be noted that the current power balance between Israelis and Palestinians is not symmetrical. Israel is an independent state that holds extensive military power while the majority of Palestinians are dispersed in refugee camps and deprived of their right to self-realization. This paper addresses the Israeli denial of the Nakbah landscape in the context of Zionist ideology, rather than an attempt to compare contested meanings of the landscape of the land of Palestine.

2 The saying, ‘A people without a land returning to a land without people’ is ascribed to Israel Zangwill, a prominent 19th-century Anglo-Jewish writer.

3 Alon-Mozes and Amir argue that pre-statehood influences of Arab imagery on a vernacular gardening culture fluctuated between rejection and acceptance; this can be explained both as wanting to disassociate an emerging new culture from the ‘primitive indigenous’ and a desire to connect to an old ancestral land.

4 The iconoclastic nature of the biblical perception of the landscape has also been utilized to promote international Christian tourism to Israel (see Bauman, 1995; Mitchell, 2000). This factor contributes to the taken-for-granted adoption of ‘the biblical landscape’ into contemporary landscape architecture.

5 Further landscape related means were recruited to reinforce such a connection after the establishment of Israel. Those included Hebraizing Palestinian placenames (Benvenisti, 2000), promoting archaeology to become of national significance (Hasson, 1996; Elon, 2000), a considerable emphasis of geography and natural history education, the introduction of a subject called moledet (homeland) in primary school education as well as the major portion that bible classes took in a secular education curriculum (Shapira, 1992).

6 At the outset, it should be noted that the first Jewish settlers of the late 19th century and early 20th century shared a romantic and exotic view of the local peasants, imagining them as descending from the biblical ancestors. Some tried to imitate their ‘grounded’ lifestyle by adopting their food and dress. Once Palestinian nationalism evolved and Zionism endorsed messianic trends, Zionist positive sentiments towards the indigenous population ceased (Rose, 2005). Nevertheless, romantic expressions of the ‘primitive’ indigenous population are also apparent in landscape paintings by the Jewish artist Nachum Gutman (1898 – 1980); in Gutman's 1920s paintings a Henri Rousseau-like naïve-primitivism is prominent (Gutman & Ben-Ezer, 1980). Manor (2003) argues that Gutman's vision was not ideologically Zionist but rather expressed an Oriental Arcadian ideal.

7 For a review of Zionist attitudes to the ‘problem’ of an existing population, see Masalha (1992), Shlaim (2001) and Morris (2004).

8 Bustan is the vernacular Middle East food and pleasure garden type that prevailed in Palestinian settlements. It usually includes fig, pomegranate, citrus, almond and other stone-fruit trees. An elaborated channel irrigation system is one distinct architectural element of Bustan.

9 The name of the village appears as al-Khayriyya in Palestinian literature.

10 One notable exception is Mira Engler's Mausoleum of Entropy that amongst other gestures proposes a tunnel “re-connecting the buried, ruined Arab village of Hir’ with daylight, and recovering its memory” (Raz & Flanz, 2000, p. 45).

11 The decade between 1948 and 1960 saw a dramatic increase from 660,000 Jewish constituents to over two million.

12 For a comprehensive review of the evolution of Israeli landscape architecture, see Helphand (2002).