Navigating the Time of Arab Jerusalem: A Perspective from Within

Abstract

For many Palestinians, the colonial denial of Palestinian self-determination in an independent nation-state has rendered futile the very notion of a future. But it is imperative to challenge the colonial logics that produce the native’s future as always already failed, unachievable, or impossible. This essay examines snippets of the life of Arab Jerusalem between the two major ruptures of 1948 and 1967 to deconstruct colonial and nationalist epistemologies of time and to challenge the persistently violent present and its domination of Palestinian pasts and futures. Using as its lens the memories and attachments of Jerusalemites who lived, worked, and struggled in the city, the essay examines the ways in which they thought of, imagined, produced, fulfilled, or were deprived of a future—in other words, how Jerusalemites shaped futurity. Such a nonlinear unfolding of time challenges dominant perceptions of the Nakba as constituting a clean break between past and present.

Keywords:

• colonial epistemologies
• Palestinian futurity
• Arab Jerusalem
• Nakba
• 1948
• 1967

Notes

1 See, for example, Kimberly Katz, Jordanian Jerusalem: Holy Places and National Spaces (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2005); Ali Jarbawi, “Al-baladiyyat al-filastiniyya: Min al-nash’at hatta ‘am 1967” [Palestinian municipalities: From establishment to 1967], Shu’un Filastiniyya, nos. 221–22 (1991): pp. 49–72.

2 Haneen Naamneh, “A Municipality Seeking Refuge: Jerusalem Municipality in 1948,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 77 (Spring 2019): pp. 110–21, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/235018.

3 Alex Winder, “After the Nakba in Nuba: A Palestinian Villager’s Diary, 1949,” Biography 37, no. 2 (Spring 2014): pp. 398–450, https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2014.0032.

4 Sherene Seikaly, “The Matter of Time,” American Historical Review 124, no. 5 (December 2019): pp. 1681–88, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz1138.

5 Letter from the Palestine Arab Workers Society to the mayor of Jerusalem, 26 August 1949, 950-2, Jerusalem Municipal Archive (henceforth JMA), Jerusalem.

6 Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

7 Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

8 Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).

9 “Aspirations of the municipality for the future” [in Arabic], radio broadcast, transcribed by Ruhi al-Khatib, translated by the author, 23 June 1958, 944-24, JMA.

10 Mayor’s memorandum on the establishment of the Jerusalem Municipality (English version), 24 April 1965, p. 19, 935-14, JMA.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Haneen Naamneh

Haneen Naamneh holds a PhD in sociology from the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on the social and legal history of Arab Jerusalem and its municipality.