LAND OF SYMBOLS: CACTUS, POPPIES, ORANGE AND OLIVE TREES IN PALESTINE

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which Palestinians experience belonging to a place and how these experiences and their related ideas and symbols inform social organization through their representation, performance, and manipulations over time. In particular, I explore the articulation of symbols and symbolic representations in relation to the Palestinian encounter with the Zionist project in Palestine starting from the early twentieth century to the present. I demonstrate how dominant symbols change according to changes in the political realities and shifts in the dominant agencies. The most prominent aspect of Palestinians' representations of nationhood and peoplehood through these different symbols across time has been the articulation of their rootedness in the land of Palestine. Hence, the Palestinian “narration” of nationness has been a narration of communities and peoplehood in relation to the land, a narration of formation and reformation in the Palestinian cultural imaginary in the face of its reconfiguration by the Jewish nationalist project in Palestine.

Key Words:

• Palestine
• symbolism
• landscape
• Palestinian-Israeli conflict, identity

I thank the editors of this journal, Jonathon D. Hill and Thomas M. Wilson. I also thank the peer reviewers of the first draft of this article for their combined inputs; these helped me focus my analysis and enhance the organization of the ideas included in the text to bring the article to this final form.

Notes

1. Fellahin are the rural Palestinian communities, mostly farmers who owned and cultivated lands around their villages. These Palestinian rural communities are often referred to as peasants in the English language scholarship on Palestine even by some Palestinian scholars. Referring to the fellahin of Palestine as peasants misrepresents the cultural life of the Palestinian fellahin society because the concept of peasantry reflects certain cultural meanings and references as they were lived by European peasant communities. A peasant in European culture is a farming worker with little or no land ownership. The fellahin of Palestine are rural farming communities with communal shared ownership of the land, which they cultivated according to communal traditions. They owned the land and the means of production (working animals and tools).

2. The story is translated into English by Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley in Palestine's Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories (Kanafani 2000).

3. Zeit ifghish is the name given to the freshly pressed olive oil. Fresh olive oil has a distinct tangy full flavor for a couple of months after pressing.

4. http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Archive/Speeches/PM+RABIN-+SIGNING+CEREMONY+ OF+ISRAEL-JORDAN+PEACE.htm (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, News Archive). Accessed November 2005.

5. See Barbara McKean Paramenter's Giving Voice to Stones: Place Identity in Palestinian Literature (1994) for an excellent analysis of landscape representations of Palestinian identity in literature.