Exhibiting activism at the Palestinian Museum

ABSTRACT

The sovereign nation-state remains the taken-for-granted setting for museums, which are conventionally understood as public institutions that collate and preserve objects, and make collections accessible to visitors. Given these expectations, the Palestinian Museum offers an intriguing case study in a growing body of research on the relationship between museums and international relations. In 2016, the Palestinian Museum opened in the West Bank without a collection and with an admission that, due to the Israeli occupation, many Palestinians would not be able to reach the building. This article proposes that the museum initiative and the experiences it has entailed illustrate activism under occupation, and the challenge this activism makes to Israel’s policies of control and erasure has been visible in three key ways. Firstly, the museum asserts a visible national presence in an environment where the everyday lives of Palestinians and Palestinian ambitions for independence are severely constrained. Secondly, the museum staff have used the lack of a collection to draw international attention to the Israeli occupation and policies of settlement, expropriation, and control. And thirdly, in its programme and stated ambitions, the museum’s designers have given wide scope to their imagined audience and the Palestinian national community, with a view to enhancing a transnational arena for activism.

KEYWORDS:

• Occupation
• museums
• activism
• Palestinian
• Israeli

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Audrey Reeves and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This term refers to the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, adopting the international community’s majority view (expressed by the UN General Assembly, UN Security Council, International Committee of the Red Cross, High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Convention and International Court of Justice) that the areas Israel invaded in 1967 are occupied territory. Since 1974, UN General Assembly resolutions have tended to view the oPt as constituent parts of a future Palestinian state.

2. For Wolfe, settler colonialism is ‘inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal’ (2006, 387).

3. Both drew on the Imperial Museum’s collection that operated in Jerusalem under the Ottoman Empire (St. Laurent and Himmet 2013).

4. E.g. the Palestinian Folklore Museum, the Old Bethlehem Home Museum, the International Nativity Museum, the Ramallah Museum, the Tulkarem Archaeological Museum, and Al-Mathaf Recreational and Cultural House. An exception is the Islamic Museum of the Haram al-Sharif which is administered by the Jordanian Ministry of Awqaf Islamic Affairs.

5. After the 1967 War, Israel declared East Jerusalem annexed, redrawing the city’s boundaries to add 64 km² from the surrounding West Bank; the majority of the international community does not recognize this annexation.

6. An unrealized project in Réunion proffered a third category of ‘accepted absences’ in a museum without objects in which images, sounds and reconstructed objects would evoke lives unrecorded in official histories whose material culture had not been preserved (Vergès 2014, 25–31).

7. My EU passport allowed access to East Jerusalem that Palestinians living in the rest of oPt are routinely denied.