Bridging memories: training the imagination to go visiting in Israel/Palestine

Abstract

Understanding imagination as a performative political action, and therefore as an action that requires training, is at the centre of this paper. Bridging Memory is an activist intervention in which body-sized photographs of Palestinian refugees living today in a refugee camp in South Lebanon were posted by Israeli activists in the place from which they were expelled. The analysis of the project demonstrates the centrality of memory and activism in training a political imagination in Israel/Palestine. Furthermore, this case study illustrates how expanding the limits of the imagination through photography, articulating the ‘right of return’ as part of ‘the right to have rights’ can help Israeli Jews visualise the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes.

AKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am thankful to John Louis Lucaites, Phaedra C. Pezzulo, Jon Simons, Ruthie Ginsburg, Katie Lind, Mark Nagle, Wendy Kozol, Ariella Azoulay, Eran Fisher, Tal Zalmanovich and Louise Bethlehem for their insigntful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Notes

[1] The ‘right of return’ is established in the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, Par. 13, Section 2: ‘Every person has the right to leave any country, including their own, and to return to their country.’

[2] Since the cave days, humans have been telling stories through images- and therefore the practice is not new- however, in the digital ecosystem, the amount of images produced per minute and the ways in which these images are reproduced and circulated, is.

[3] See a complete interview (Hebrew and Arabic) at ‘Remembering Ras al-Ahmar,’ accessed 3 December 2014, http://www.zochrot.org/en/booklet/49826. For information on the village and refugee camp, see http://www.palestineremembered.com/Safad/al-Ras-al-Ahmar/ and http://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/lebanon/camp-profiles?field=15, respectively.

[4] Nakba is the word used in the Arab world to refer to the violent events that occurred from 1947 to 1950 and led to the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians, the demolition of 530 towns and villages, and the destruction of rural and urban cultures.

[5] See Zochrot’s film with edited testimonies of refugees from Ras al-Ahmar, among them Ahmad Salim al-Hatib’s. Ranin Jeries, dir., Bridging Memory, November 2008, YouTube video, 14:55, Zochrot, https://www.zochrot.org/en/video/49706.

[6] Historically, a moshav is a cooperative agricultural community of farmers pioneered by the Labour Zionists.

[7] For more information on Najdeh, see http://www.association-najdeh.org/english/index.html. For more information on Zochrot, see http://www.zochrot.org/en.

[8] According to Mohammed Hassan Ayoub, a refugee from the village, Ras al-Ahmar, its Palestinian name (Arabic for ‘redhead’), indicated that the hill on which the village was built was once an active volcano, hence the red colour of the soil. Mario Rozio, one of the first Jewish inhabitants of Kerem Ben Zimra, said he heard from his Arab neighbours that the name Ras al-Ahmar originates from the fact that one of the main agricultural productions of the village was tomatoes; therefore, from a distance, the village situated on a hill used to look like a redhead. In any case, in the first years of the moshav, the name that was used was rosh adom (Hebrew for ‘Ras al-Ahmar’), a literal translation of the Arabic name into Hebrew.Kerem Ben Zimra (Hebrew for ‘the vineyard of Ben Zimra’) is the Zionist name that the place received. It refers to the tomb of Rabi Yosef Ben Zimra which is believed to rest next to the moshav. In his interview, Rozio laughs about the name and says that it was actually the tomb of an Arab Sheikh, whose tombstone he and his friends found with Arabic inscriptions on it, and which was ‘turned’ into a Jewish tomb only thirty years ago. Trading the Arabic names for names in Hebrew (and Judaising Arab tombs) is a Zionist practice that was used first as a symbolic strategy to reclaim the land and later became the continuation of the same colonial project.

[9] See: Rosemary Sayigh. ‘On the Exclusion of the Palestinian Nakba from the “Trauma Genre.”’ Journal of Palestine Studies 43, no. 1 (1 November 2013): 51–60.

[10] My positionality as Israeli (activist and researcher who cannot travel to Lebanon) discloses the limitations of this research and explains its focus on the Israeli side of the project.

[11] I use here the word testimony in a wider sense to describe a vernacular process of memory work that is not constructed by professional legal practices but is embodied in grassroots activism.

[12] See https://najdeh.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/right-of-return/.

[13] See Zochrot Background and rationale: https://www.zochrot.org/en/content/17.

[14] Mairav Zonszein, ‘Rightists Disrupt Nakba Ceremony at Tel Aviv University,’ +972 Magazine, accessed 27 June 2018, https://972mag.com/rightists-disrupt-nakba-ceremony-at-tel-aviv-university/45646/.

[15] The full text can be found in the report written by Eitan Bronstein Aparicio for Zochrot’s website: Aparicio, ‘Nakba Commemoration Ceremony at Tel Aviv University,’ Zochrot, May 2012, accessed 3 July 2018, https://www.zochrot.org/en/article/53699.

[16] Here I refer not only to the state laws but also to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement that works to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law.

[17] It is important to remember that dictators have a very developed imagination. And therefore the need to train a political imagination together with others: all those who are to be part of the future of the place.

[18] Recently, more and more Palestinian activists are constructing local models of return. One pioneering project is the model built by architect and artist Hanna Farah-Kufr Bir’am, in which he re-constructed his parents’ village, adapting it to the modern necessities of young generations, whom he imagined will return to live in it. See Norma Musih, ‘Hanna Farah-Kufr Bir’im,’ in Solution 196–213: United States of Palestine–Israel, ed. Joshua Simon (New York: Sternberg Press, 2011).

[19] I refer to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state as a fantasy. As Azoulay and Ophir (2012) have shown, the State of Israel was never completely a democratic state, or it was democratic only for Israeli Jews. Since its creation, and with the exception of the six months between the time the military rule over the Palestinians inside the ‘48 borders ended in late December 1966 and the military rule over the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza began in June 1967, the state has governed a large Palestinian population without this population having civil rights.

[20] Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes during the Nakba but remained in the area that became the State of Israel are considered internally displaced persons (IDPs), which are defined legally as ‘present absentees’ – an oxymoron. Present absentees are not permitted to live in the homes they formerly lived in, even if they currently reside in the same geographical area as the home, the property still exists, and they can prove their ownership. In other words, present absentees are present, but absent in the eyes of the law. And although they are Israeli citizens, the law does not protect their ownership over properties that the state appropriated and refuses to return. Additionally, if they decide to break the law by returning to their homes, the law will enact its violence on them. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), in 1950, 46,000 of the 156,000 Palestinians in Israel were IDPs.

[21] Sharon Rotbard has already noted that the only time in the history of Israel when someone was thrown into the sea was when Palestinians were forced to leave Jaffa in 1948. See Sharon Rotbard, White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, trans. ed. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015).

[22] One example that takes an academic approach to the understanding of the Nakba in general and the refugee problem in particular is the work of Ruth Gabison, a well-known scholar nominated for the Supreme Court in Israel. Gabison writes extensively about the dilemma inherent in defining the State of Israel as Jewish and democratic while expressing a total negation of the right of Palestinian return, relying on a liberal discourse of rights that defends the rights of Israel as a Jewish democratic state. See, for example, Ruth Gabison, ‘Meaning and Implication of the Jewishness of Israel,’ in The Jewishness of Israel, ed. Yedidia Stern and Aviezer Ravitzky (Jerusalem: The Israeli Democracy Institute, 2007), 107–78. A legal approach to the Nakba can be seen in ‘The Nakba Bill.’ The bill, proposed by ‘Israel Beiteinu,’ the right-wing party in the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) and finally passed in March 2011, states that the finance minister will be charged with deciding when to withdraw funds from local authorities and other state-funded bodies (such as schools) holding events marking the Palestinian Nakba Day after consulting the attorney general and a professional team comprised of members of the ministries of finance and justice. For a compelling analysis of the Nakba Bill and its damages, see Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, ‘Necropolitical Debris: The Dichotomy of Life and Death,’ State Crime Journal, no. 1 (2015): 34.

[23] In 2011, an international ‘right of return’ movement led a ‘march of return’ in which Palestinian refugees from Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan marched to the Israeli borders, and as Diana Allan notes, it served to solidify the Palestinian refugees as a ‘newly visible political collective’ of ‘rights-bearing claimants.’ See Diana Allan, Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.)

[24] For more information on the march, see ‘Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) Join the Human Rights March on December 9!’ Accessed 1 November 2016, https://www.acri.org.il/en/2011/11/30/join-the-human-rights-march-next-friday/.

[25] See B. Cotter, ‘Hannah Arendt and “The Right to Have Rights”,’ in Hannah Arendt and International Relations, ed. A. F. Lang, Jr., and J. Williams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 95–112.

[26] The mobilisation of photography in human rights campaigns is a strategy in use worldwide. Also, in Israel photography has been crucial for human rights organisations. For a critical analysis of the use of photography in Israeli human rights organisations, see Ruthie Ginsburg, And You Will Serve as Eyes for Us: Israeli Human Rights Organizations as Seen through the Camera’s Eye (Tel Aviv: Resling 2014), (Hebrew).

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Norma Musih

Norma Musih is a researcher of visual culture and digital media. Musih holds a PhD from Indiana University and is currently a post-doctoral researcher in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Drawing from her curatorial work and activist engagement, in her research she traces a link between images and imagination through the analysis of archival photographs, photographs produced by activists and digital images in order to suggest practices for training a political imagination. https://bgu.academia.edu/NormaMusih