Landscape of time and immobility

ABSTRACT

This paper sheds a light on the ephemeral landscape of Palestine. Under a deliberate process of ‘erasing, peeling, cutting and pasting’, the physical and mental maps of Palestine today are rapidly changing with the Palestinians being pushed out of the scene. This colonial project has been best represented by Sari Hanafi as ‘spacio-cidal’ as it targets the landscape and consequently the narrative of those who shape it.

Stemming from the need for an alternative discourse to narrate and redraw the map from a local lens, I use the village of Beit Iksa as an example to portray the spatial restructuring of the landscape. I show how ‘greening’ casts a shadow on the Israeli colonial strategies that lie beneath to alienate and ‘reinvent’ the rural scene. And yet, because for every strategy of control there is a tactic to resist, I show how through spatial interventions, I tried to rethink the rural and challenge its ideological transformation into a void; a leftover landscape shaped by time and immobility and yet is loaded with spatial potentials and open to change.

KEYWORDS:

• Immobility
• spacio-cide
• rural Palestine
• spatial restructuring
• tactics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A widely used phrase in the literature of Zionism to legitimize the movement of Jewish immigrants to Palestine to establish the ‘Jewish State’ during the 19th and 20th century.

2. The drawings and maps in this paper are drawn by the author unless stated otherwise.

3. www.palestineregenerationproject.com .

4. Part of this project was published by (Golzari & Sharif, 2017).

5. His Space and Their Space are also created in the village. These relate to the men and workers with their informal and invisible tactics to negotiate the voids in search for a living.