Deconstructing the Hegemony of Nationalist Narratives through Landscape Architecture

Abstract

Landscape is often a repository of nationalist ideologies. In such circumstances, landscape architecture can act in a conforming manner and perpetuate the hegemony of nationalist narratives, or become a liberating agent and challenge prevailing ideologies. This paper focuses on one such example in Israel: the landscape of the Palestinian 1948 Nakbah (catastrophe). A major formative event of Palestinian identity and at the heart of an on-going Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the memory of Nakbah is very much alive in the everyday life of Palestinians but repressed in Israeli Zionist society's psyche where an entire landscape layer is denied. In the midst of a country that was constructing a new homeland, the presence of ruins and rubble of a destroyed landscape were either ignored or adopted to reconstruct an ideological Jewish historic return to the land. Design professionals, swept along by Zionist ideology of nationhood-building, contributed to the erasing of a whole layer of landscape by an unacknowledged appropriation of the Palestinian vernacular landscape elements often euphemistically referred to as ‘biblical’ or ‘traditional’. Opportunities for ethnic reconciliation necessitate letting the repressed layers surface into Israeli consciousness. This paper calls for the deconstruction of the hegemony of a Zionist nationalist narrative in the Israeli designed landscape.