The Arab village: a genealogy of (post)colonial imagination

Abstract

This article critically discusses the image and the imagining of the Arab village produced by two cultures, the national-Zionist from the 1930s onwards, and the national-Palestinian during the last decade. Unlike fellow theorists and researchers, we are reluctant to be satisfied with the claim that throughout history the Jews, establishing their identity vis-à-vis the rural and oriental ‘other’, perceived the Arab village in an inversely mirrored manner. Instead, we suggest that it took the Arab village only a few years to transform from an object which represents the ‘other’ and a signifier of the backward enemy, to what we would define as ‘still life’, a-historical and de-politicised. The Arab village, we would argue, became an object, a source of colonial imagination in the Israeli architectural culture, which sought the ‘local’ in order to establish a national identity, without associating it with its creator, the Arab society. Within this framework, we also suggest that through a process of ‘mutual contamination’ the Arab village is perceived and politically re-constructed by Palestinian architectural discourse and practice within the boundaries of Israel.