The Palestinian State of Emergency and the Art Practice of Emily Jacir

Abstract

It was in part the colonial State of Emergency in British-controlled Mandatory Palestine that formed the historical and legislative background to the formation of the state of Israel and its legal order. The Emergency Defence Regulations, as Edward Said explains in The Question of Palestine, ‘were originally devised and implemented in Palestine by the British to be used against the Jews and Arabs’ during the mandate period, and especially during the Arab revolt of 1936–39. But after 1948, Israel retained the emergency regulations ‘for use in controlling the Arab minority’, and ‘forbade Arabs the right of movement, the right of purchase of land [and] the right of settlement’.1 In this context, the declaration of a state of emergency was used as the legal pretext for a large-scale land grab: ‘the Emergency Defense Regulations were used to expropriate thousands of acres of Arab lands, either by declaring Arab property to be in a security zone or by ruling lands to be absentee property.’2 The contradiction between Jewish opposition to the emergency regulations during the British mandate period on the grounds that the regulations were colonial and racist, and Israel’s subsequent adoption of these regulations after 1948 may appear to be self-evident, for these regulations provided Israel with the legal means to justify the occupation of Palestinian territory on the grounds of national security. In the words of Jacqueline Rose, the ‘Occupation can no longer be seen as a state of exception, a temporary and regrettable episode; it has become the reality of the nation.’3KeywordsRefugee CampMilitary OccupationBare LifePalestinian RefugeeIsraeli StateThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.