Palestinian Homes Research Articles

The politics of time: Political entropy, settler colonialism and urban ruination in Hebron / Al-Khalil, Palestine

This paper explores the relationships between settler colonialism and temporal regimes of urban ruination in the Palestinian city of Hebron/Al-Khalil. The city is divided into two sectors: H1, controlled by the Palestinian National Authority, and H2, roughly 20% of the city, including 33,000 Palestinians and 700 Jewish settlers, living under direct Israeli military occupation. Drawing on fieldwork in H2, we identify several temporal formations shaping H2: the settler-messianic time that spatializes the past as a platform to facilitate colonial expansion; contemporary military control that seeks to destabilize Palestinian homes, their everyday lives and ontological security in the present; and the Palestinian effort to recalibrate the rhythm of elimination and recover the future. The paper develops the concept of political entropy: a temporal technology of control that builds on the process of natural decay. Israel uses the power of time and entropy to let Palestinian assets decay slowly while prohibiting proper renovation and maintenance. The mundane violence of political entropy tends to remain unseen, as the harm is done slowly, allegedly naturally. Facing the settler colonial temporalities that maintain a state of undecidedness, where deferral itself becomes a weapon which lets entropy operate without interruption, Hebron's Palestinian inhabitants aim at slowing down the effects of time by applying friction to the process of ruination, as well as by their insistence on futurability. By identifying the temporalities trapping the city's Palestinian population, our paper thus frames Hebron's H2 as space that is simultaneously ruined and reclaimed.

Analisis Human Security dalam Resolusi Dewan Keamanan Persatuan Bangsa-Bangsa (DK PBB) No. 2334 Tahun 2016

<p>UN Security Council resolution no. 2334 is issued to resolve the conflict between Palestine and Israel. This resolution contains orders for Israel to halt the expansion of settlements and to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes. Basically, the resolution aims to defuse conflict and to create peace in the region. The expected peaceful situation will affect security for humans. Therefore, this paper will analyze UN Security Council resolution no. 2334 with a human security approach. This paper finds that UN Security Council resolution 2334 fulfilled the indicator of human security approach because the resolution urges the parties to comply with the laws of Geneva Convention IV, international humanitarian law, the opinion of the International Court of Justice, the Quartet Roadmap, as well as many previous resolutions. All international instruments that are mentioned are focused on discussion to protect human in economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, political and human rights. However, in practice, this resolution met many obstacles, and even tended to be ignored by Israel. This paper uses a descriptive qualitative method with data collection techniques carried out through a literature review.</p>

Settler-colonial dispossession in West Jerusalem: between the personal and the collective

ABSTRACT This article analyzes a spontaneous encounter between a Palestinian refugee—stepping over the threshold of her childhood home for the first time in seventy years, following its expropriation—and the current Israeli Jewish owner. This unusual encounter led us to propose a new understanding of dispossession based on both its personal (symbolic–emotional) and collective (economic–political) meanings. The former dimension is expressed in the Palestinians’ acts of remembering and visiting their pre-1948 homes, not only as a reflection of the past and a nostalgic impulse, but also as a way of shaping, intervening in, and influencing the present. The latter, collective meaning, explores the multiplicity of dispossession processes in a settler-colonial society in which the capitalist mode of production already existed before the settlers arrived. This article focuses on one particular form of dispossession through a micro-geographical study of one house in Jerusalem that was once a Palestinian family home. We also offer an expanded interpretation of dispossession as personal and collective by analyzing three modes of experience relating to dispossessed property: settler-colonial property, stolen property, and property as nativeness.

Israeli Physical Persecution in Occupied Jerusalem

Israeli authorities have committed a wide range of human rights violations, including direct violence, land annexation and settlement building, home eviction and arbitrary arrest and detention. Such practices have been carried out with political cover from the Israeli government. In addition to the direct confiscation of Palestinian homes and other property, Israeli authorities and organizations such as settlement associations frequently use subterfuge or bribes to transfer ownership to Jewish residents and interests. Through historical review and analysis, this paper documents the most common types of direct and structural violence practiced by Israel, along with their effect on Palestinians, and highlights the roles of the various players in Israeli society.

Mental health impact on children of forcible home invasions in the occupied Palestinian territory

A new report by three leading Israeli human rights organisations—Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Yesh Din and Breaking the Silence—documents the grievous mental health repercussions, including on children, of the...

Brief Synopses of New Arabic-Language Publications

Brief Synopses of New Arabic-Language Publications

Role of Community Protection Project in Strengthening Palestinian Home Front and Means for Activation

This study aimed to identify the assessment degree of a sample of media and security people regarding the role of the community protection project in Palestine, which is being implemented by the National Commission forStrengthening Values and Behaviors in the community, in relation to some variables (gender, work type and years of experience). The study also attempted to propose a set of recommendations that might contribute to activating the role of community protection. To achieve this, the descriptive analytical method was followed and a questionnaire of 31 items was used to collect data from a sample of 118 participants. The study findingsrevealed that the degree assessment of the role of community protection in supporting home front requirements was high at a relative weight of (81%).The first dimension (communication with the occupying forces) received the highest degree, whereas (building national affiliation) received the lowest degree. There were no statistically significant differences (<0.05) among theparticipants attributed to years of experience and gender. On the other hand, there were differences attributed to work type in favor of security people. The study stressed the need to support security organizations in their pursuit to raise security awareness by encouraging the culture of media and security climate that supports home front. It was also recommended that project activities should be well-planned and all requirements should be made available to make the project sustainable.

Role of Community Protection Project in Strengthening Palestinian Home Front and Means for Activation

This study aimed to identify the assessment degree of a sample of media and security people regarding the role of the community protection project in Palestine, which is being implemented by the National Commission forStrengthening Values and Behaviors in the community, in relation to some variables (gender, work type and years of experience). The study also attempted to propose a set of recommendations that might contribute to activating the role of community protection. To achieve this, the descriptive analytical method was followed and a questionnaire of 31 items was used to collect data from a sample of 118 participants. The study findingsrevealed that the degree assessment of the role of community protection in supporting home front requirements was high at a relative weight of (81%).The first dimension (communication with the occupying forces) received the highest degree, whereas (building national affiliation) received the lowest degree. There were no statistically significant differences (<0.05) among theparticipants attributed to years of experience and gender. On the other hand, there were differences attributed to work type in favor of security people. The study stressed the need to support security organizations in their pursuit to raise security awareness by encouraging the culture of media and security climate that supports home front. It was also recommended that project activities should be well-planned and all requirements should be made available to make the project sustainable.

The Dialectics of ‘Home’ in Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun

Since the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, the definition of home in diasporic Palestinian literature has become a central issue among literary scholars. However, this concept of home has been addressed mainly from a mono-dimensional perspective, that is, either the concrete attachment or the abstract affiliation of home. Based on the significance of the interplay of both dimensions and the lack of focus on the duality of home in previous studies of Palestinian literature, this paper explores the abstract and concrete dimensions of ‘home’ as depicted in the novel Men in the Sun written by Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian diasporic writer. This study investigates the paradoxes of home for Palestinians in the aftermath of the Palestinian Nakba , with a special focus on Kanafani’s perception of home. The study adopts Georg Hegel’s dialectics of thesis, antithesis and synthesis in the discussion of the abstract and concrete perceptions of home. Our findings disclose that Kanafani projects the many spaces that the refugees seek shelter in, such as the refugee camp, as the antithesis of home and that they are attached to poverty, humiliation, and death. Not only does Kanafani deny any mediating solutions for home, but he also assures us that such mediating solutions, other than the original home, will lead to additional aggravation to the original problem of displacement. Therefore, the synthesis of home, in both its concrete and abstract dimensions, remains as Palestine. It is hoped that this paper will pave the way to a better understanding of the concept of a Palestinian home.

Concord between Palestinian Resistance and Literature: A Historico-Literary Analysis of Darwish’s Works

This research explores the last seventy years of the Palestinian Arabs’ political struggle for their recognition as a sovereign nation-state as reflected in the poetic and prose works of Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). Given the relationship between life and literature, the Palestinian situation can be best revealed through their own cultural productions, especially literature. Darwish has utilized his sense of exile and cultural memory to realize the ideals of Palestinian home and its requisite identity. His writings constitute an integral part of Palestinian resistance literature. His works are reflective of a deep aesthetic sense coupled with a profound political understanding of the ground facts within and outside Palestine. He contests the legitimacy of a sustained foreign occupation and at the same time stresses the need of preserving national cultural heritage. He stresses the need of both intellectual and political resistance to the gradual encroachment caused by the colonial settlement regime. The present research has sought to figure out the dimensions of Darwish’s poetic and intellectual contribution to the volatile geopolitical issue of the resistance to a hegemonic control.

The Question of Palestine and the Muslim World

The question of Palestine (and the city of Jerusalem) is a core issue that remains at the centre of the Muslim mind in our time. This is because most Muslims feel that the Zionist Movement created the State of Israel in Palestine after World War II by depriving the local population of their fundamental right to exist in their ancestral homeland. The global Zionist Movement conspired, resorted to terrorist tactics and executed an ethnic cleansing campaign to create the State of Israel. The Zionists first secured the support of British politicians and then the American leaders in favour of their search for an exclusive Jewish state covering the entirety of the former British Mandate of Palestine. Although the Palestinians – like Muslims in various parts of the world – quickly developed a national consciousness in the inter-war period and tried to protect their fundamental rights, they were no match for the Zionists who had already secured the support of major powers of the globe (e.g. Britain and the US). Later, Israel managed to obtain UN membership in its third attempt with the commitment to allow all Palestinians to return to their ancestral home. But in practice, Israel has ignored all UN resolutions regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel has gradually developed a legal framework to deny the citizenship rights of the original population of Palestine and continues to build new Jewish settlements by demolishing Palestinian homes. While the Palestinians continue to suffer under Israeli repression, the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) and most Muslim governments have largely abandoned the Palestinian cause of liberation. This, in turn, frustrates much of the Muslim youth around the world – fuelling fundamentalism and extremism.

Preserving ‘the Enemy’s’ architecture: preservation and gentrification in a formerly Palestinian Jerusalem neighbourhood

This article relates to the preservation of Palestinian buildings in Jerusalem and raises the question why state-sanctioned institutions act to preserve Palestinian architecture built pre-1948, bearing in mind the context of a difficult past and an on-going conflict? The article addresses the manner in which Jerusalem’s authorised heritage discourse focuses only on preserving Palestinian buildings’ tangible aspects (architectural styles), and not on intangible aspects such as the narrative of their builders. The main argument is that while preservation is presented as a civilised practice, it is driven by the commodification of the buildings and sites and their valued ‘authenticity’. The common practice is to ‘preserve’ these buildings by developing them to create more housing units. This practice inevitably leads to gentrification. Moreover, even when intangible aspects of heritage are pushed aside, preserving these buildings comes with the ‘risk’ of them being used as memory sites for subaltern groups. The article focuses on one formerly Palestinian West Jerusalem neighbourhood, Baka, where gentrification was triggered by historic Palestinian homes and where the neighbourhood’s development continues to be linked with historic preservation.

Seeing through the Wall

Seeing through the Wall

Things that matter: nostalgic objects in Palestinian Arab homes in Israel

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the complex identity of Israel's Palestinian Arab citizens from an atypical perspective: through manifestations of their material culture. The cultural expressions that will be examined are objects from the past and objects that relate to the past, particularly to the rustic Palestinian life profoundly destabilized by the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. These objects, displayed in the homes of some of Israel's Arab citizens, are interpreted by contemplating their design, the design of their environment, their relationship to other objects, and their placement within the domestic sphere. Our study is animated by the desire to sketch a cultural portrait of Palestinian Arab Israelis, as well as by a methodological interest in interpretations based on a socio-architectural reading of objects.This article reveals the various layers of meaning within these nostalgic displays in all their diversity, and will discuss at length their uniqueness, which is linked to the past traumas and present difficulties of Israel's Arabs. Our main purpose is to develop a line of thought whereby objects that express nostalgia are understood as the embodiment of a consciousness that is characteristic of the present.

At the limits of the human: reading Postraciality from Palestine

ABSTRACTDrawing from David Goldberg’s attentiveness to racism and ‘postraciality’, I read the role of racial violence and terror in the making of Palestine and the Palestinians. The paper shows how Goldberg’s book unsettles racialized convictions of postraciality, and deconstructs the uncompromising global narrative of race. Following Goldberg’s analysis, this paper challenges racialized Zionist ideologies by considering how we might understand the marking of Palestinian homes, bodies, and lives that have become sites of racialized incarceration and brutality through the process of Israeli settler colonialism. I suggest that there is a need to pay close attention to mundane, everyday modes of suffering in order to understand the postraciality of racial suffering in the context of Palestine. I explore how the equation of Palestinians with non-humans requires them either to disappear or submit to racialized exercises of power. These questions allow us to critically analyze postraciality in the context of those living at the limits of humanity.

Old (Molotov) cocktails in new bottles? “Price-tag” and settler violence in Israel and the West Bank

ABSTRACTIn the early morning of July 31, 2015, masked attackers threw firebombs into two Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Duma, south of Nablus, killing three Palestinian civilians. Contrary to claims by Israeli and Palestinian politicians, this attack was neither an isolated anomaly nor just another incident of settler violence. Instead, it was the latest attack in an important but largely unknown phenomenon called “price-tag,” in which a loosely connected group of young Israelis called “hilltop youth” burn Palestinian mosques and destroy property in hundreds of attacks accompanied by threatening graffiti that references Israeli settlers, outposts, and anti-Arab slogans. Using an original dataset of price-tag incidents and interviews with key actors, we demonstrate that the perpetrators, targets, and strategies of price-tag are different than previous patterns of settler violence. Whereas previous settlers saw the Israeli state as legitimate and largely decided to cooperate with it, the hilltop youth have decided to confront it by using price-tag attacks to deter settlement withdrawals and chain-gang the state into a conflict with the Palestinians. This analysis of the strategic logic of price-tag reveals its potential to shift the political landscape within and between Israelis and Palestinians.

‘Once there were Moroccans here—today Americans’

Gentrification, and its expressions in the housing market, is a burning issue, bearing many social implications. This paper examines this issue through the case study of the Baka neighbourhood in Jerusalem. Baka has a unique history as a Palestinian neighbourhood, turned into a poor immigrants’ neighbourhood in the 1950s and today a highly gentrified and desired place of residence. Baka’s gentrification resulted from both the geopolitical changes in Jerusalem’s borders after the 1967 war, which turned it from borderline into an inner-city neighbourhood, as well as the re-enchantment of Palestinian homes caused by new architectural trends. While the gentrification process of Baka was initially dominated by the secular and educated Israeli middle class, over time Jewish immigrants from Western countries—mainly the USA, France and England—have become dominant. The paper is based on lengthy ethnographic fieldwork, and analyses the developments in Baka’s housing market through a reading of the stages of gentrification as they appear in the contemporary literature. The argument advanced is that gentrification is a neo-liberal process driven by market forces and encouraged by the state. It is therefore not a free market process open to everyone, but rather one which benefits strong social groups that are considered hegemonic in the Israeli context and excludes other populations, with lesser financial abilities. The case study also reveals how in modern Israel ‘real estate language’ replaced ‘national language’, and that the usage of such a language disguises ethnic and ethno-national stratification as well as class inequalities.

Embroidered Palestine: A Stitched Narrative

IntroductionIn studying folk creativity, unexpected day-to-day encounters sometime point the way to new research projects, while the emotions relating to such discoveries can become indispensable as analytical resources. Such was the case when during a casual chat at a sports center I happened to mention a research project in which I was involved, focusing on needlepoint embroidery (Salamon). Upon hearing the topic of my research, the man sitting next to me dismissed this kind of embroidery, only to go on to enthusiastically describe an embroidered wall hanging he recently came across in a Palestinian home in one of East Jerusalem's refugee neighborhoods.1My interlocutor, an Israeli man in his seventies, was impressed by the wall hanging's aesthetic style as well as, to use his own phrase, by surprising, even daring theme: an embroidered picture, composed entirely of Arabic written names of pre-1948 Palestinian villages in Jerusalem and its surroundings, which now formed part of the State of Israel.2 When he asked whether the piece was for sale, the owner answered that this piece, embroidered by his wife, will never be sold. It is priceless (see figure 1).Living in Jerusalem, I was familiar with a wide and varied range of Palestinian embroidery: dresses, pillows, handbags, and even wall hangings, mainly preserving traditional patterns (as seen in figures 2 and 3). Yet it seemed to me that this vivid story was describing an object that lay at the intersection between the craft of embroidery, memories of a lost patrimony, and the uncompromising declaration of ownership-all wrapped up with intense emotions. Naturally, this provoked my curiosity. Asking Palestinian friends about this form of embroidery, I learned they were all familiar with it and, in addition, were not surprised to hear that non-Palestinians rarely got a glimpse of this type of handicraft. Moreover, they introduced me to an even more explicit design-that of an embroidered map of Palestine, called Tatriz khartat Falastin (?^k^ie jjjki), Embroidered Palestine Maps, made to be framed and hung on the walls of Palestinian homes.3Embroidered Palestine Maps are a loaded spectacle. The needlework is colorful and large, describing the borders of pre-1948 British-Mandate Palestine; place names and images are located in their respective geographic locations. The names of towns and cities of Palestine of that era are stitched in Arabic letters and pictorial images, while non-Palestinian towns and cities are ignored (as may be seen in figures 4 to 14).The discovery of this embroidery style enabled me to inquire into its stitched narrative and the sentiments associated with it. This article explores the voice arising out of this style of embroidered narrative and approaches the source of its distinctive potency. The research project on which this article is based focused on these embroidered maps from the Palestinian embroiderer's point of view. At the basis of this project was fieldwork conducted during 2010 and 2011 in Jerusalem and its vicinity both within the West Bank barrier and outside of it. The research was carried out with the assistance of two female Palestinian students and included the documentation of the embroidered maps together with accompanying in-depth interviews. The interviewees were asked to recount the path that brought them to embroider the maps, and the emotions that were associated with the act of their creation throughout the process.As this article will go on to demonstrate, the painful past and the conflicted reality in which these maps are embroidered and displayed is overburdened with competing narratives that seek to defeat and silence each other. The embroidered narrative operates within the multinarrative sounding board of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The land narrated by Embroidered Palestine, as I choose to name these maps, is the very same land discussed over and over in other narratives, from printed maps to the mainly verbally articulated forms of the different sides. …

Israel as Absolute State

Israel as Absolute StateIn his seminal essay, Critique of Violence/Zur Kritik der Gewalt (1921), Walter Benjamin proposes a direct link between violence and law. Law is initially instituted by violence, he offered, and in turn the direct consequence of law is political domination by virtue of that legalized Just two years before the publication of Benjamin's essay, Max Weber in his Politics as a Vocation/Politik als Beruf' (1919) had defined as the institution with an exclusive claim to legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence. The combined insights of Weber and Benjamin mark the state as the legalized apparatus of violence systemically geared toward political domination.In these two critical essays, both Weber and Benjamin were in part responding to the immediate consequences of World War I (1914-1918) and the humiliating defeat of Germany in its aftermath. Preoccupied as they were with their own intra-European predicament, neither of these two pathbreaking theorists of violence, law, and state were particularly concerned with the colonial context of similar issues, let alone the racialized denomination of state violence when extended to the non-European world. Theorization of the colonial world, as indeed the colonial world itself in the shadow of European imperial conquest, would remain un- and under-theorized until decades later with the rise of a generation of critical thinkers best exemplified by Frantz Fanon and Edward Said.In his groundbreaking new book, Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit (2016), the eminent Palestinian sociologist Elia Zureik continues his earlier work to expand the political implication of such and similar ideas, with particular attention to Foucault's work on biopolitics, into Palestinian territories under the Zionist colonial project. Just like Walter Benjamin and Max Weber, Foucault was almost entirely oblivious to the colonial shadow of European modernity. For Zureik, the reverse is true. He plants his theoretical tripod right at the heart of European colonialism in Palestine and offers a corrective lens to theories of state, law, and violence.For Zureik, the three interrelated themes of violence, territoriality, and population control (all with a strong racialized undertone) are the three-prong strategies of the settler colony dominating the native population of Palestine. Racialized violence, racialized demarcation of land, and racialized surveillance are the direct result of this colonial project. In Zionism, European imperialism around the globe has invested all its techniques of domination as if in a laboratory for the world at large to see and examine. If people were not alive to see what the British did in India, or the French and Italians in North Africa, the Belgians in Congo, the Dutch elsewhere in Africa, all the way back to the Spaniards in the New World, all they need to do is to look at what European Zionists are doing in Palestine. For this reason alone, Elia Zureik is today perhaps the most astute theorist of this archive of European racist colonialism as collectively cataloged and put into practice in Palestine.The central argument of Zureik's book is in its third chapter (Colonialism as Surveillance), and its cathartic moment in its final chapter (The Internet and Acts of Everyday Residence). Chapter two navigates a critical updating of Zionism as a colonial project. The book in its entirety is a tour de force of critical thinking on racism, domination, surveillance, and land theft, based on the widest body of archival evidence ever gathered for such a scrupulous examination.Depopulating Palestine, denationalizing the refugees, and stealing ever bigger chunks of Palestinian lands are the point of departure for Zureik upon which he then builds a thorough theoretical argument about the manner in which Israel has systematically stolen Palestinian lands, racialized the daily life of its colonial subjects, demolished Palestinian homes and farms, and consistently sought to dismantle the very social basis of a civic life, in effect seeking to erase Palestinians from their own homeland. …

Repenting for What Israel Did to Gaza—Without Condoning the Wrongs Committed by Hamas

Repenting for What Israel Did to Gaza—Without Condoning the Wrongs Committed by Hamas