Palestinian Landscape Research Articles

Woman Is a Cause: Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa as Critique of Patriarchal Nationalism

How should one read Returning to Haifa, Ghassan Kanafani’s tragedy of post–1967 Palestinian-Israeli confrontation, in the twenty-first century? Though the novella ends with the protagonist’s call to arms, recent interpreters read it as an opening for dialogue and cohabitation. However inviting, though, such a “dovish” reading may not take seriously the unresolved conflicts at the novella’s core. We argue that the novella responds to the tectonic shifts in the Palestinian landscape of 1966–67 by reworking the calls to action and speech with which Kanafani concluded Men in the Sun (1962). Borrowing from Hannah Arendt’s theory of action, we propose a reading of Returning to Haifa that comes to grips with the enigmatic but crucial phrase “man is a cause,” arguing that in his representation of women in the novel, Kanafani not only writes against Palestinians resigning themselves to Israeli rule, but also points to how patriarchal nationalism alienates both Palestinians and Jews, and portends only an eternal recurrence of the Nakba.

Denotations of Resistance in the Palestinian Proverb "Semio-sociological Approach": دلالات المقاومة في المثل الشعبي الفلسطيني "مقاربة سيميسوسيولوجية" (2021)

This study depends on the analysis content by used semio-sociological approach in the interpretation of proverbs through selection of a group of the Palestinian proverbs associated with the resistance dimension. Many studies of proverbs did not address this type of interpretation. Moreover, many of these studies were not up to the desired methodological level because of the proverb’s varied associations with the general life. In its sociological context, the proverb stemmed from a sensory human experience, expressed in simple language. It was able to portray the life of the human through their immersion into the action framework that awakened the collective conscience which rejected the oppressive reality, which drew the differing paths of the proverb and left some margin for explicating the current crisis and how to deal with it. Since the resistant proverb is a part of the cultural landscape, it was in harmony with the novel, poem, drawing and poetry in a revolting image that stressed confrontation as well as rejection of weakness and subjection. It also succeeded in expressing an identity that embodied awareness about the suffering of human reality in all its concise and deep dimensions and historical and social framework. Despite the fact that the proverb is subsumed under the duality of subjection and revolt, the two researchers opted to address the resistant side of it, through a Palestinian model whose space abounds in a movement that bestowed a deep constructivist dimension on the Palestinian landscape. This is parallel with the current objective contexts that the Palestinian society is undergoing. Therefore, this study proceeded along three results, the first results of the interpretive structure of the denotations of the proverb and its projections on the symbols of time and place, secondly the proverb denotations and projections on plantation, animals, the third of the interpretive structure of the denotations of the proverb and its projections on the humans.

The Cypress Tree

a FICTION The Cypress Tree by Shereen Malherbe Author’s note: Over the last two decades, whenever I have returned to Palestine, there has been considerable change. However, what I take comfort in is not the changes but the consistencies that have been kept the same and then taught through the family from grandmother to mother to daughter, etc. I think of the enduring traditions that have kept the Palestinian people connected to the land and the importance of passing on these rituals. The cypress tree is a symbol on the traditionally embroidered Palestinian dress. It is also a common feature of the Palestinian landscape and has been used as a representation of rural Palestine and as a motif for national poets such as Mahmoud Darwish. The cypress tree is a female-centric story of the importance of these traditions and how their continuation provides a hopeful framework for keeping our home and memories alive. M y Tata told me about a treasure that is found in a cypress tree garden. I have searched my whole life for this treasure. When I was a child, I lived back in a northern town of Palestine. It is a town that exists on the edges of the West Bank, high up in the mountain ranges, almost touching the peaks of the heavens. As a child, I used to sit under the cypress tree. It shaded me from the searing midday sun as I searched for the treasure I imagined underneath its soil. As the sun began to drop in the sky, I would leave my treasure hunt behind and skip home to the smell of my Tata’s maklouba; cooked chicken on top of rice, mixed with cauliflower and blanched almonds, as it drifted along the breeze. When I arrived home, my family was always gathered on the courtyard under grapes, hanging abundantly from the vines. The hot dishes were brought out on brass platters, and just as they were placed down on our table, family and friends would come over and eat with us. I unstacked chairs and we ate and laughed. Dinner would last until the call to prayer echoed out from the minarets. As the guests left the courtyard, I used to go and help my Tata clear away plates in the small kitchen in the back of our home. Afterward, we would sit together and stitch our thawb (thobe) as the light faded in the garden of cypress trees. Years passed until it was my wedding day. I remember it, as clearly as the sun. The whole town came. The cars lined up on the roads and pressed their horns in rhythmic jubilation. The men erupted into songs of families becoming one. They sang the tune of young love and the promise of children. Our cypress tree held our wedding lights. The fairy-lights in the branches glittered like Christmas in Bethlehem. The starlight twinkled even brighter above them. Even the trees 9 84 WLT SUMMER 2021 SLIMAN MANSOUR, THE VILLAGE AWAKENS – SAHWIT AL KAREH / COURTESY OF THE ARTIST pointed up toward the heavens, reminding us that this was the closet place to heaven on earth, where the soil itself was blessed. The whispers and prayers of our dreams floated in the air. The land was ours, and it was the same garden where my grandmother was wed fifty years before. I wore her thawb. It was embroidered with trees. I remember how I danced. I danced in the glow of hope. I was going to travel the world and find its treasure. After we left Palestine, I traveled throughout the earth. I traveled to the deep green countryside and gardens in Tuscany . I traversed the Italian fields and the cities in all their splendor. I sailed down the canals of Venice and stopped in the rolling hills to find the treasure my Tata had told me about. I flitted like a bird across the forests and countrysides of Europe hoping to find it. I ventured to the sprawling palatial gardens of Istanbul. I sought out the dense forests of North America. I searched under the vast rainforest gardens of Asia. I ventured to the gardens of ancient...

Sacred Space in Egeria's Fourth‐Century Pilgrimage Account

This article examines Egeria's pilgrimage in the 380s as emblemising the fourth‐century Constantinian conception of the Holy Land as a sacred space. Egeria's account is the second‐oldest surviving pilgrim itinerarium and her writing helped pioneer the development and codification of pilgrimage as a lived religious practice. Egeria embarked on pilgrimage with the belief that holiness was accessible through an immersion within the sacred Palestinian landscape. She expressed two desires: to engage closely with holy sites and to see how monastic communities were living and praying within the landscape. This liminal landscape was a ritual site where prayers brought the past into the present. Although she travelled with a deep belief in Constantine's legacy of holy places, a routinisation of pilgrimage had not yet occurred. With no scriptural, doctrinal or theological definition of the practice, she was autonomous in defining the meaning of holy landscapes within her own context. This article finds in Egeria's account an early example of the transformative and liminal phenomenon of pilgrimage through the eyes of an independent, devout, and pioneering female pilgrim.

Visions of landscape photography in Palestine and Israel

ABSTRACT Landscape photography is a visual construction of nature. Viewing recurrent representations of landscape photographs can contribute to the creation of national and political visual heritages, appropriation, and cultural claims over lands. Thus, landscape photographs serve as mediums for influencing political agendas and ideologies. These ideas are illustrated in this study by analysing European, Palestinian, and Zionist landscape photographs of the Holy Land (Zion/Palestine) from the middle of the nineteenth century and up to contemporary artistic Israeli photography. I contend that landscape photography was employed as a political tool at the hands of European and pre-statehood, Zionist photography for cultural land appropriation in their political struggles, while local Palestinian documentation was absent from this arena.

NEO-ZIONIST FRONTIER LANDSCAPES IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

Immediately after the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza the national religious youngsters (Gush Emmunim settlers) reached out to settle the new frontier of the biblical places. By thus, they have developed a Messianic myth. The interpretation of Gush-Emmunim settlers’ experience of landscapes reveals a complex and contradictory structure of sense of space. Settlers’ mythical sense of space may be understood in two strata - imagined and material. The imagined stratum is conceived mainly in transcendental romantic terms while the material is reified according to classic conceptions. Two main contradictions are outstanding: first, between the romantic representation of Jewish landscapes and the classic representation of Palestinian landscapes in the imagined stratum; second, between the romantic representation of the Jewish home space in the imagined stratum and the classical representation of the suburban Jewish home landscape in the material stratum. The first contradiction is inherent in frontier societies as a means to pseudo-rationalize the colonisation of the land, although in general there may be a mixture of romantic and classic attitudes towards the natives. The settlers pioneering myth is highly subsidised by the government and aggressively backed by military force. This enables them to tolerate the surrounding fear, antagonism and hatred. Thus, the landscape they build represents power and domination with no regard to local nature and to the Palestinian landscapes that are perceived by the settlers as part of it.

Decolonizing History and Depoliticizing Territory: Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape

Inspired by postcolonial theory, this essay reads Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks as a critique of nineteenth-century US and European travel writers who recorded their encounters with Arabs living in Palestine, deconstructing the modern–primitive opposition that such writers assumed. Writing an indigenous travel narrative, Shehadeh seeks to write back against colonialist (mis)representations of Palestine and its people and to criticize the orientalist attitudes that preceded it. He disrupts, inverts and challenges those patterns of European and US travel writing. Thus, Shehadeh’s narrative sketches ways of challenging and questioning the assumptions of orientalist narratives that facilitated Israeli settler colonialism and aspires to decolonize Palestinian history and depoliticize the Palestinian landscape. This essay responds to the relative neglect of reading Palestinian literature as one of the postcolonial literatures that function as a counter-narrative to European and US orientalist hegemonic narratives, and not just Zionist colonial narratives.

Palestinian media landscape: Experiences, narratives, and agendas of journalists under restrictions

ABSTRACTThis study aims to increase our understanding of the dynamics of the Palestinian media and the conditions and circumstances in which they work, including both the conflict with Israel and the internal political strife within Palestinian society. It is based on the use of qualitative research methods and was conducted in two stages. First, we performed a mapping of Palestinian media outlets. Data on these Palestinian media outlets were collected online from the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Information website, the Gaza-based Hamas government’s Ministry of Information website, and statements published by Palestinian media outlets on their websites describing their affiliation and ownership. Second, to gain a more in-depth understanding of the dynamics and experience of practicing journalism in a situation of asymmetrical conflict, semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted with 25 professional local Palestinian journalists working for local media outlets in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Through this study we aim to learn more about how groups shape and express their narratives and agendas through the media when restricted by the conditions, pressures, and limitations of asymmetrical conflict.

Gary Fields. Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror; Gershon Shafir. A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict; Salim Tamari. The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine; Ilan Pappe. The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories; Norman G. Finkelstein. Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom; Michael Sfard. The Wall

G<scp>ary</scp> F<scp>ields</scp>. <i>Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror;</i> G<scp>ershon</scp> S<scp>hafir</scp>. <i>A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict;</i> S<scp>alim</scp> T<scp>amari</scp>. <i>The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine;</i> I<scp>lan</scp> P<scp>appe</scp>. <i>The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories;</i> N<scp>orman</scp> G. F<scp>inkelstein</scp>. <i>Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom;</i> M<scp>ichael</scp> S<scp>fard</scp>. <i>The Wall

Claiming Modernity in Mandate Palestine: A Journey Across the Mountains in the Strongholds of the Rebels

Abstract Riḥlah bayna al-jibāl fi maʿāqil al-thāʾirīn was serialized in the Jaffa newspaper Al-Jāmiʿah al-Islāmiyyah towards the end of the 1936 Palestine revolt. Under the guise of a reportage by a Western journalist, the series successfully defied British censorship and published interviews with guerrilla commanders and rank-and-file rebels, and one of Fawzī al-Qāwuqjī’s communiqués. Following the main trend of literary reportage at that time, the author adopted a viewpoint focused on the rebels’ cause and emphasized the ability of the Arabs of Palestine to face the challenges of modernity. The narrator comments on the skills and virtues of rebel leaders and common people, rejecting the dehumanizing image that colonial officials and Western newspapers were making of them, and romantically depicting the nighttime Palestinian landscape. At the same time, the description of the insurgents’ organization projects the picture of an orderly society, equipped with the institutions and symbols that typically define modern states.

Landscape change in Ramallah—Palestine (1994–2014)

ABSTRACTThe Palestinian landscape has always been subjected to dynamic processes of change. This article examines the landscape change in Ramallah city during the last 20 years by analysing two aerial photographs from two periods—1994 and 2014—to create land cover maps which illustrate the change in different landscape classes in the city. The article aims to quantify the landscape change in the specified periods using GIS and FRAGSTATS analysis, and to identify and explain spatial patterns of the landscape, taking into consideration the political, social, and economic circumstances. The results reveal a considerable change and fragmentation. The main change is an increase in the built-up area at the expense of a decrease in the permanent trees and scrub areas. This change, due to the occupation policies, is a reflection of many indicators, including population growth, migration, and an economic boom in the construction sector.

Palestinian schoolscapes in Israel

The linguistic repertoire of Palestinian citizens in Israel is complex and diverse. Arabic is the language of personal, cultural, and national identity. Hebrew is important for social mobility, higher education, and shared citizenship. English, as a global language, is a window to the wider world (Amara, Policy and teaching English to Palestinian students in Israel: An ecological perspective to language education policies, 2014). As to language education, Arabic is the language of instruction in Palestinian schools. Hebrew is studied as a second language by all the Palestinian students from the second grade on, or even earlier. English is studied as a foreign language from the third grade on, and in many schools even earlier (Amara, Policy and teaching English to Palestinian students in Israel: An ecological perspective to language education policies, 2014; Hebraization in the Palestinian language landscape in Israel, 2015). This study investigates the reflection of the three languages studied in the Palestinian schoolscapes. More specifically, the schoolscapes in six Palestinian high schools located in three towns in the Little Triangle in Israel are studied. The distribution of the languages in the schoolscapes was examined by exploring the functions of signs, distinguishing between informative and symbolic content, and determining the authorship of signs (top-down vs. bottom-up). Altogether 1216 photographs of signs were taken and analyzed. In addition, the ‘tourist guide technique’, developed by Szabó (Journal of Applied Language Studies 9:23–51 2015), was used. The findings reveal that Arabic, Hebrew, and English are used in the schoolscapes of the Palestinian schools in Israel. Arabic is the most ubiquitous language, and Hebrew is also present. While there is evidence of English, its use lags far behind that of the two other languages. The schoolscapes are largely monolingual (mainly Arabic) or bilingual (Arabic-Hebrew). Trilingual signs almost do not exist. Though Palestinian students are trilingual since they learn three languages at school, multilingualism is not truly reflected in their schoolscapes.

Agricultural Land Use Change and its Drivers in the Palestinian Landscape Under Political Instability, the Case of Tulkarm City

ABSTRACTAgricultural land-use change is unavoidable with population growth and economic development. This study investigated the causes and the consequences of agricultural land-use change in Tulkarm city in the West Bank of Palestine after the construction of the Separation Wall. With the aid of GIS data, the study found that urban and built-up areas increased by 54% during the period 1999–2009. About 80% of the new urbanization occurred on agricultural land. Further, the study presented views of the urban planners, decision makers and farmers in Tulkarm regarding the main factors affecting agricultural land-use change in the city using qualitative interviews. The study found that the political factors, especially the existence of the Wall and the division of land into areas A, B and C, have had a major impact on the city’s uncontrolled development and the diffusion of urban areas on the landscape around the city. At the same time, unprofessional planning, lack of experience, and lack of communication and coordination between different planning organizations are considered major factors leading to uncontrolled and unorganized expansion of the city. Other factors such as farmers’ socio-economic status, land fragmentation, and population growth play essential roles in selling-off agricultural land for urban uses. Studying the dynamics of agricultural land-use change and the factors that led to this change in the West Bank in general, and in Tulkarm in particular, might help shape more robust theoretical understandings of how factors of land change interact under different circumstances, including protracted conflicts.

Framing Visual Politics: Photography of the Wall in Palestine

Photography of the Wall in Palestine is a site of visual and political struggle. Through conversations with Palestinian and Israeli photographers, I shed light on the visual and national anxiety that photography of the Palestinian landscape produces in the shadow of the Wall's construction. Building on Gil Hochberg's conceptualization of visual politics, through which the Israeli state dominates the visual field, I argue that the significance of Israeli photographers’ work lies in visualizing what is made invisible by the state. For Palestinians, the significance of their photography of the landscape lies in resisting the visual politics dictated by the Israeli regime. I conclude by offering questions about the role of photography in subverting visual politics in Palestine and Israel.

Up/Rooting: Breaching Landscape Architecture in the Jewish-Arab City

This article portrays and theorizes a new utterance of landscape architecture within Israeli Jewish-Arab urbanity, which aims to represent the prolonged and multifaceted Palestinian urban loss since 1948 in the design of a major city park. The analysis of design discourses at Jaffa Slope Park examines differing Israeli and Palestinian landscape sign systems. Dominant and breaching landscape architecture utterances in the constructed landscape of the park will be interpreted and theorized in the context of the discursive landscape sign systems, together with the local post-1948 history of urban institutional ruination and planning. The park's design involves both the intensive use and destabilization of a traditional Zionist/Israeli landscape mold that aims at greening’Ereẓ Yisra'eland at concealing ruined pre-1948 Palestinian locales under green shields. Through a close reading of the park's landscape, the paper explores ethical, political, and allegorical utterances of landscape architecture, immersed in both Israeli and Palestinian landscape semiotics, yet undermining these sign systems at the same time.

Confronting injustice beyond borders: Palestinian identity and nonviolent resistance

ABSTRACT“Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” is a question often asked in relation to the nature of Palestinian resistance. The question reflects a lack of accurate knowledge about Palestinian society and history, as well as a misrepresentation of the forms in which Palestinian resistance has taken place over the past few decades. Throughout their struggle for independence, Palestinians have predominantly adopted nonviolent forms of resistance. Focusing on the determinants of Palestinian support for nonviolent resistance against Israeli occupation two decades after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, this paper lays out the historical context of nonviolence in the Palestinian political landscape. Through the use of survey data this study provides an alternative theoretical conceptualization of Palestinian popular resistance, and community resilience. The findings of this empirical study highlight the impact of self-reported identities on support for nonviolent tactics in resisting Israeli occupation.

Urban &amp; Spatial Development in Glocal Palestine: The Case of Rawabi

The different settlement strategies of the late century and the violence of the ongoing conflicts are reflected on urban and rural landscapes, leading to situations where any previous identity of place seems to have been lost. This covers only the surface of territorial conformations: underneath the current urban sprawl lye ancient structures of the deeprooted history of Palestine, lines of force for the present landscape. Even today the urban pattern mostly follows the ancient corridors of connection, today fragmented by several cuts. While, in about one century, no new towns were founded, during the last decades, with the significant population growth, more than five hundred small villages have spread spontaneously, but often without any primary services, while hundreds of new Israeli settlements, favouring the emergence of new global practices, further worsened the conditions of urban services and infrastructure networks. Since 1967 the absence of any Palestinian local plan highlighted the unbalanced planning with the Israeli side, a globalized context with a long urbanization process. Some existing crowded cities underwent uncontrolled expansion and urban sprawl, compromising the cultural heritage sites and the agricultural sector, strategic not only economically, but even for the identity and the cultural roots of the country. Over the last years, under the PNA government, housing and infrastructure projects witnessed major developments, focusing both on existing cities for increasing the functional vocation of each one and the density within built-up areas as well as on new towns. Rawabi, the first city planned under the Palestinian Authority, is an example where to investigate the hybrid character of “glocal” in today’s Palestine, where the traditional relations of the village of origin, the strongest element of identity, merge together with a new sense of urban identity.By considering some cases of spatial and urban transformations, this paper would try to investigate the cultural impact of social and economic globalization on the Palestinian landscape, as well as the relation between local culture and a modern character that, framed in global urban dimensions and related to the Israeli occupation, is sometimes unable to meet the real local needs.

Out of Time: Erasing Modernity in an Antique City

Considerations of the socio-politics of archaeology mark the contributions of H. Martin Wobst across studies of many different epochs. Socio-politics open avenues for archaeology to contribute to social justice, especially in places whose histories are fiercely contested, such as in the Middle East. In 1909, a clock tower was built on top of the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem’s walled city; as a material intervention, it was noticeable and noticed. Early in the British Mandate, the clock tower was removed. While there have been many critiques of Israeli erasures of the Palestinian landscape, the antiquing of Jerusalem deserves critical attention. Invoking the dismantling of the clock tower reveals an important aspect of the transformation of the city.

“This is our land”: collective violence, property law, and imagining the geography of Palestine

This study seeks to explain the origins of two types of violence occurring on the Palestinian landscape, the erasure of Palestinian farms and the demolition of Palestinian homes. Such violence has two sources. One source derives from an enduring practice of meaning-making about geographical places that has inspired groups with territorial ambitions to seize control of the landscapes they covet and is referred to by Edward Said as the crafting of “imaginative geographies.” The second source focuses on changes in property rights that follow when groups with territorial ambitions succeed in seizing control of coveted land. It is the imagined geography of Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people, first framed by Zionists of the late 19th century and absorbed into the practices of Israeli state-building, and the changes in property rights inscribed into the Palestinian landscape following Zionist and Israeli military conquests in 1948 and 1967, that lie at the core of violence directed against the Palestinian farm and home today. This process of imagination, legal transformation, and violence is part of a longstanding lineage of dispossession that includes the English enclosures and the taking of land from Amerindians on the Anglo-American colonial frontier.

Palestinian landscape and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Palestine, as it stands today, consists of two physically separated land masses, namely the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip with a total area of 5661 km2 and 362 km2, respectively. Although small in size, its unique location at the crossroads of three continents has made Palestine an environmental melting pot for the flora and fauna of Africa, Asia and Europe. This natural diversity has become an innocent bystander to the destructive practices of the Israeli occupation. This paper examines the Israeli practices that violate the environmental rights of the Palestinians. Sustainable peace is only possible through just and equitable resource use between Israelis and Palestinians.