Palestinian Village Research Articles

Absenting as a Repertoire of Action

This article draws on fieldwork in the West Bank (2007–2017) to understand how dispossession and ruination are not only spatialized, but engaged and remade. It examines experiences of a settler frontier in Faqu'a, a Palestinian village. People there have a visual vantage point onto the majority of the village lands, which have been expropriated by Israel. Following a demolition by Israel, Faqu'ans have transformed this frontier site from a place for home-building, first into a garbage dump and then, most recently, into a garden. Faqu'ans’ shifting engagements with this site reveal that edgeness, which seems to characterize this location, is not a naturally occurring status. Edges are made. Faqu'ans periodically adjust their proximity to Faqu'a's eastern edge. By examining different people's engagements with one site over a long duration, what the article calls “absenting” comes into view as a primary means by which people adjust proximity to an edge. Proximity can be temporal, spatial, and affective. Absenting is a particularly useful technique under conditions of extreme duress, such as those arising out of life on a frontier that seeks one's disappearance.

Murmurs of Presence in Objects of Absence

This article takes two artifacts belonging to two people the author met in the course of many decades of research in and on Palestine—a British Mandate-era identity card and a set of framed photographs of a Palestinian village destroyed in the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948—as central objects of consideration in reflecting on how objects of absence incorporate historical and personal loss as well as continuing presence. The use of the term “objects of absence” to describe these materials points to how they are more than repositories of memory. They record, preserve, and animate forms of life that appear lost. Rather than being noisy eruptions into public life, their volume is more of a murmur. Their collective impact is in their repeated presence rather than their spectacular pronouncements. Palestinians preserve these objects for themselves, for their children and following generations, for their community, and for their nation. The work of these objects is thus personal and political, individual and collective. They help people locate themselves in the world, maintaining some continuity despite the devastation of the Nakba.

The architecture of dispossession: On the dark side of architecture and art in transforming original spaces and displacing people

This paper interrogates and problematizes the intimate role of architecture in the dispossession and displacement of people. It explores the case of Ayn Hawd, a dispossessed Palestinian village that was transformed into an Israeli Artists colony in 1951. It found that architecture is deeply involved in executing, facilitating, legitimizing, and aestheticizing the violent act of dispossessing people. I theorize this as architecture of dispossession, a coherent aesthetic, economic, and political regime of practices, in which a social reality is manipulated and transformed spatially to construct a new, spectacular and imaginary, reality in the dispossessed space. The architecture of dispossession involves three distinct yet interrelated logics: political, economic, and aesthetic. The logic of accumulation by dispossession involves the seizure of the dispossessed’s property as assets used for the purpose of profit. It can take place in various ways, including privatization, the commodification of cultural forms, and dispossession. The logic of the exclusion of presence focuses on both the actual exclusion of a group of persons and the subjective or “existential” effects, intended or not, on the dispossessed, experienced as a loss not just of property and belonging but of their identity, form of life, or “being” as such; a kind of existential or ontological negation. Finally, an aesthetic logic of dispossession is a use of art and architecture to describe the dispossession in ways that legitimize it by representing or dissimulating it so that it can be advertised and appreciated as something more and other than the violence it involves. There is an important role for architectural criticism in showing not only that some population has been excluded, but how this is rationalized and legitimated in the ways the new forms and uses are constructed, described, represented, or advertised.

Al-Lajjun: a Social and geographic account of a Palestinian Village during the British Mandate Period

ABSTRACT This paper provides a social and geographic account of al-Lajjun (Jenin Sub-district), a prominent Palestinian village during the British Mandate period (1918–1948). It portrays a countryside in renewal, encapsulated in the story of Umm al-Fahm’s expansion and Lajjun’s resettlement. In contrast to existing scholarship, the present work contextualizes the site within the wider diachronic, longue durée, history of the region, and the synchronous, shifting pattern of settlements in Marj ibn ‘Amir (Jezreel Valley), Bilad al-Ruha (Ramot Menashe), and Wadi ‘Ara (Nahal ‘Iron). It focuses on the development of the physical outlines of the (re)new(ed) village, with the development of three “Lajjuns” reflecting its founders’ Hebronite/Khalīlī patterns of settlement. Furthermore, it explores Lajjun’s diversified economy and its metamorphosis from a derelict hamlet into a hub of utilities and transportation infrastructure of regional importance under the British Mandate of Palestine (1920–1948).

Legacies of Survival: Historical Violence and Ethnic Minority Behavior

How is the electoral behavior of minorities shaped by past violence? Recent studies found that displacement increases hostility between perpetrators and displaced individuals, but there has been paltry research on members of surviving communities. We argue that the latter exhibit the opposite pattern because of their different condition. Violence will cause cross-generational vulnerability, fear and risk-aversion—leading the surviving communities to seek protection and avoid conflict by signalling loyalty and rejecting nationalist movements. In their situation as an excluded minority in the perpetrators’ state, they will be more likely to vote for out-group parties. Exploiting exogenous battlefield dynamics that created inter-regional variation in the Palestinian exodus (1947–1949), microlevel measurements that capture the damage of violence, and an original longitudinal data set, we show that Palestinian villages in Israel more severely impacted by the 1948 war have a much higher vote share to Jewish parties even 70 years later. Survey evidence further supports our theory, revealing that this pattern exists only for members of the surviving communities, and not among displaced individuals. The findings shed new light on the complex social relations that guide political decision-making in post-war settings and divided societies that suffer from protracted conflicts.

Toward an Indigenous development sociology methodology: social reality and change in the Palestinian context

This article discusses findings from a dissertation research project in the Palestinian village of Ni’lin in relation to the synthesis of an actor-oriented methodological approach with Indigenous theory. Through this synthesis, the article proposes a theoretical and methodological approach for studying settler colonialism and social transformations in Palestinian contexts. It also adapts the methodology, allowing enriching development theory to account for settler colonial settings and the case of Palestine. It shows the value of critical events, as sites to study historicity, violence, and resistance, highlighting the important interaction of individual and collective actors with culture and larger frames of meaning in relation to Indigenous resurgence.

Forced Migration: The 1948 Palestinian Refugees

During the 1948 Palestine war, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, accounting for roughly half of prewar Palestine’s Arab population. The exodus was a central component of the Palestinian society’s cracks, disempowerment and displacement, known as the Nakba, during which between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were damaged and others were exposed to the Hebraization of Palestinian place names, and it also relates to the wider period of the conflict itself and the subsequent oppression up to the present day. The main aim of this research is to define the causes of the 1948 Palestinian exodus, which led to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. It also seeks to show the ways that the Nakba has influenced Palestinian history. This study explores the work of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, a UN (United Nations) agency that supports Palestinian refugees’ relief and human development.

A lineage in land: the transmission of Palestinian Christianity

AbstractThis article examines a Christian tradition defined by descent, but a descent that extends beyond family lineages to include relatedness with saints and sacred land. This tradition emerges from the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, one of the oldest churches in the world, composed of a Palestinian laity and a Greek monastic hierarchy. Through an ethnography of the Orthodox feast of St George and the ritual use of olive oil from Palestinian villages, the article frames discussion of indigeneity, land, and rootedness around the concept of descent. Putting Palestinian Orthodoxy in conversation with kinship theory and the critique of social structure, it argues against sequestering divine and human forms of relatedness in separate social domains. It suggests the concept of descent can be a powerful tool for integrating them when expanded to include all ‘forces that bring forth life’.

The democratizing qualities of the Palestinian village Bil’in’s civil resistance campaign

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the quality of civil resistance and, in particular, the democratizing qualities of various civil resistance practices. There is a great amount of research on civil resistance and its capacities to foster social change, and in particular its impact on increased democracy. However, we still have an empirical bias in this research since these studies mainly focus on mass-mobilized breaking resistance. This paper provides an analysis of various civil resistance practices’ democratizing qualities based on a case study – namely the Palestinian village Bil’in’s campaign against the Israeli plans to build a ‘security barrier’‚ through the village’s farmlands. The process of the campaign began in 2002 and lasted until the Supreme Court of Israel’s decision from 2007 to re-route the building of the ‘security barrier’ away from the farmland from was implemented in 2011. Based on a ‘process tracing’ (PT) methodology, an analysis of, primarily, interviews that were made with Bil’in activists and proxy activists (mainly Israelis) is presented, where the tracing underlying mechanisms could explain why the campaign had an impact on democracy. Theoretically, the paper applies the concept of ‘democratizing qualities’ (Munck 2016), as well as the analytical toolbox that is labelled the ABC of civil resistance. The paper will conclude with a presentation of potential causal mechanisms that may explain why the civil resistance campaign impacted on democracy. The guiding overarching research question is: In what ways can different practices of civil resistance have democratizing qualities?

Mahmud Darwish’s Prose and Poetry as Means of Peaceful Resistance for the Palestinians: The Importance of Re-Writing the History of Palestine

Mahmud Darwish was undoubtedly one of the major Palestinian poets of the peaceful resistance against Israeli aggression, expulsions of Palestinians from their own lands, their houses and their other properties. Darwish also wrote prose, like for example Fi Hadrat al-Ghiyab (In the Presence of Absence) work in which he emphasized the need to re-write the history of Palestine, since Israel has constantly destroyed Palestinian villages, and has expelled the Palestinians from their own towns. Israel has systematically substituted these villages and their names by Hebrew ones. This way Israel conveys the notion that they are Hebrew villages. On the other hand, it is possible to notice that Israel denies the pre-existence of the Palestinian settlements, towns and villages in those places. For Darwish, therefore, there is a clear need to re-write the history of Palestine, in order to show that where there are nowadays many Jewish towns, there were Palestinian villages in the past. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Method Development for Detecting Low Level Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) among Workers and Residents from a Carpentry Work Shop in a Palestinian Village.

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are considered a major public health concern in industrial location areas. The presence of exposure to (VOCs) has raised concern regarding the health effects caused by chronic human exposure as this will increase cancer diseases in the village. An analytical method has been developed and modified to help us detect 38 VOCs in the blood of 38 volunteers who are related to a carpentry shop at the parts-per-trillion level. To measure and evaluate the potential risk, several devices, such as portable passive monitors and air-collected samples, in addition to blood concentration, were used to study three different occupational groups. Ten of the volunteers are employees at the shop, 10 volunteers live very close to the shop, and 10 of them are students in an elementary school very close to the shop. In this study, we developed an automated analytical method using headspace (HS) together with solid-phase microextraction (SPME) connected to capillary gas chromatography (GC) equipped with quadrupole mass spectrometry (MS). The detection limits for the method used were measured in the range from 0.001 to 0.15 ng/L, using linear calibration curves that have three orders of magnitude. The detected concentrations ranged from 3 ng L-1 for trichloroethene to 91 ng L-1 for toluene and 270 ng L-1 for 2,4-diisocyanate, which was derived from the paint solvents used for the wood in the carpentry shop and the paints on the walls. More than half of all assessed species (80%) had mean concentration values less than 50 ng L-1, which is the maximum allowed for most VOCs. The major chemical types among the compounds quantified will be those we found in our previous study in the surrounding air of a carpentry workshop in Deir Ballout in Palestine, which were toluene diisocyanate and butyl cyanate. Some were found to be highly present air. Most of the measurements were below the guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO). Despite the fact that this study only involved a small number of smokers, smoking was found to be connected with several blood and breath components. This group includes unsaturated hydrocarbons (1,3-butadiene, 1,3-pentadiene, 2-butene), furans (2,5-dimethylfuran), and acetonitrile. The proposed classification of measured species into systemic (blood-borne) and exogenous volatiles is strictly hypothetical, as some species may have several origins.

“A thorn in their throat” planning for settler colonial removal in hizma

Hizma is a Palestinian village historically located within the Jerusalem Governate that Israel has arbitrarily severed from it in its quest to expand and entrench a Greater Jerusalem. To eliminate the village and its natives, the settler state has incrementally deployed a series of urban planning policies that together constitute an eliminatory infrastructure. These have included overlapping and tenuous jurisdictional areas; movement restrictions imposed through closures, checkpoints, and surveillance regimes; transformation of common lands into a state-run nature preserve; and the construction of the Apartheid Wall through the village. These measures have concentrated Hizma's residents into an urban area and severely isolated them from their agricultural lands, places of worship, education, families, and health facilities. Based on field work conducted between 3 August and 18 August 2019, this essay sets out to explore two phenomena. First, it seeks to understand how Palestinians navigate and resist Israel's eliminatory infrastructure. Second, it explores what this infrastructure revealed about the relationship between the violence of settler colonialism and the banal administration of urban planning. Using autoethnography, this essay documents the journey of Palestinians in Hizma across three eliminatory terrains erected by planning policies: through the Apartheid Wall, within the suffocating physical and juridical bounds of entrapment, and into the community's expropriated spring.

Summaries

Summaries

Social Cohesion and Community Displacement in Armed Conflict

Abstract What are the origins of conflict-related population displacement? Why do some communities in conflict zones suffer mass casualties while others evade conflict violence? Whether civilians migrate before or after belligerent operations in their vicinity influences the scale of casualties and population displacement in war. “Preemptive evacuation” is a specific manifestation of forced displacement, in which whole communities leave their homes before belligerents attempt to seize control in their local area. In conflicts involving strategic civilian-targeted violence, social cohesion, by promoting collective action, enhances communities’ capabilities to mobilize collective migration, thereby increasing the likelihood of preemptive evacuation. An investigation of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War probes the plausibility of the theory. Detailed information about Arab Palestinian villages in the previously restricted Village Files is used to construct a village-level dataset, which measures social cohesion and other social, political, and economic characteristics. These documents and data provide crucial sources of evidence to researchers investigating Palestinian society and development, the origins of Israel's statehood, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Findings suggest that areas where communities lack social cohesion may suffer higher casualties from targeted violence, signaling a need for urgent diplomatic and humanitarian prevention or mitigation efforts.

Three Ruins in Infiltration by Yehoshua Kenaz

Abstract: This article will discuss the visual, social, and political meanings arising from the description of three ruins in the novel Infiltration (1986) by Israeli author Yehoshua Kenaz. The novel tells the story of a group of recruits with mild disabilities at a basic training camp in Israel in the 1950s. The three ruins are situated in the locales where the soldiers live or train. The first is in Ramla, where Avner makes love to his married paramour; the second is a remnant of the village of Sarafand, where the recruits train for night combat and Alon, the kibbutznik, shoots for no reason; and the third is in the Sand Dunes near Ashkelon. Previous scholarship has overlooked the similarity between shooting into an Arab ruin and shooting at a “ghost”—the traces of a Palestinian village left after the residents’ expulsion/flight during the 1948 War of Independence. The ruin is a traumatic, liminal space that awakens in the narrator’s mind childhood memories mingled with nightmares. The soldiers confront the third ruin at the Barne ʿ a Sand Dunes during a series of military exercises practicing infiltration tactics. The scene is revealed as a mise-enabyme , a part of the novel that replicates the general plot in miniature. This article will examine the differences between the three ruins, showing why it is only at the third ruin that the recruits realize they are witness to the catastrophic erasure of a human settlement. The first two ruins create a romantic-melancholy impression, while the third is surrealist. The article will elucidate the link between these artistic movements and the novel’s political-social dimensions.

Cooperation and conflict across ideological and strategic divides: Sumud Freedom Camp coalition in the occupied West Bank

AbstractThe literature on social movement coalitions highlights the tremendous challenges posed to coalitions by ideology. Yet, coalitions do occasionally form across contrasting ideological lines. This study investigates how the Palestinian‐led Sumud Freedom Camp coalition in the occupied West Bank was able to reach agreement across ideological divides, thereby enabling an ambitious collective action that actively sought to reestablish a Palestinian village depopulated by Israeli colonial policies and settler violence. Based on interviews with coalition activists, this study principally highlights, though, the tremendous challenges the coalition faced sustaining agreement among all the partners and the circumstances that led the coalition to splinter. Ultimately, it argues that differences in strategy need to be addressed, particularly in environments where the differences are salient. Otherwise, interactions with media and prospective members, along with the authorities, are likely to expose the differences and trigger conflict, particularly as it relates to representation and expression of the coalition's collective identity (i.e., who “we” are collectively).

How do international borders affect conflict processes? Evidence from the end of Mandate Palestine

Rebels can comply with international law during a conflict by not violating international borders, yet strategic goals may incentivize rebels to violate these borders. When do international borders affect the spatial and temporal distribution of rebel activity in a conflict setting? I theorize rebels have an incentive to refrain from violating borders when doing so will reduce their international legitimacy. When international legitimacy is a less important goal, rebels will be more likely to violate borders. I test this claim in the context of the 1948 War in Mandate Palestine by exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in how the 1947 UN partition line was drawn. Using an original dataset on over 1,000 Palestinian villages from British colonial documents and an atlas of aerial photographs of Palestine, I use a geographic regression discontinuity design to see how the UN partition line affected the location and timing of depopulated villages during the war. The results show that villages in areas that the UN assigned to the future Israeli state as part of the 1947 partition plan were more likely to be conquered before Israel received recognition. These findings have important implications for understanding where and when rebels target areas and shed new light on important dynamics of the 1948 War in Palestine.

Correction to: Ghosts in the archive: The palestinian villages and the Decolonial archives

Correction to: Ghosts in the archive: The palestinian villages and the Decolonial archives

Flora and Phytosociological of Plant in Al-Dawaimah of Palestine

Al-Dawaimah is an ancient Canaanite Palestinian village, occupied in 1948 by Israel, and belongs to inframediterranean to thermomediterranean thermotype and arid, semi-arid, and dry ombrotype. The study presents, a region rich in many plant vascular, and it is part of the Palestinian coast, North Africa, the Negev and the Sinai desert, in addition to the mountainous hills of Palestine located west of the Hebron, Jordan River and the Dead Sea. The objective is to identify and update the flora and vegetation in the area of Al-Dawaimah and its neighboring areas in west Hebron of Palestine. Methodology: More than 270 plant specimens have been taken from Al-Dawaimah and surroundings areas, using Braun-Blanquet, Van der Maarel and Salvador River Martinez methods to study the flora, and phytosociological plants, and 214 x 10 plants plots distributed in area were studied. Result and discussion: Three different plant communities were identified, in different environments between arid, dry- subhumid ombrotype and infra-thermomediterranean thermotype, and different soils as (carbon substrates as brown ruinsenas and terra rossa lands, limestone and others), where more than 214 species of plants have been found, of which 45 (20.02%) are endemic species, and in Raunkiaer's life system, trees represent were, (86; 40.18% trees), (34; 15.88% shrubs), (51; 23.83% chamaephytes), (10; 4.67% geophytes), (16; 7.47% phanerophytes), and (12; 6.54% hemicryptophytes). Conclusion: In Al-Dawaimah area, syntaxonomical performance of these associations are: Quercetalia ilicis Br.-Bl. ex Molinier 1934. Rhamno lycioidis-Quercion cocciferae Rivas Goday ex Rivas-Martinez 1975. 1. Rhamnus palaestinae- Quercetum calliprini ass. nova., Pistacio lentisci -Rhamnetalia alaterni Rivas-Martínez 1975. 2. Ceratonio siliquae -Pistacetum lentisci ass. nova., Junipero phoeniceae- Pinon acutisquamae A.V. Pérez et Cabezudo in A.V. Pérez et al. 1988 corr. Rivas-Martinez. et al. 2002. Pinetalia halepensis Biondi et al. 2014. 3. Junipero phoeniceae- Pinetum halepensis ass. nova.

Sedentary and Bedouin Dialects in Contact: Remarks on the Dialect of Christians and Muslims in Kufur-Kanna

Abstract Kufur-Kanna is a Palestinian village that has always been in contact with Bedouins. Some of its inhabitants are also Bedouin. One can describe the dialect spoken by both Christians and Muslims in the village as a rural dialect of mixed type. It shows some Bedouin features, e.g. *q > g. The Bedouin features of Kufur-Kanna belong to the Syro-Mesopotamian group of dialects. One can describe several traits shared with Bedouin dialects diachronically as sedentary traits, e.g. the preservation of interdental consonants and gender distinction in the plural of verbs and pronouns. The dialect of Kufur-Kanna has the b-imperfect as other sedentary neighbouring dialects, while it differs from them in some features, e.g. the negation. It is characterized by the compound negation in addition to its absence in other forms that can be considered as a Bedouin feature.