Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012

 

Video and Edited Transcript 
Thomas Abowd
Transcript No. 427 (17 March 2015)

 

 



Zeina Azzam:
  
We are really delighted to have Thomas Abowd with us to talk about the subject of his book, Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012. It was published in 2014 by Syracuse University Press. I’d like to tell you a little bit about the book and then I will introduce our speaker. 

 
In one of the few anthropological works focusing on a contemporary Middle Eastern city, this book explores a vibrant urban center, which is Jerusalem, at the core of the decades-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This book shows how colonialism, far from being simply a fixture of the past as is often suggested, remains a crucial component of Palestinian and Israeli realities today. Thomas Abowd illuminates everyday life under Israel’s long military occupation as it is defined by processes and conditions separating where Palestinians are regulated and controlled. Abowd examines how both national communities are progressively divided by walls, checkpoints and separate road networks in one of the most segregated cities in the world. Drawing on theories on racial politics, colonialism, and urban spatial dynamics, his book analyzes the politics of myth, history, and memory across an urban landscape integral to the national cosmologies of both Palestinians and Israelis and meaningful to all communities. 
 
So it’s my pleasure to introduce Dr. Abowd. He is an urban anthropologist and historian who received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University. He teaches in the Department of Anthropology and in the Arabic program at Tufts University. He’s been involved for two decades in scholarly projects related to Palestine, Israel, and the Middle East, and is the recipient of awards from Fulbright Hays, the Fulbright Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad, the Palestinian American Research Center, and the Social Science Research Council. Please help me to welcome Dr. Abowd. 
 
Thomas Abowd:
Thank you Zeina and to all the staff at The Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center. Samirah, Tamara, Mohammed, and of course your new chief of staff, Zeina. Thank you all for coming today, it’s good to see you. I’m going to tell you a little bit about my book and some of the aims of it and what I sought to do in it. At some point after I set it up sufficiently, in terms of history, and perhaps, a little theory, I’m going to give you some anecdotal, sort of emblematic stories from the research, that I think underscores what I’m trying to say about Israeli governance, or Israeli power and forms of Palestinian resistance. Thank you once again for coming everyone. 
 
This is an ethnographic and historical account of, as Zeina just said, arguably, one of the most segregated cities in the world. I also studied Detroit, Michigan, which is the largest segregated city in the United States. And I have to tell you, Jerusalem is more segregated, I believe, between Israelis and Palestinians – precisely because of a set of legal prescriptions and laws that have been inherent in the Zionist project for about a hundred years that have manifested themselves quite dramatically since 1948. Doing the research for this book was fun but also challenging. It was a wonderful experience largely because I got to meet wonderful people there, Palestinians and Israelis, but also I got to continue friendships that I had started in the United States and with some people in the audience who, in fact, were very influential in my trajectory, as a scholar and as an activist. Doing the research was about talking, it was about connecting with people. This work, which again is ethnographical and historical, is based on about one hundred formal interviews, semi-structured interviews, but I also (and I say this in the introduction of the book) came to understand them as an anthropologist: as valuable as semi-structured formal interviews (sit-down interviews in which I prepared questions) were, the hundreds of informal conversations and sort of impromptu encounters that I had along Jerusalem’s very segregated, policed and surveilled streets, in shared cabs, with those of you who have driven throughout the Palestinian territories, know about. They’ve evolved themselves in shape and form. The fact that the Palestinians and Israelis were generally very eager to talk about politics, much more intellectually and politically curious than Americans I think in my humble judgement, made this whole project very much easier. 
 
A friend of mine, the late Graham Usher, who reported for The Economist for many years and once an incredible journalist, spent about a decade in the Jerusalem area, the West Bank, occupied Palestine, once said, “this is a journalist’s dream, this place; everyone wants to talk to you and everyone wants to talk about politics.” I benefited from that enormously. But this research also involved and required spending several years in Jerusalem and Palestine-Israel simply doing the careful work of observation and observing the ways in which the city has been radically altered by the Israeli state; and how the Israeli state has shaped the city in particular ways consistent with the vision of what East and West Jerusalem have been in the Zionist planning. What it’s become is what the Zionist planning circles have largely sought to make it. As one Palestinian has once told me, “no we don’t know if we’ll ever have a state here, but it’s important to know that just about everything the Israeli government has sought to do they’ve accomplished.” They radically transformed the demographics. They built eight or nine mega-settlements just in East Jerusalem that house about 200,000 Jewish settlers. They’ve projected those settlements as nice little neighborhoods, a friendly little place. A settlement is something different and yet, ideologically, I don’t say they’ve won the battle or sort of convinced the global communities that they are legitimately occupying East Jerusalem. But they’ve gone some way toward making it seem at least as a contested zone rather than an occupied center. By looking at the broader structural dimensions of Israeli governance and also trying to do what anthropologists do, which is look at everyday life, and the kind of quotidian details of the street and what non-elites are doing, the so-called “ordinary people” are doing – who are rarely so ordinary, requires a lot of observation and requires shutting up and listening to people as they are talking about their experiences – means challenging your own assumptions. In the book I tried to do that, and others will have to be the judge of how well I did. But I will tell you one thing, a book entitled Colonial Jerusalem has a special task before it by necessity: by looking at colonial power and trying to examine Israeli governance or Israeli authority as colonial authority, one is thinking against the grain, largely because even among communities that are critical of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, they are very reluctant to refer to Israeli governance as colonial governance. That seems to many, a sort of thing we are already beyond. Colonialism is a thing in the past and we are now in a post-colonial world, supposedly.
 
Doing that was not just my effort to sort of level a sterner rebuke at the Israeli state. It was the most precise way to look at the kind of forms of power, the kinds of land theft, and the forms of settlement building that are involved in Israeli rule. And this also meant going back to the British colonial period, looking at some of the similarities and continuities (there are important ones), and also looking at the fractured disruptions between British colonial authority and Israeli power. This book was intended to be written as a scholarly intervention and a book that is also meant to be read by non-specialists. The reason I did that, among other things, is because a lot of academic books can be quite boring. I wanted it to be a text that would shake folks up a bit and might get people to think about the role of the Israeli state and U.S. imperial power in different ways.
 
We need to talk about international law but also go down into the street level and consider what forms of violations of international law and the occupation are present (which the entire global community regards as illegal – the settlements, the wall, the ICJ’s judgment; we just came upon the tenth anniversary of that) to understand and identify colonial power when we see these things happening. This is a corrective to a couple of things, not least of which is what I see too often, the prevalent representation of Jerusalem. I just heard a very pathetic report by NPR about the tram line that goes from the settlements to West Jerusalem. There was no mention that the Palestinians attacked this tram line, that it not only crosses from East Jerusalem to West Jerusalem, but it crosses from occupied territory to West Jerusalem. That was sort of mentioned at the end, but the guy, the Israeli settler being interviewed, is never identified as a settler. That is sort of on the better end, because NPR is not like some of these other Fox News style representations or representations you hear from congressional people. But what you also hear is something which is almost as damaging: a radically depoliticized understanding of the city. It’s an understanding and representation of the communities who are in conflict there, as being involved in Biblical, timeless, and eternal struggles – these people have been fighting forever. And the city is represented in this way that the Israeli state often propagates as an eternal, immutable capital that belongs, most importantly- if not solely – to the Jewish people. 
 
These radically, depoliticized representations are what Edward Said described once as “representations that sort of exist of history.” As archaeologists and anthropologists – we know very little about King David, and yet the Israeli nation state has built up a whole national mythology around the City of David. Israel, I argue, in this book is not just a flawed, liberal democracy and it doesn’t represent just any old colonial regime: it represents a form of colonialism that those in colonialists studies want to distinguish as “settler colonialism.” And settler colonialism, I argue, has been created here. But as history goes back before 1967, to understand the Zionist projects, one has to understand the concepts of settlement and the demographic and racial vision that a broad swath of the Zionist movement’s participants were invested in. I’m going to talk a little bit later about Martin Buber, the great Jewish humanist philosopher, who moved from Germany and found refuge in Palestine in the late ‘30s – lived in Edward Said’s house before ‘48 – and then stayed on until his death in Jerusalem in 1965, in a strange sort of arrangement in an appropriated Palestinian home – I’ll tell you a little bit about [that]. But Buber was always a fighter for bi-nationalism and he was opposed to a Jewish state, like Chomsky and Einstein and others who might have vaguely referred to themselves as Zionists – they were against a Jewish state. But Buber reconciled himself with that Zionist vision, but even before that, was mentioning in the ‘30s, in defense of the Zionist projects in Palestine, that referring to the project as sort of a sacred mission that is ordained by the God of the Bible. And he even writes that this project of Zionists must be what he called “concentrative colonialism.” What he meant by it was different from what Jabotinsky or Ben-Gurion meant by it, but he was using that terminology and that terminology was in the air. Early Zionist settlers were largely settlers who called themselves settlers. 
 
What’s crucial to this particular colonial state and colonial project is a very distinguished colonial racism and forms of legal discrimination and discriminatory housing policies that are pretty apparent, I would argue, and are pretty explicit or implicit in Israeli laws and policies in public discourse from everyone from Netanyahu to the Meretz Party talking about the anxieties of too many Palestinians, essentially – demographic dangers, demographic time bombs. This is not just the discourse of the Israeli foreign minister who is full of nice, lovely statements as of late. But really, if you talk to people in the Meretz party, which is the far left Israeli Zionist party, you hear the same sort of concerns. The most progressive say, “Yes Palestinians deserve equality, but separate from us, we have to have a kind of separation. They can be in Jerusalem but we ought to live apart.”
 
So, this machinery of apartheid-like racism became more apparent when I lived under this form of governance and spoke to Palestinians and many progressive Israelis, who were Israeli Jews but were very much in opposition to what their government – Labor, Likud, it didn’t matter – were up to in terms of colonizing the former Palestine. Settler colonialism, then is in the language of the literature, distinguishes itself because it has what Patrick Wolfe calls “a logic of elimination”, that is not necessarily like the British in India or Kenya – at all actually- it’s more like the French rule in Algeria, where the idea was to settle people and to replace one people who were living there with another group of settlers. It’s not based on the conquest of land and the exploitation of labor, it’s more that this type of regime just wants the indigenous population out. They are not even necessarily interested in exploiting the labor. Hebrew Labor, “Avoda Ivrit” (I believe in Hebrew) is the idea of Jewish or Hebrew labor being the basis of this project. 
 
If you run through the maps a bit – this Jerusalem between ‘46 and ‘67 after the 1948 war, which Israel conquered West Jerusalem, about 95-98% of the Palestinian Muslims and Christians of the west side were expelled, maybe more. The east side came under Jordanian rule for that time period and the first of the separation walls divides between the city were erected. In the ‘67 war when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai, Golan Heights, East Jerusalem – among one of the first things the Israeli state did (this speaks to the kind of bureaucratic dimensions that are linked to racial designs and racial policies) was to redraw the boundaries of Jerusalem and expand them ten-fold from roughly seven square kilometers, (which is the Jordanian defined city) to seventy square kilometers. In June of 1967 this is what the new boundaries were meant to be – they were drawn in a way that spoke to, honored the Israeli principle of “the maximum amount of land, minimum amount of Palestinian people.” Former planners that have been involved in this have been very explicit that this was and is, in fact, today (as we’ll get to, of course, the Wall) the principle: taking as much Palestinian land as you can but leave the Palestinian people on the other side – strictly racial, and I would say racist, vision. But that is the operating logic of this regime. Again, not just ‘67: one can see this inside the ‘49 armistice lines as well. 
 
To this day, Israeli land laws stipulate through a sophisticated, circuitous, legal set of tactics that about nine-tenths of the land of Israel that’s within the ‘49 armistice lines, roughly its international boundaries, is administered by the laws of the Jewish National Fund. The Jewish National Fund bylaws are exclusionary (the JNF does not “own” this land but they own some of it and they manage most of the state land, as I understand it): this land is to be used for the exclusive use and benefit of Jews only; non-Jews may neither own this land nor lease it long-term. This makes the vast majority of Israeli land off-limits to Palestinian Christians and Muslims and other non-Jews; though not the so-called “Russian Jews” a third of which (Ian Lustick points out at a conference here a few weeks ago) about 300,000 of the so called “Russian Jews” are not Jewish and don’t pretend to be. For the sake of demographic politics they’ve been counted by the Israeli state as Jewish. Palestinian Russian Orthodox complain that the Russian Orthodox Churches are full on Sundays with Russian Jews. At any rate, that’s a side issue. What I’ve really wanted to get at, Talal Asad (a brilliant anthropologist and someone I was deeply influenced by) was understanding colonialism then not necessarily in the way it functions in the popular imagination: not as sort of sheer power and coercion and force and torture and bulldozers and walls – that’s all part of it, but as Asad says, “colonialism has to be understood not as a temporary repression of subject populations, but an irrevocable process of transmutation in which old desires and ways of life are destroyed and new ones take their place.”
 
So you have the original boundaries drawn in ‘67 – these were not walled off – but now, with the creation of the Wall (the Wall in Jerusalem is a wall, it’s not a fence or a picket fence which some of the State Department makes it sound like) it has almost completely surrounded Jerusalem and is intended to take in Ma’ale Adumim (which we can talk about a little bit later) and what’s happening is that even Israeli boundaries drawn in ‘67 are now being altered to leave out populations of Palestinians – there is something like 60,000 Palestinians who have Israeli residency permits within Jerusalem who are now finding themselves (because the Israeli state would rather not add them as a demographic danger) on the other side of this wall. But yet they have the right to be in Jerusalem. Why else do you draw boundaries in the formal boundaries like this if you don’t have a racial vision and a notion that certain people are the “wrong kind”: certain people belong here and certain demographic dangers are not welcome here?
 
Beyond all of this concrete and fortressing is also a project of cultural control. Colonial dominance is solidified through ideological means and as a cultural project of control – it does a range of very creative and productive things (neutral terms) with ideas of myth, Biblical myth, although more recently, constituted national ideas. The Jewish National Fund as always emphasized that the project for this organization is to “redeem” the land, “reclaim” the land. In Hebrew, there are a couple of different words they use – I’m not as astute in Hebrew, I have elementary knowledge of it – but this whole idea of “going back”, “redeeming”, “reclaiming” should cause worry in one’s mind: it’s mythical, for one (reasons we can talk about and unpack a little bit), but it also is effective in mobilizing support for the project, and blunting resistance to intrusions onto the land. If you do believe that this is God’s bequest to the Jewish people and no others have a claim here, if you are a Jewish individual in the United States and you’ve never been there and you believe you have a greater claim than the Palestinians, then the ideological work has functioned and done its job. This I refer to and call the “weaponization of myth” which we can talk a little bit more about below in just a few moments.
 
I was surprised to hear that among these myths were biblical ideas that (according to many of these Israelis that I met) permeated a lot of secular thinking’s discourse. My friend and former editor, the brilliant Israeli leftist and anti-Zionist scholar Tikva Honig Parnass (I recommend you all get her wonderful book False Prophets of Peace), she fought in the Palmach and the Haganah, and tells a story growing up in Israel (always being secular and a part of left-Zionist secular tradition), describes that even in secular schools the Bible was taught as history five times a week. Young students were marched around the country and Biblical references were used to describe and emphasize why this is “their” heritage, this is God’s bequest to them. She also relates this quite interesting story that I talk about on page twenty-two, I’ll just read it. Basically, she’s now a grandmother, her son is in secular north Tel Aviv eighth grade and a young boy was tasked with coming up before the graduation and reading the line from Genesis 13:14-17, “the Lord said to Abraham after Lot had parted from him, ‘please raise your eyes and see from the place where you are northward and southward and eastward and westward, for all the land that you see I will give to you and your seed to eternity.’” Now this claim that the Land of Israel is a part of a celestial real estate guide whose listings can only be acquired by members of one religious group has been deployed in innumerable ways, in secular education. Out of the words, of what I understand was a very secular politician, Ehud Olmert, but he would always sort of talk about these sorts of biblical connection, apparently knowing they were mythical, not believing himself that they were mythical. 
 
But this is what I wanted to get at in the book, trying to sort of pull out and challenge these ideas, which link up with identity and space and discrimination and racism as well. I begin the book with a story of cultural violence and negation by the Israeli state that has really, to this date, became really difficult to fathom That is, the creation of the so-called “Museum of Tolerance” funded by the enormously economically potent organization the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. For those not familiar, many of you are, it’s an institution and a very grand museum that’s meant to build peace and heal the landscape of this scarred, fractured city. But, in fact as those who know a bit about it will know, it’s chosen as its site one part of a one hundred year old Muslim cemetery just outside the Jaffa Old City walls to the West, the Mamilla Islamic Cemetery. This is a picture of it in 1920, this is not a picture of the part of the cemetery where the Museum of Tolerance was going to be built, but it is going to be built there. In the course of actually finding the site and laying the foundation, those who were involved in the actual construction were forced, compelled to acknowledge that they had dug up bones of the remains of people buried there. The response was an interesting one, consistent with some of the discourse the Israeli state has mobilized to defend actions that are this egregious, including the assertion that this was not a real cemetery and these were fake graves. It’s interesting to note if you go back and look at the British colonial period and also earlier Zionist maps from different Zionist organizations, the cemetery appears! Long before 1948, it’s acknowledged and represented on nearly all cartographic representations of the city. This is not a fake cemetery. There were many arguments for why the museum should go forward and it is now moving forward with the sanction of the Supreme Court ruling, I believe, in 2008 that declares it lawful and further denigrates the heritage of those families in this city who have passed away who have some connection to this and for whom this is an important space. This is the inside of the museum as it’s being configured. These are kind of contraband images because, in fact, Israel and whoever is involved with the construction project has built a mammoth wall around the project so people can’t actually look in very easily at what’s going on. 
 
What’s interesting about colonial discourse (and I would argue in this part of Jerusalem in particular), is that even those who are in opposition and could level a really solid critique of what the Wiesenthal Center and Israeli municipality are doing, were often unaware because the defense was “this is part of an Israeli park. Yes, there’s a cemetery over there, but this is part of an Israeli park and we are building on what was a parking garage.” Those who sent letters of opposition to the Wiesenthal Center got back this high-res image of a parking lot which said “this is where we’re building it”. What they had to do to perform that ideological contortion was to not say that the parking lot itself was paved over another part of the cemetery in the 1950’s and Independence Park that was established in the ‘50s and ‘60s had paved over the older part of the cemetery. It’s sort of emblematic, I argue, for what’s happening in Jerusalem today: there’s plenty of opposition, very intelligent opposition, against what Israel is doing in East Jerusalem, but so much is lost in terms of a critique of what has already been paved over, what has already been taken in West Jerusalem. That is a sort of colonial layering, as I call it that is happening. 
 
Many Arab and Palestinian cemeteries have been plowed since 1948 in the course of depopulating and destroying about 400 villages in the early years of the new Israeli state. Many cemeteries (not maybe 400, but many others) were destroyed in villages that were destroyed and unpopulated. I came across others in the Jerusalem area alone. These included a formal burial site in the depopulated Palestinian village of Sheikh Badr which is just to the west of the museum – it’s a few kilometers west of the site I just showed you – it was a former Palestinian village but today it’s known as Gan Sachar, the Gan Sacher Park. The large green area was the village in this space and where crops were grown. Apparently the village went into the foothills where the Knesset was also built. So the Knesset was built partially on the land of this village too. I was invited to walk through the park a few years ago when I was last in Jerusalem with an Israeli friend, a well-known radical activist in Israel, Jeff Halper the head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and he wanted to show me the remains of this village, the traces that were left, the cemetery in particular. He didn’t know exactly where it was, he hadn’t been there for a couple of years (though he lives right near this park), but he insisted that not far ahead we’d find the last remains of the village. We plowed through brush under the tall pine trees now everywhere around us (we were up in this area walking around the hill not far from the back entrance of the Knesset). He couldn’t find the burial site. It seemed to have been gradually gotten rid of – he was convinced it was there, and we couldn’t find it for half an hour or forty-five minutes; but he was convinced there was a remains of a kind of stone platform that might’ve been part of the former cemetery but in the years between our visit and the time he had last been, he was convinced that the last part of the cemetery had been eliminated. As we’re fanning out in search of it though, suddenly a loud “sh!” was heard behind a group of trees. We had apparently stumbled unwillingly into an Israeli nature preserve for rare bird species now located in the land of the destroyed village. The staff person was irate. As we gave up on finding the cemetery and walked toward him, there was a sign in Hebrew that instructed those who ambled through these foothills just below the Knesset not to disturb the birds. That’s what he was upset about. Critically and symbolically I think it was very important junction to silence the past. He didn’t know what we were up to, all he knew is that we were disturbing the birds but there’s something very emblematic, I think, of that story: the idea that in a search for, in an effort to uncover or unearth destroyed pasts, destroyed cemeteries, negated histories are to be contested. You see this in Jerusalem all the time in many different places.
 
Many decades ago about ten years before Israel was established and the Palestinians were expelled, the great thinker and theorist Walter Benjamin asserted that “only that historian will give the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins and this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” Now Benjamin is talking about fascism in Europe – there is not a clear parallel – but the enemy of which he speaks is found among the Israeli political elite and bureaucratic planning circles that seek to negate and replace not just populations but histories and stories of the past. 
 
This weaponization of myth and history can also be found in Sheikh Badr. It’s not mentioned in Israeli public discourse or texts or what have you, but it is mentioned in one place that I found directly as a destroyed village. This is a plaque in a series of blue plaques the Israeli municipality put up all over West Jerusalem, and they’re monuments and memorials, something I also write about in this text, to the Haganah, the Stern Gang, paramilitary forces that become the Israeli Defense Forces which marked off (and this is the side of a Palestinian appropriated home, the Jamal house in Talbiyeh), not denoting this as a home that once belonged to a Palestinian family, not mentioning Sheikh Badr as a destroyed village, but to commemorate the head of the Stern Gang who unwittingly blew himself up as he was putting some explosives together in the backyard of this home that had been taken over by the new Israeli state and it reads, “Dror’s headquarters, which acted as “Lehi” or “Stern Headquarters” and housed their arms, ammunitions, and explosives industry. This structure was named in memory of Mordechai Dror who fell during the liberation of Sheikh Badr (meaning the expulsion of the Palestinians in early ‘48). “Here, a tragic explosion claimed the lives of five of the finest Lehi freedom fighters.”  So this is the kind of marking and ideology that exists in the world, that exists and is sort of inscribed on areas of the city, not just West but East Jerusalem, that are memorialized but are meant to tell different stories than the stories of dispossession which nearly always have entailed. 
 
Benjamin’s statement on memory and the past is crucial to the contest over this colonized city, and this work looks at how religious nationalist myths are melded and merged together to facilitate that conquest of some of the most vital places in this deeply symbolic urban center. Let me just tell you about one (this is a picture that’s actually also the cover of my book) which I believe was taken in the ‘20s or ‘30s and it’s taken of a 700 year old Palestinian-Arab neighborhood, mostly Muslim, that for 700 years existed before the Kotel or the Western Wall. It was destroyed in 1967 by the new Israeli occupation forces, which, before even redrawing the boundaries of the city in the first few days of the occupation, in one night with three hours’ notice expelled the 600-800 residents of this neighborhood, demolished it, expelled them and put them on buses and sent them out. They destroyed about 135 homes and structures. To create what the Israeli government wishes to create is a space that’s not so much sacred (it is sacred and important to Jews all over the world for sure) but to create a place called the “Western Wall Plaza” which is an open area that is not only a site of worship (this is the marking for the synagogue – by the way, never gender-segregated until Israel took over in 1967) but this area beyond the synagogue which is also used for a variety of reasons. This is the former arrangement and this is the new Western Wall Plaza about forty seven years old. This is a space that existed before the Kotel and the Moroccan quarter for hundreds of years and Jews did pray there (Jews who predate Zionism who lived in the city well before ‘48 or before the rise of political Zionism). Here’s some slides of the destruction days and actually hours after the 135 Palestinian structures were destroyed. This was all intended to make way for a grand celebration celebrating what the Zionists call the “liberation of Jerusalem”. The space to this day is used for scenes like this, Jerusalem Day – tens of thousands of people make their way to the wall (which is both a national and religio-national space) meant to stoke and build nationalist ideas and ideologies.
Let me just speak about something a little more contemporary, and I’ll zoom through this very quickly. I’ll take questions about Martin Gruber and his experiences in the question and answer session. There’s an area of Jerusalem that Israel has made its claim on called “E-1” which is just east of the boundaries of the Old City of East Jerusalem and it includes settlements and an extension of the settlement Ma’ale Adumim built in the ‘70s. About fifteen or twenty years ago, a population living on land that Israel wishes to appropriate and to include within the wall as a part of its expanded broadened capital, are a group of Bedouin communities, generally very poor, who live on this land but are gradually being expelled. This area is in Area C. In the late ‘90s they finally were packed up and gotten rid of so that the settlement could expand – in one case, a kindergarten for settler children. These marginal communities are indeed in a strict sense of the word “subaltern communities”, that is they are outside of any form of government services. They are marginal not only to Israeli society but also to Palestinian society as well. I’m not aware of the Palestinian Authority ever making any particular great campaign on their behalf. This community and others have been relocated in the Israeli parlance to an Israeli municipal garbage dump – that is where they are to this day.  Their land has been appropriated and they have been put where one puts the dirt or the filth or the pollution – those who pollute a body politic that does not want them and regards them as “dangerous.” Let me just conclude with that. Thank you very much.

 

Thomas Philip Abowd is an urban anthropologist and historian who received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University in 2003. His book on spatial politics in contemporary Jerusalem, Colonial Jerusalem: the Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference, was published in 2011 by Syracuse University. In 2006 he received a Post-Doctoral Research Award from the Palestine-American Research Center (PARC), to study housing politics in contemporary Jerusalem. From 2008 to 2009 Dr. Abowd was the recipient of a Faculty Fellowship from the Humanities Center of Wayne State University, to continue research on housing politics and housing-rights activism in Jerusalem.