2004 mireia folch

7/27/2019 2004 Mireia Folch

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Els paisatges de la postmodernitat

21, 22 i 23 doctubre de 2004

Mireia Folch-SerraProfessora de Geografia Cultural

University of Western Ontario (Canad)

The current relevance in the social sciences of the analysis of imagesgives a new meaning to the landscapes visual impact on national andcultural identity. The idea that through observation a sort of knowledge can

be acquired marks the advent of modernity in contrast to pre-modernsocieties lack of interest on visual descriptions. This tendency underlines thecurrent emphasis on the ocular,1 where seeing as knowledge is also related tointeractions greatly dependent on socially constructed visual experiences.2Television, billboards, the Internet, advertisements, etc., all send off imageswhose authenticity is difficult to ascertain, as is the authenticity of fabricatedpolitical identities and claims to national membership. The fusion of imagesand identities, of the visual and the political, provides an opportunity toexplore the possibility of landscape as metaphor of the postmodern nation.

But what is a postmodern nation? Is it not incongruous to regard aspostmodern an entity whose ancestral attributes and origins antedate the creationof the nation-state?3 How can this pre-modern product of the longue duree belabelled postmodern? A postmodern nation is nothing but a paradox, an oxymoronthat needs to be discerned in the context of a specific landscape; only there theresilience of this ancient form of association can be compared to the modern statesexpediency. Looking at the nation and the state in the light of resilience andexpediency prevents us from making sweeping statements. It also makes evident

1 Rose, G. 2001 Visual Methodologies. London: Sage Publications, and Daniels, S. 1993 Fields of Vision. Princeton:Princeton University Press

2 Rose, 2001 p.83 LLobera, J.R. 1994 The God of Modernity. Oxford, UK/Providence, USA: Berg

http://www.catpaisatge.net - [email protected] 1


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that each nation is unique and thus must be evaluated within the space and timethat configures it.

Identity

Culture

LANDSCAPELANDSCAPE

Fig. 1 Dialectics of landscape

As a product of time where culture and identity are embedded, a landscapeis a palimpsest whose cultural layers, not to mention its geological ones, are overlaidone on top of each other. By virtue of this configuration the landscape becomes thenations visual metaphor. Gradually, the landscape is transformed into a pastiche ofmultiple juxtaposed periods whose visual impact is a reminder of a nations historicalswirl. Within the landscape, individuals and societies establish links with the past.Through time, the landscape accumulates a series of public contributions thatmaterialize in political projects and social processes. Successive generationscontinue these projects and processes and transform them into the cultural and

geographical heritage of the nation. Moreover, it is through the poetics and politicsof geography and the cultural appreciation and conservation of the landscape,that national identity is defined. Hence a nations art, politics and history arerevealed and manifested in the landscape while its cartographic representationbecomes the abstract rationalization of its limits. Most nations collective memory isembedded in the exemplary power of landscape.

Fig. 2 The power of Landscape



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To illustrate the supposition that each nation is the product of its chronotopei.e. of the complete and inseparable entity created by the confluence of time andspace, I need to reflect on theories of landscape, the outlook of modernity and theidea of nation. Then, I will ponder the relation of the Palestinian nation and the Israelistate.

When landscape is interpreted as a manifestation of the built environment,

the aesthetic of form and other spatial elements, it is also recognized as a product ofsocial decisions legitimated by political authority. But a landscape is more than ascenario where social and political life unfolds; in reality it is a repository of meaningsthat allow people to establish affective and imaginative responses to theirsurroundings and the social collective. The landscape is loved, painted, andremembered; it is bemoaned and made into poetry. Yi-fu Tuan equates thesesentiments to topophilia, the affective bond between people and place.4 ForBenedict Anderson, however, the national sentiment inspired by landscape isnothing but an illusory case of imagined communities.5 Yet if nations producelandscapes and landscapes make nations, these so-called imagined communitiesmight be more real than fictional. As the outcome of the observation and

modification of nature, landscapes create places to establish links with temporal andgeographical vectors. These vectors, or chronotopes, as Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us,resist the Hegelian trap of separating time and space, and, as a time-spaceaggregate become a complete and inseparable entity.6 They include as well spatialforms, aesthetic creations such as buildings, pyramids, churches, and roads, andimagined cartographies.7

National landscapes have been considered from several angles, especiallyfrom the perspective of the nation-state, vicariously conflated with the nation itself.John Agnew has criticized the correlation of nature, nation and territory that theUnited Kingdom, Finland and Switzerland utilize to naturalize the national

landscape and to reinforce the nationalist narrative.8 In these cases, the nationalculture (usually consisting of several cultures within a single state) is equated to thenatural environment as the most important element of national identity. The nation-state is then conflated with the nations contained within the state, regardless of their

4 Tuan,Yi-fu 1974 Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes and values. Englewood Cliff, NJ: PrenticeHall, p.45 Anderson, Benedict 1991 Imagined Communities. London: Verso6 Bakhtin, M.1986 Dialogical Imagination. Editor M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.7 Nations without a state such as the Palestinians, the Kurds, the Catalans, the Basques, etc. envision the possibility of

a state with its own spatial and aesthetic conditions and its own cartographical limits.

8 Agnew, J. 2004 Nationalism inA Companion to Cultural Geography, Eds. J.S. Duncan, N.C. Jonson & R.H. Schein.Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell, p.233



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linguistic, historical and geographical differences. In fact, while nature can begeneralized, national cultures cannot for they are unique and incomparable.9

Geographers have many ways of interpreting the landscape

p e c a d a d e e u n


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On the contrary, Joseph Llobera presupposes that national identity isconstantly re-created.13 In other words, national identity cannot be universalizedbecause it is anchored in the chronotope, in the meeting of time and space thatbrings about a particular evolution. National identity evolves from period to period,from generation to generation and yet dwells in the same landscape that accruessocial and cultural transformations. But elites or colonizers who simultaneouslylegitimate and/or deny meaning to the act of rememorizing the past can certainlymanipulate the social, historical and collective memory of nations.14 However, anations image is not always engineered by the elites. The landscape containselements and contributions from all of the society. There are many in-determinedaspects of a nations identity and culture that permit multiple possibilities of

understanding. To generalize the power of the elites is to determine the image of thenation. On the contrary, national cultures have multiple forms and possibilities.

What is or what the nation is not is a question that permeates debates on themeaning of national identity and nationalism. Except for Llobera, most of the quotedauthors ignore or diminish the importance of the chronotope that constantly re-creates the cultural/historical landscape. However, the creation and modification ofnature through culture is underlined by the idea of place. Place conveys that anations landscape is the consequence of a continual, dialectical and evolving


13 Llobera, 1994, p. 20614 Jonson, N.C. 2004, p.318


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process. The single postmodern rupture of this process consists on the artificiality ofpublicly remembering an altered past that suits the elites aims and thus becomes afabrication devoid of its authenticity and rotundity. But the nation has indeed a real,intrinsic past that can be evoked and understood through interpretation.

However, the uncertainty of the past and the un-know-ability of its absolutereality confer a postmodern condition to the nation. This condition is even moreapparent when we consider that the goal of modernity was to eliminate from civil lifethe burden of the past, to eradicate all association with tradition and technologicalbackwardness, and to sever irrational notions of belonging to a particularcollective. In the political program of modernity the nation lost its importance, it was

diluted, associated to folklore and converted into a sentimental and superficialrepresentation. The state, meanwhile, was given the task of modernizing all thearchaic and irrational aspects implicit in the love for a nation whose past could bemythologized. In this view the nation became nothing more that an ancestral andarchaic afterthought superseded by modernity.

National sentiment, nonetheless, has been recognized as a reaction to thecosmopolitan pretensions of the Enlightenment.15 As a consequence, after the 18thcentury the idea of nation and the ideology of nationalism have been associatedeither with bloodline or plebiscite. Nation as race, bloodline, or nation as a contractconstantly renovated, plebiscite, are two opposite concepts. It is an antinomy that

can be overcome when the nation is conceived as culture.16 Belonging to a cultureis unavoidable and inevitable. Culture is part of the landscape and can be seen onthe ground, whereas the plebiscite or the race, do not. National cultures are literallyseen in their architectonic, artistic, agricultural, urban and archaeological forms. Themeaning of these forms may change with the passing of time, but their presenceendures. Some become relics and some continue to function. National cultures arethus indeterminate, visual, disperse, concrete, and in constant fluctuation while thestate is modern, abstract, enlightened, centred, hierarchical, and precise.Paradoxically, that confers both an archaic and a postmodern scope to the nation.

The archaic element is a sign of endurance and the link to a remote past

while the postmodern condition situates the nation beyond the reach of modernityrepresented by the nation-state. The recognition of this paradox has encouraged thedebate on so-called multinational states conceived as asymmetrically federatedstates, flexible and compatible with the current nature of geopolitics. Apparently, itmakes no sense to continue with a system, --the nation-state system-- that hascaused havoc in the Europe of the 19th and 20th centuries and still does so in otherparts of the world. Catalan historian Joseph Fontana believes that the nation-statesunderlying political strata has caused many wars in the quest for homogenization,

15 Bernstein, R.J. 1992 The New Constellation: the Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity. Cambridge,

Massachusetts: MIT Press

16 Todorov, T. 1994 On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought. Cambridge,Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, p. 386



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from languages to traditions. In his essay La construccio historica de la identitatnacional Fontana upholds the multinational state as the sole viable model forcontemporary societies.17

Is it possible to conceive and conceptualize a multinational landscape? Giventhat the traditional state is usually associated with a unitary and singular nation it isdifficult but not impossible to imagine it. The debate on multi-nationality can beillustrated from different positions and with contrasting models. For instance, from a

state that refuses to incorporate within it a different nation, as is the case of Israelwith respect to Palestinians; to the systematic denial of the Kurds cultural andlinguistic particularity in Turkey; to the refusal by the Spanish state to grantconstitutional status of nation to Catalonia.18

The above examples represent different aspects of the states attachment tothe norms of modernity such as centralization, hierarchy, precision, exactitude,homogenization, universality, generalization, etc. These norms are challenged by thetheory of situated knowledge (situated ness) that describes knowledge as a productof a particular place and period and postulates that there are many different waysof knowing. The theory also refutes a neutral perspective to observe the world that

serves to universalize knowledge, a view from nowhere. Instead, it recognizes theimportance of situated knowledge as the outcome of embodied objectivity.19

Fig. 4 Embodied objectivity

17La Vanguardia Digital, July 14, 200418 Since medieval times, the Catalan cultural landscape has been constituted by a specific language, an

architectural style, a distinct land-planning and the delimitation of the marca hispanica.

19 Haraway, D. 1988 Situated Knowledge: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectivein Feminist Studies 14, 575-99



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As a consequence, all knowledge originates in a specific place and periodand thus multiple standpoints and partial perspectives offer situated versions ofreality. In this outlook, it is precisely the partial and not the universal that allows us toinvoke reason, because the principal perspective to obtain knowledge depends onour position.20 Our way of knowing is marked by our geographical, political,existential, and gender positions; otherwise, to float in the world, to not have aposition, is impossible. This explains why ideas about norms that appear perpetualand universal in a given period and place, are in fact the specific and peculiarproduct of a cultural system.21 Reasoning like this makes feasible the idea ofmultinational landscapes, because the political/territorial status quo as a culturalsystem is neither eternal nor universal. It can evolve, change and adapt to

circumstances. The danger of onthologizing what is merely a particular event withinstructural and temporal parameters is thus avoided by the postulates of embodiedobjectivity. Situatedness (embodied objectivity) and dialogism (the chronotope)share in this way a similar viewpoint. Basically, what both theories do is to inoculatethe subject (us) against the illusion of complete autonomy, isolation and absolutecertainty.

Robert Sack has equated situated knowledge to relativism and absolutism.22

He argues that postmodernism cannot articulate a moral theory necessary tounderstand the creation of place. In his book, written and published after theSeptember 11, 2001 attacks on New York, Sack establishes that evil is locatedbeyond the confines of time and space. The Bakhtinian chronotope, therefore, isrenounced.

Evil manifests itself in such places as the GULAG, the North Americanantebellum slave plantations, and the Nazi concentration camps. Yet there aredegrees of evil; slave owners are part of a paternalistic system where slaves areconsidered inferior and in need of a guide;23 ordinary citizens of Nazi Germany fallinto Hitlers trap. In both instances evil is the responsibility of the higher authority.

Accordingly a malign dictator can makes us happy if we accept his rules, usuallybased on an aseptic language such as the final solution, evacuation, specialtreatment or deportation.24

The self-deception of Nazis and slave owners is justified by the need to reacha higher good for all, regardless of a segment of the populations suffering. Theend justifies the means. This exposition gives Sack the opportunity to demonstrate

20 This is a very geographical theory in that includes concepts such as local, position and situation, in a very

cartographic sense of their meaning.21 See Bakhtin 198622 Sack, R. 2003A Geographical Guide to the Real and the Good. New York and London: Routledge

23 In order to keep the myth of slave inferiority, slaves were not allowed to read and write.24 Sack, R. 2003, p. 169



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how geography can be instrumental for the implementation of evil. And also allowshim to carry out a dire critique of postmodernism/relativism by defining geographyas an instrument employed to diminish the worlds variety and complexity throughtyranny, chaos and isolation. Sack explains the Holocaust as an instance of expulsionand spatial concentration. This malevolent geography involves isolation, autarchy,homogenization and uniformity, and according to Sack also applies to Stalins SovietUnion and North Korea. On the other hand, Sack leaves out instances such as SouthAfricas apartheid, the enclosure of Palestinian vital space or the conspicuous LatinAmerican repressive military dictatorships, where geography is very much a part andparcel of repression.

For Sack, a geographer esteemed for his analysis of territoriality, the notions ofgood and evil are definite.25 To him postmodernism and situated knowledge lack thecapacity for altruism; a judgement that he also applies to radical democracy whilstliberal democracy is equated to altruism. The latter Sack wishes to extend to thewhole world, making his critique less of a speculative discussion than a political one.26 But the overall purpose of the book is not only the critique of postmodernism; thegeographical basis of political and ideological projects guided by ideas of tyrannyand extermination are also examined. Sacks explanation of how the fragmentationand division of place is utilized by the state to dominate and oppress a nation orcultural group is particularly useful to understand the links between the spatial andthe political. Thus I connect a part of his analysis to the insights of embodied

objectivity, hoping that these contrarian bed-fellows make available to me a usefulapproach to delineate the Palestinian cultural landscape.

The Palestinian cultural landscape is difficult to ascertain as the colonialpowers that set up Mandate Palestine ignored many of its features to advance theirown purposes.27 The colonizers engaged in a game of sorts to manipulate the social,historical and collective memory of Palestinians in order to do away with theirexistence. The existence of a group or nation can be negated in a number of ways.The more radical consists in denying its territorial base. When someone decides thata group does not belong here and never says where it should be, but persists sayingthat does not belong here, what happens in effect is the erasure of the groups

existence, for the fact of existing is manifested in the connection between being andplace. A group or nation cannot exist out of space; it needs a place, where evennomadic tribes can exist.28

But not even elite colonial powers can erase forever the recollections of apopulation. It is well known that cultural landscapes have been preserved for futuregenerations through memory and commemoration. Historical maps, archives,

25 He includes abortion as an evil act, demonstrating his affinity with the North American evangelical majority ( seepage 35)26 Sack, R. 2003, p.242

27 See Gregory, Derek 2004 The Colonial Present. Blackwell Publishing, pp 76-10228 This is an adaptation of Sacks reflections on page 74.



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storytelling, memorabilia and artefacts that have endured beyond physical andemotional demolition, bear witness to the existence of Palestinian lieux de memoire;their meaning is not lost in spite of military occupation and ideological repression.Bakhtin reminds us that nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will somedayhave its homecoming festival.29

For hundreds of years an indigenous Arab population was distributed in townsand cities over the territory known as Mandate Palestine. However, at the turn of the

20th century Jews of Middle Eastern and European descent formed 10 percent of theMandates population, and sought to establish a country of their own inspired byZionist ideas. After the state of Israel was founded in 1948 the indigenous populationlost their right to the land. Those living under Israeli occupation became statelesswhile others sought refuge in neighbouring countries and in the world at large.30

After 1948 entire Arab towns were bulldozed and effectively removed fromphysical existence in the name of the historical imperative to found a state overalready inhabited space. Paradoxically, while Israeli politicians kept on saying thatthe Palestinians sought the annihilation of Israel the Palestinian landscapesdefacement continued apace. Thus in 1948, 1949 and again in 1967, thousands of

Palestinians were expelled from their homes and towns originating an exodus haslasted for decades amidst unbearable conflict and decimation and reflects thequest for a Jewish landscape devoid of Arabs.31

The Arab-Israeli wars not only maimed Palestinian civilian population but alsodestroyed their cultural landscapes. A landscape that reflected hundreds of years ofcontinual occupation was eradicated in a few decades.32 Their collective memorywas also threatened. Arabic place-names were replaced with Hebrew or biblicalones, and images of the Israeli transformation of the land were disseminated todiscourage the refugees from returning. Between 1948 and 1950 alone Israeldestroyed over 400 Palestinian villages and built 160 Jewish settlements on land that

had been confiscated from its former occupants.33 However, as Derek Gregoryexplains, they have retained their memories in a profoundly spatialized waynot

29 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1986 Speech Genres and Other Late Essays edited by M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of TexasPress, p17030 Israel took 78 percent of Palestine in 1948 and the remaining 22 percent in 1967. It is only that 22 percent that is inquestion now. Agnew, J. 2002Making Political Geography. London: Arnold, p.32This 22 percent is called The Occupied Territories, The disputed land or Judea and Samaria by the advocates

of Eretz Israel.31 Falah, Gazi 1996 The Israeli-Palestinian War and its Aftermath: the Transformation and De-Signification of Palestines

Cultural Landscape inAnnals of the Association of American Geographers 86(2), pp. 256-285

32 Falah, G. 199633 Gregory, D. 2004, p.88



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only in the sense of the space of Palestine itself but also in the intimate microtopographies of homes, fields and cemeteries.34

Fig. 5 Partition and depopulation

Once Israel was established many of its laws discriminated against non-Jewishcitizens. Full rights were determined by differentiated levels of civil status based onfaith. Citizens were subdivided into groups according to religious affiliation ratherthan nationality. Israeli-Arabs, identified as non-Jews, have ever since beenperceived as a racial and religious threat to Israels security. 35 A indication of this

34 Gregory, D. 2004, p. 8835 Palestinians who remained in Israel (so-called Israeli Arabs), account for less than 20% of the population, roughly

numbering more than one million in 2002. Up to 220,000 of these people are displaced within Israel and not allowedto return to their homes, while 43 villages where 70,000 Palestinians live are not recognized by Israel.



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attitude is a ban imposed in May of 2002, preventing Palestinians from joining theirrelatives in Israel that has kept thousands from uniting with spouses who are Arabcitizens of Israel.36

Likewise, under Israeli law the political status of the West Bank, officiallyrenamed Judea and Samaria, is neither occupied nor administered, but liberatedafter 1967; although in Gregorys estimation it was the land itself not the Palestinianinhabitants who were liberated by the Israeli occupation.37 This kind of rhetoricalwarp has resulted in many more Israeli settlements being established in the WestBank, which already makes it impossible to build a putative contiguous Palestinianstate. Of late the territories (Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem) are said to be

disputed which renders Israel claim formally equivalent to that of the Palestinians.The irony of this, according to Gregory, is not lost to the intrinsic violence of colonialmodernity, where this particular form of oppression has been determined, like in theAmerican antebellum mentioned by Sack, by race, land and nature. At presentclose to 50% of the West Bank territory has been set aside by Israel for the mobility,protection and fulfillment of Israeli colonists, thus revealing through the urgency toacquire more land, a drive to dominate nature in the name of nationalism.Meanwhile, the peace for land rhetoric and the establishment of two states isnothing but an anachronism that disregards the shared geography of Israelis andPalestinians, the nature of international relations, and the fraud of borderdemarcation.38

Certain forms of hatred, oppression and violence may seem inevitable tothose who act upon it. By concentrating the Palestinian population in areasconstantly shrunken and limiting their vital geography in the name of preservingsecurity, the state of Israel is implementing geographical separation through isolationand expulsion. There are at present 98check points of the Israeli army (IDF) and99 barricades to control the movement of

Palestinians in the West Bank, while Israelicolonists are spared the travails ofidentifying themselves and theirmovements. The rules of spatialsegmentation reinforce stereotypes andproduce behaviors such as terrorist suicideattacks that confirm the image of Arabs asviolent and inhuman. A cycle of hatred

36 Israels birthday sparks protests in The Globe & Mail, May 16, 2005, p. A1137 Gregory, D. 2004, p. 92

38 John Agnew (2002, pp. 30-32) states that the peace rhetoric established by border demarcation in the treaties ofOslo (1993), Cairo (1994), Taba (1995), Wye (1998), and Sharmael-Sheirk (1999) are essentially a gigantic scam.



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and intolerance is entrenched when Israeli troops close roads, demolish homes, killpolitical leaders and fill up jails with political prisoners; but above all, when the civilianpopulation is collectively punished for the crimes of extremists.

Spatial concentration and expulsion have culminated in the construction of awall began by the Israeli government in 2002. At some points it reaches 8 meters,twice the height of the Berlin Wall and it is equipped with a sophisticated system ofin-vigilance and, in some tracts, an electrified snare. But this concrete barrier is not anew idea, it had circulated since 1973. It became controversial at the beginning ofits construction near the town of Salim, West of Jenin, where the line that demarcatesthe 1967 armistice has been ignored, thus dislodging people from their homes andfields.

For decades millions of ArabPalestinians dispersed in the occupiedterritories, in Israel, in refugee campsand exiled throughout the world,39 havebecome invisible for the internationalcommunity, except when committingatrocious terrorist acts. Lost from theannals of history are their disappearedhomes, land-tenure deeds, towns,cemeteries, birth certificates and other

documents as well as their legal territorialstatus. According to Ghazi Falah, thecurrent build up of Israeli settlements inPalestinian land is nothing more than thecontinuation of the policy that since1948 has promoted the destruction of400 Palestinian towns.40 The concertedeffort to eradicate Palestinian historicalmemory correlates with the demolition ofthe cultural landscape. One is theconsequence of the other.41

Fig. 6 Sep ration Walla

39 About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes when the state of Israel was founded. They have not ceased theirdemand to return with their descendants, that number a total of four million people by United Nations estimates.40 Falah, Ghazi, opus cita

41 One could see the inverse of Fig. 1 Dialectics of landscape. If landscape is made of culture and identity, defacingit has the effect of erasing culture and identity.



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All this happens under the scrutiny of the world even as it creates thesensation that nothing can be done, that these events are naturally inalterable. Inreality they are instances of absolutism operating geographically.42 Naturalizing thedefacement of the Palestinian landscape produces a condition of self-deception, inwhich fundamental questions about the existence of the Palestinian lieux dememoire, its palimpsest, are disregarded as futile. Nevertheless the visual metaphorof nationhood is there to be seen, appreciated and remembered. This map illustratesthe cartography of Palestinian historical memory.43

Fig. 7 Ghazi Falahs cartography of memory

otwithstanding their ancient culture and identity, their longue duree as anestabl

Nished people, the Palestinians have never had a state of their own, a situation

also shared by the Jews before the foundation of Israel. But while the latter got their


42 Sack, R. 2003, pp.102 and 202.43 Falah, G. 1996.


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state almost six decades ago, the Palestinians in addition of not having a state alsolack an international juridical status, similar to other nations. What's more, aPalestinian declaration of independence seems utterly improbable in the nearfuture. At present the space of the occupied territories resembles a colanderperforated by about 200 Israeli settlements. The implementation of Palestiniansovereignty cannot hold in this colander. According to Naseer Aruri, thedemographic and geographic character of the numerous Jewish settlements in theWest Bank would make it nearly impossible for any Israeli government to find asatisfactory arrangement accommodating settler colonialism and Palestinianindependence.44 Furthermore, in Gregorys estimate even Palestinian airspacewould be brought beneath Israeli airspace, so that it would continue to command

the skies above Palestinians buildings and low-flying helicopters, and Israel alsodemands subterranean sovereignty over the mountain aquifer beneath the WestBank.45 The maps below show the putative contiguous Palestinian state on the leftand, on the right, the reality of a series of dispersed and disconnected spaces whosefragile existence depends solely on Palestinian cultural resistance and will to survive.But the question remains about the indispensability in this day and age of becominga state to survive as a nation.

Fig 8 Discontinuous Palestinian territory

44 Aruri, Naseer H. 2003 Dishonest Broker. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, p.24145 Gregory, D. 2004, p.103



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Aents from the occupied territories andccording to Ilan Pappe, the belief that the state of Israel will withdraw all

settlem restore the Green line border of 1967 tocreate Palestinian state is nonsense.46 The same was thought by Edward Said whobecam

s

he traditional state, born from the idea that it should be organized in centrereflection of the age of Reasons proposition that only the state is

qualifie to provide categorical answers to the nations dilemmas. This Jacobin

outloo

use its unique

cultural landscape cannot be generalized. Also universal explanations and goodversus

ae an advocate of a multinational state shared by Arabs and Jews. Other

thinkers agree that the two-state solution has run its course, having been dealt asevere blow by a colossal imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians.47In spite of having a comparable population size, the economic and military power ofIsraelis and Palestinians pale in comparison.48 Furthermore, the presence ofthousands of Palestinians inside Israel, and thousands of Israeli colonists in what isupposedly the future Palestinian state discredits the idea of the two states, aposition, ironically, now accepted by a new generation of Palestinians, aware of the

fact that in the Palestine/Israel overall territory there are at present almost the samenumbers of Arabs and Jews.49 This confirms Bisharas assertion that any further delayin resolving the outstanding issues of polarization and discrimination will deepen theantagonism of the Apartheid system already in place.50

Tand periphery is a

d

k, paired with the belief in a single national culture encompassed by the state,disregards tradition and regionalism. Rationalisms certitude, however, could notanticipate the nations different and contradictory elements that pertain neither tothe centre nor the periphery. So-called irrational petitions and antagonist posturesagainst the state are thus the product of the states false impressions of the nationsqualities. Likewise, conflicts supposedly provoked by the nations unexpectedreactions and inexplicable attitudes, are usually analyzed within the nation-statesystem thus perpetuating the antagonism between nation and state.

As postmodern theory would have it, separating theories and concepts fromtheir context tends to obfuscate the portrait of the nation, beca

evil dichotomies are incapable of defining a nations identity, for eachnational palimpsest is circumstantial, partial and unfinished and cannot be encasedforever in a determined historical moment. The exclusivity of the landscape and its

46 Pappe, I. 2004A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge University Press, p. 26747 Aruri, Naseer H. 2003 Dishonest Broker. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, p.21748 81% Jews and others (5,160,000 Jews and 290,000 non Jewish immigrants) plus 19% Israeli-Arabs(close to one million) 220,000 Jewish settlers 3,500,000 Palestinians; Economy:Israels 110.2 billion; Palestinians (West Bank and Gaza): $4.36 billion; Military: Israel, Active 163,500,

Reserves 425,000; Palestinian Authority: Paramilitary 35,000; Unemployment rate: Israel 9.0%; Gaza Strip 48.5%,West Bank 30.3%49 According to the U.S. State Departments Country Reports On Human Rights Practices, 2004, of the 10,827,185 total

population of Israel/Palestine, 48% are Jewish, 49.3% are Palestinian and 2.7% Other Minorities.50 Bishara, p. 166.



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condition of visual metaphor are thus beyond the reach of grand theoriesexplanatory power.51 Ditto for the computer-ages homogenizing power that so farhas not been able to eradicate the singularity of national societies. On the contrary,the multiple meanings, memories, interpretations and inexplicable aspects of anations diversity and difference, can only be fathomed from the partial perspectivesof situated knowledge.

Paradoxically, even if the state imposes its power over the nation, the conflictbetween nation and state can never be surmounted through the erasure ofmemory, the landscapes decimation or the cancellation of national autonomy.Intertw

power of the landscapes visual metaphor, the grip of a historical andlinguist cultural context embedded in a particular space. Even though the majorityof hom

ined into the nation-state system, instituted by the Treaty of Westphalia three

hundred years ago, is the intolerance that continues to uphold the status quo. As thetragic examples, to mention only a few, of Chechnya, Tibet and Palestine reveal, thestates inflexibility has only reinforced these unhappy nations determination tosurvive.

The determination of the Palestinian claim to the land demonstrates oncemore the

ices and infrastructure have disappeared from historical Palestine alongside its

original inhabitants, the landscape persists to reside in peoples memories. Asevidence of historical presence and continuity these photos of demolished homes in

the Khulda and al-Kunayyisa villages taken in June 1990, and published in GhaziFalahs essay,52 demonstrate the testimonial power of the cultural landscape.

51 Marxism, positivism, structuralism, realism, rationalism, etc.52 Falah, opus cita



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Palestinian museum of memory would be the culmination of a trend thatn guaranteeing the rights

of na to their knowledge of the past, a series of museums have beeninaugu

Ahas coalesced in several projects around the world. Intent o

tionsrated in South American, European and North American countries to preserve

the memory of victims and contemporary humanitarian disasters.



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The goal of these museums is to safeguard the relations between history,memory and politics. France, for example, counts at the moment with twenty eightmuseums and public centers in whose title appear the words resistance anddepor

diator between thesociety t produces it and the historical past. An outstanding one is theMemorialde la

rights. Dirty wars, torture, and forced

disappearances, have been rescued from oblivion and neglect by civil and nationalassoci

tation. It is interesting to note, however, that the Museum of Lyon and theMusee de la Resistance et de la Deportation at Grenoble, were inaugurated in 1992and 1994, respectively. That is almost half a century after the end of the SecondWorld War in contrast to private institutions that since the beginning of the 1950saccumulated objects and documents about the antifascist resistance. But the mostinteresting development consists on the creation of eco-museums in which thetheme of resistance is incorporated to the landscape, directly into the original sites ofmemory (lieux de memoire) where the resistance took place, thus conveying not

only the collective memory of facts, but the memory of places.

A historical museum is essentially the voice of the community in which it isentrenched and represents for this community the role of me

thaResistance du Vercors, because it integrates a vision of the region, work,

landscape and ideas that constitute the collective memory of the fight againstfascism. Likewise in Germany, the government has established the Jewish museumand the Holocaust monument, to remember the millions of lost lives in the fightagainst fascism. In Italy, one emblematic museum, the Museo Storico dellaLiberazione di Roma, is made of donatedobjects and statements on the prison walls,

from drawings, to messages, poems and slogans. These graffiti have been conservedas the most meaningful relics. In Spain, many civil associations have disseminated theresistance to fascism, but have not organized a petition to the government toestablish a museum of memory,53 except for the Basque Museo por la Paz deGuernica. Many other museums of memory have sprung all over Europe, fromLithuania, to Poland, Estonia, Hungary and Russia, in which the theme is not only thefight against fascism but also against communist totalitarianism best exemplified byPerm 36, the Russian museum of the Gulag.

In South America, especially Chile and Argentina, the major theme of thememory museums is the breach of human

ations (Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Open Memory, CONADEP, etc.)54 InChile one of the first acts of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, instituted in1991, was to build a monument in the Santiago General Cemetery with the names ofall the dictatorships victims. As a consequence, those who up to that day had beenconsidered terrorists, delinquents, criminals and fugitives by the Pinochet regime,were recognized as victims of the state. However, it is not until very recently, onMarch 24, 2004 that a Museum of Memory has been inaugurated in Argentina. To

53 The Foro por la Memoria, Asociacion para la Recuperacion de la Memoria Historica, and Asociacion Guerra y

Exilio, are among the better known Spanish associations.

54 This National Commission of Disappeared Persons was created in Argentina in 1983 and documented ninethousand cases.



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establish these memorials in South America has been an up-hill battle due perhapsto the painful reflection on the crimes committed against the population by themilitary regimes. Nonetheless, the catalogue ofMemoria Abierta includes twenty twothousand written documents, four thousand photographs, a collection of threehundred and forty affiches, and the maps of clandestine detention centers of themilitary regimes; plus an oral archive with three hundred recollections of the victimsrelatives, ex prisoners, and exiles.

It is important to underline the structure of these museums that usually countwith a documentation center, juridical information such as records, processes,denunciations, etc.; a center for the reproduction of documents, and archive of

human

out the recollection of its ancestralcultural landscape.

rights abuses, deaths and disappearances and a bibliographical collectionand press files. All of these is naturally connected to the collection of visual andmaterial objects. But the most important feature is not only the commemoration ofthat that has been lost but the constitution of a reflective and active memory tounderstand the present and to grasp the causes that have altered the nationscultural landscape. In Europe and elsewhere these museums serve as venues ofcultural, educational and participatory projects for the benefit of youngergenerations. Memory and analysis, linked to regional development, explains theirsuccess and their impact on the civil society.

In this day and age the Palestinian nation may not necessarily require a state

to thrive, but it certainly cannot survive with

Fig. 9 The object of memory55

55 Published in The Globe and Mail, May 16, 2005, p. A11



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his paper is the outcome of a presentation at the Seminari International delPaisatg

Te, in October 2004 at Olot in Catalunya, Spain. I wish to express my thanks to

the fine comments of Joan Nogue-Font and Angel Quintana. I am also grateful to allmy Catalan friends and colleagues who encouraged me with their presence.

2004 mireia folch

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