Wishful Landscapes Protest and Spatial Reclamation in Jaffa

S P A C E a n d M E M O R Y Wishful Landscapes Protest and Spatial Reclamation in Jaffa Noa Shaindlinger he anthropological “arrival” of Palestinians in recent years has largely focused on questions of memory, place making, and identity formation among refugees.1 For Palestinian refugees, displacement means absence from one’s perceived “place of origin,” its commemoration, and insisting on the right to belong and return. This focus on refugeehood as constitutive of Palestinian identity sidelines the experiences of those Palestinians who remained and became Israeli citizens, albeit considered “second class” and enduring various legal forms of discrim­ ination.2 For the Palestinian citizens of Israel, displacement has meant diferent experiences in various historical moments: in 1948 and in the immediate afermath, many were prevented by the state from returning to their homes in villages, towns, and cities under the control of Israel. Although they became citizens (most under a strict military rule), they were forced to relocate to surviving Palestinian communities.3 Palestinian citizens of Israel have con­ sistently experienced forms of displacement from the state’s political and economic centers as well as from ofcial histories, both Zionist and Palestinian.4 This article interrogates the meaning of displacement for Palestinians in present­day Jafa and focuses on the creativity with which it is challenged by local activists. It is based on extensive fieldwork in 2012–13. Those years saw the resurgence of local political activism led by young Palestinians and several Israeli­Jewish allies. The emergence of new forms of Palestinian activism represents a younger generation of Palestinians who challenge the state head­ on in the streets, through cultural production, and in social media, afer a decade of relative decline in Palestinian activism following the Second (“al­Aqsa”) Intifada.5 As scholars have aptly noted, Palestinian citizens of Israel have been historically politically oriented toward Arab society within the 1948 territories. This focus usually has played out either in hotly contested party politics (especially between the Communist Party, MAKI, and their Islamist and secular liberal­nationalist rivals) or in civil society and local organizing that tackled everyday concerns.6 In the con­ text of Jafa, the main actors are local NGOs such as the nonsectarian al­Rabita (or the Association for the Jafa Arabs), Darna (Popular Committee for Land and Housing Rights), and by contrast, the Islamic Movement. While al­ Rabita has been around the longest, all three organizations attempted to address their constituents’ most pressing concerns: the acute housing shortage, access to adequate education, and fighting the efects of gentrification. The latter manifested in the successful campaign for pedestrian access to the luxurious Andromeda Hill gated commu­ nity and the Jafa Slope Project, which transformed a garbage dump site into a public park.7 The novelty of the protests discussed below, then, lies in the conscious choice of their location: the historic Clock Tower Square. While the other NGOs active in the local Palestinian community have chosen sites in Arab­ majority ‘Ajami to stage protests—either over home demolitions or in response to state violence against Gaza— the younger activists centered their eforts in the most identifiable area of the city, which has been de­Arabized T Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol. 39, No. 2, 2019 • doi 10.1215/1089201X-7586819 • © 2019 by Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/39/2/313/610863/313shaindlinger.pdf by COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS user 31 3 31 4 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • and commodified by the state, the municipality, and the private sector. Moreover, their activities represent a shif from historical patterns of party politics and instead engage with the politics of decolonization, oriented to a pan­Palestinian network of their generational counter­ parts in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the diaspora. Nerdeen, a twenty­something activist, explained to me early on that while longtime figures such as Sami Abu Shehadeh, a former municipal councillor and a local organizer with the Rabita, have taken part in the Clock Tower Square activities, they represent another gener­ ation, more preoccupied with communal survival and mired in petty local rivalries (pers. comm.). Nerdeen identified herself as part of a new generation that has largely overcome these concerns and instead situated itself within a growing network of Palestinian activ­ ists strategically confronting what she called the “root cause”—namely, the Zionist state and the “ongoing Nakba.” These protests were also a Palestinian afair: led and coordinated by Palestinians, with the tacit under­ standing that while Israeli Jews were welcome to attend, they could not presume to take up any leading role or to shape the messages. The role of Israeli Jews was second­ ary, as they were perceived as agents of displacement and gentrification. In the context of Jafa specifically, many of the Israelis present at the Clock Tower Square protests were newcomers to the city, who, priced out of rental apartments in Tel Aviv, took up residence in Jafa.8 In what follows, I argue that the Clock Tower Square protests were designed to counter the system­ atic displacement of Palestinians from those parts of Jafa identified as historically valuable (and there­ fore potentially marketable), a process that efectively de­Arabized the area and erased the historical role of Palestinians in its production. Moreover, these acts of reclamation and particularly their repetition produce “wishful landscapes.” I borrow this term from Ernest Bloch to denote the work of hope within urban spaces9: the specific forms of acts of reclamation of public spaces in Jafa seek to momentarily invoke imaginaries of pos­ sible postcolonial futures that are “not yet become” but that represent openings or opportunities for meaning­ ful political engagement and the remaking of place. For English speakers, the term may invoke “wishful think­ ing,” which is perceived as devoid of politics and which implies passivity and a feeble articulation of vague opti­ mism. Wishful landscapes, however, is constitutive of asserting political agency through the production of oppositional spaces that challenge the materialities of colonialism, neoliberalism, and gentrification. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/39/2/313/610863/313shaindlinger.pdf by COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS user 39.2 • 2019 In this context, “landscapes” and “places” are not mutually collapsible but rather intersecting concepts that are mutually constitutive and historically pro­ duced. While “place” denotes a physically identifiable site, “landscape” refers to “a contextual horizon of per­ ceptions . . . in which people feel themselves to be living in their world.”10 By speaking of wishful landscapes, then, I intend to highlight the imaginative and future­ori­ ented aspects of place­making practices that are at once tied to place but also “venture beyond” the here and now and “throw themselves actively into what is becom­ ing, to which they themselves belong.”11 The question of belonging is especially crucial in the context of this arti­ cle: by eschewing the “here and now” of Israeli settler colonialism, Palestinians in Jafa not only challenge the local realities of urban displacement and reclaim de­Ar­ abized spaces, they also reject colonial fragmentation of historic Palestine and imagine liberatory geographies that are in the process of becoming, thus illuminating the spatiotemporal dimension of wishful landscapes. The acts of reclamation that I describe below dredge up traumatic memories of destruction and displace­ ment but also of communal solidarities and forms of belonging that are brought to bear on what Frederic Jameson, in his reading of Walter Benjamin, once called the “maimed present.”12 For Palestinians in Jafa and beyond, the colonial present is a continuous “moment of danger,”13 as it has been since 1948. The production of wishful landscapes is for Palestinians a strategy to wrest history away from the state, to challenge urban displace­ ment and spatial appropriation by pointing to the possi­ bility of a world of their making that is other than what is. It is the response of the colonized to the projection of state power through the physical alteration of place. The marginalized Palestinians are currently unable to reverse decades of demolition, expropriations, and the repurposing of urban spaces, but they can disrupt the colonizer’s claims of progress and modernity by insist­ ing on bringing Benjamin’s piles of “wreckage,”14 or the human toll of colonial modernity, into our line of sight. Moreover, these acts of spatial intervention are a polit­ ically mobilizing force and provide Palestinians every­ where, not just in Jafa, an avenue to remake reality and open up new horizons of possibilities that defy Israel’s eforts at foreclosure and spatial containment. Disaster and Displacement Recently scholars have begun to account for forms of urban activism in Jafa, focusing on several key sites, such as bars, cafés, and a small local park that became Noa Shaindlinger the venue for the 2011 “tent encampment” protests.15 Here I would like to focus on one site, the historical Clock Tower Square in Jafa, specifically chosen by young Palestinian activists to stage protests. Before I turn to an analysis of these protests, this section will briefly flesh out the Ottoman­era rise of this site, its cat­ astrophic fall in 1948, and subsequent processes of spa­ tial appropriation and commodification. When its construction began in 1900 in prepara­ tion for Sultan ‘Abd al­Hamid II’s silver jubilee, the clock tower and its immediate surroundings were designed as physical markers of Ottoman urban modernity, with the emergence of new ideas about the function of the public sphere and governance. The Hamidian era is marked by conscious eforts by the empire to reconsoli­ date its rule over the Arab provinces through massive con­ struction projects that created a network of urban centers interlinked by systems of railroads and countless nearly identical public monuments, including clock towers.16 To the west of the square is the al­Mahmudiyah mosque, which stood for a glorious past, a history to revere but also to overcome, especially if the Ottomans wished to “catch up” with their European rivals.17 East and north of the clock tower were vibrant modern com­ mercial areas, with markets like the suq al­deir, owned by the Greek Orthodox Church, and al­Salahi market, the heart of Jafa’s orange trade. North of the square were the modern Bustrus and ‘Awad streets linking it to the railway station, which linked Jafa and Jerusa­ lem. The square itself was symbolically located at the intersection of three main roads: south to Gaza, east to Jerusalem, and northeast to Nablus. These roads linked Jafa with the rest of the country and the region beyond and made it a vital center of commerce, culture, and politics. And finally, the clock tower was flanked by two important markers of authority: the kishleh—the local police station and jailhouse—and the new seray, the seat of the Ottoman governor and, temporarily, the Jafa municipality, until the latter relocated to its new building in the modern quarter of Nuzha. The traumatic events of 1948 are enshrined in Pales­ tinian national memory as the Nakba (Arabic, disaster), denoting the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the territories that came under Israeli control, the destruc­ tion of hundreds of villages, towns, and urban areas, and their repopulation with Jewish migrants under subse­ quent Israeli governments. For Palestinians, the Nakba is more than the isolated event of ethnic cleansing, as it refers to the historical process of their continued sys­ tematic displacement from and within their homeland.18 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/39/2/313/610863/313shaindlinger.pdf by COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS user • Wishful Landscapes • Space and Memory In United Nations (UN) resolution 181 of November 29, 1947, which recommended the partition of Palestine between Jewish and Arab states, Jafa was consigned to complete encirclement by Jewish settlements, cut of from its agricultural hinterland as well as its satellite towns of Lydd and Ramla. Soon afer, political tensions exploded as hostilities broke out between Tel Aviv’s Jewish militants and Jafa’s armed defenders. The bru­ tality that ensued is etched in the memory of many Pal­ estinians who survived it as well as on the scarred urban landscapes. On January 4, 1948, two Stern Gang militants dis­ guised as Arabs parked a truck full of explosives hidden under a pile of oranges next to the new Seray, which housed municipal ofces as well as meetings of the local Arab committee. The dignitaries were not in the build­ ing when the truck exploded. Instead, scores of chil­ dren who were being fed on the premises were killed in the blast.19 Isma’il Abu Shehadeh, who was working nearby, shared his memory: “The place was destroyed on Sunday at nine a.m. in the morning, during break­ fast. Not all of them died, some were injured . . . it was raining. A vehicle came and parked by the Seray and detonated . . . when the building collapsed we heard the people scream; I saw boys and girls with broken legs and exposed bones. When I saw them I fainted.”20 Afer months of escalating violence and a hurried flight of the frightened civilian population, Jafa finally fell on May 13, 1948, transforming this once bustling cultural and economic center of Arab Palestine, and the region at large, into a decrepit “backyard” slum of Tel Aviv. The handful of Palestinian residents who remained, just under four thousand, were forcibly relo­ cated to ‘Ajami, formerly an afuent suburb, now hast­ ily transformed into the Arab ghetto. In subsequent decades, the Jafa Palestinian community watched as their city quickly transformed and amalgamated into Tel Aviv, as newly arrived Jewish migrants resettled in the refugees’ homes and took over their businesses, the city’s public spaces, and its ancient port. Following the conquest of Jafa, then, the Israeli state embarked on two mutually constitutive processes: the de­Arabization and Judaicization of Jafa, on one hand, and public forgetfulness and the ability to “bury” histories of mass expulsion on the other. The remaking of Jafa in the image of the state constituted normaliz­ ing occupation, in ways that convincingly submerged the “newness” of a rapid and radical urban transforma­ tion and erased Israel from the annals of global colo­ nialism. 31 5 31 6 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • Empty Façades Hailed as one of Jafa’s most iconic heritage sites, the clock tower has been expropriated from its own Pal­ estinian and Arab histories, reclaimed by the Israeli state, the Tel Aviv municipality, and neoliberal entre­ preneurs as a “quaint” tourist and commercial center. As far as Israeli Jews are concerned, local histories of military occupation and mass displacement have been relegated to the depth of collective amnesia as newer ur­ ban identities, including those of the hummus­serving Arabs and “contrived coexistence” have flourished in their stead.21 Palestinians are present in the square’s vicinity as exoticized “orientals” who serve falafel, sha­ warma, and freshly baked mana’ish (pita with za’tar) to Israelis and tourists. Otherwise, their presence is lim­ ited to consumers or passers­by. Even those who attend services at the nearby mosques are rendered invisible: worshippers enter through a side street, while the call to prayer is marketed as part of the “magical oriental soundscapes” of the ancient port city. The markets to the east of the square have also been repurposed and transformed, now part of the chic flea market, replete with small boutiques and trendy restaurants and bars catering to Tel Aviv’s middle­class Jewish population. The area has also been a prime location of rapid gen­ trification, as upscale, gated communities sprang up around the market, surrounding the old city. The old kishleh, which is adjacent to the mosque, is currently under renovation, gutted by developers who intend to turn it into a boutique hotel. The new seray met a difer­ ent fate: instead of being rebuilt, the municipality reno­ vated only the building’s imposing façade as a grotesque monument for the seray’s demise. These forms of spatial appropriation speak to con­ tinuous debates among architects, urban scholars, and preservation professionals about the role of conserva­ tion, especially in colonized cities. One approach stip­ ulates that buildings are to be preserved for the sake of their perceived “aesthetic value.” Critics argue that aes­ thetics as a defining criterion means arbitrary imposi­ tion of hierarchies of taste masked as universal and that material vestiges of the human past, including build­ ings and monuments, are instead archives of historical knowledge and cultural memory and can be read like documents.22 However, the preservation of urban material heritage in the context of Israel/Palestine raises fur­ ther questions: the founding of Israel as a Jewish state entailed the systematic erasure of vestiges of Palestinian­Arab presence on the land, following the Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/39/2/313/610863/313shaindlinger.pdf by COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS user 39.2 • 2019 mass expulsions of 1948.23 Radically altering or com­ pletely destroying the built landscapes of Palestinian urban (and rural) environments was a process explicitly designed to prevent the return of the refugees in case the international community pressured Israel for repa­ triation as a solution to the ongoing conflict. Systematic material erasures and the massive project of settlement of Jewish newcomers in Arab towns and urban quarters (and on sites of former villages) were aimed at cement­ ing the identity of the state as inherently Jewish and at undermining Palestinian claims of belonging. Against this background, the push for the historic preservation of the remains of pre­1948 Jafa, then, cannot merely be interpreted as “recovering roots” in landscapes that archive the national collective memory, nor can it be reduced to the issue of conserving “beauty.” In the late nineteenth century, European imperial powers, mainly Britain and France, used urban planning and heritage preservation as a means to rebrand colonialism and make it seem more palatable. For instance, in Egypt, the British preservation impetus corresponded with ori­ entalist forms of knowledge production and colonial perception of civilizational hierarchy.24 French colonial urbanism, for another instance, strove to make a claim for modernity by separating the Arab qasba from the new European city.25 Preserving historic Jafa, then, produced a series of “empty façades,” by which I mean conserving authentic elements of the original Arab architecture while gutting its internal spaces. Moreover, this process of erasure rendered the modern history of Arab Jafa invisible, casting Israelis as rescuers of dilapidated beauty that had been abandoned by its former custodians. Within this logic, the façade may be Arab in origin, but Israe­ lis earned their ownership of the cultural heritage of Jafa, not just through military occupation but also by acknowledging and preserving the aesthetic value of these historic buildings. That Clock Tower Square is the rendezvous point for tourist groups and walking tours is instructive. The creation of empty façades was part of processes of com­ modifying historic Jafa and of its subsequent embed­ dedness in global circuits of tourism. Much has been written about the modern history of Western tourism to the region and the orientalist imagination.26 These practices of commodification and neoliberalization of native spaces are prevalent in late capitalism’s colonial settler societies, with which Israel is commensurate. Rendering the colonized native quaint and palatable for global and domestic tourists was made possible because Noa Shaindlinger of the subjugation of aboriginal peoples by settler­colonial states and their (at least partial) elision from the annals of history. The consumption of indigenous “authenticity” reinforces the colonial racial order and coalesces with private­sector economic interests.27 In other words, mar­ keting “oriental” Jafa as a global and domestic tourist destination generates income, which then feeds into further investment in urban development projects that benefit the upper echelon of Jewish­Israeli society, all without disrupting the settler­colonial order of things. Bound and Blindfolded In the summer of 2011, the J1428 mass protests erupted in response to rising housing costs: under the banner of social justice, disparate civil society groups mobi­ lized young middle­class Israelis to take to the streets weekly, demanding tighter regulation on the rental market, expansion of public housing, and an increase in government subsidies of basic foodstufs. The most rec­ ognizable feature of the movement was the erection of tent encampments, first in Rothchild Boulevard, at the heart of Tel Aviv, and then in other, less afuent, parts of the country. Within two weeks, Palestinian activists decided to join the J14 movement and set up their pro­ test encampment on Yefet street, in the small Gazans Park, located in the quarter of ‘Ajami, densely populated by Palestinians. J14 brought the younger generation of Palestinian yaffawi who have experienced or witnessed renewed waves of evictions and home demolitions in the wake of the “revitalization” (read gentrification) of Jafa. However, despite their eforts to integrate into the mainstream protest movement in the hope of making the particular problems of Jafa’s Palestinians visible, they constantly found themselves marginalized; the middle­class Jewish leadership of J14 expected Palestin­ ians to silence the issue of their subordination as second­ class citizens of Israel, for the sake of movement cohesion and its purported nonpolitical nature.29 Thus, the par­ ticipation of Jafa’s Palestinian activists in J14 repre­ sented a moment of fleeting hope for change followed by bitter disappointment, as homeless families were not provided with a permanent solution before the forced dissolution of the encampment by municipal ofcials. However, several of the young activists became the core group of Palestinian organizers who soon claimed a new site to stage protests. When I began my fieldwork in Jafa in late summer of 2011, I almost immediately gravitated to the Gazans Park encampment, since most of the local activists I intended to interview congre­ gated there nightly. Little did I know that those first Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/39/2/313/610863/313shaindlinger.pdf by COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS user • Wishful Landscapes • Space and Memory encounters would not only lead to long­term camara­ derie and collaboration but would reorient my research in an unexpected direction. Afer the dismantling of the tent encampment, and over that winter, I watched as young Palestinian activists—who, so to speak, cut their political teeth in the abortive J14 movement—cohered as a group around issues that transcend the woes of their local community. What follows is the evolution of the Clock Tower Square protests from small daily per­ formances to a sustained and vocal presence in the city’s public space most frequented by Israelis and tourists. In the spring of 2012, the most burning issue on the national agenda for Palestinians was the plight of administrative detainees.30 Two of them, Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahleh, had been on hunger strike for more than two months to protest their arbitrary detention. As a show of solidarity, at least fifeen hundred prisoners also launched a hunger strike on Prisoner’s Day, April 17, 2012, demanding an end to administrative detention as a punitive measure and the release of Diab and Halahleh, whose condition was rapidly deteriorating.31 That was the context for the first public performance by the Jafa activists at Clock Tower Square. For several days, a small group of mostly female activists, the majority of whom were Palestinians, arrived in the square at a particular time. Then, to the surprise of passers­by, they knelt down, bound and blindfolded (fig. 1). The performance mimicked the treatment of Palestinian detainees at the hands of Israeli soldiers, a sight with which most Israeli civilians are unfamiliar. The performance was carried out in absolute silence. The “detainees” remained on their knees for the duration (or at least as long as they could without cramping), immobile and unresponsive, even when Israeli pedestrians and drivers cursed them Figure 1. Activists perform a simulation of Palestinian prisoners, bound and blindfolded. February 17, 2013. Photo by Haim Schwarzcenberg. 31 7 31 8 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • or expressed their wish that the hunger strikers perish. These daily performances evolved over time: as more activists joined, several remained standing, holding a small banner with a slogan protesting administrative detention, handwritten in Arabic; then the Palestinian flag was added to the performance. As the appearance of these markers intensified, so did the reaction of ran­ dom Israelis. We were spat at, threatened, and told to “move to Gaza, live with the Hamas [commonly mispro­ nounced “khamas” by Israeli Jews].” The daily “bound performance,” as we came to call it, became a routine for the activists and those people, Palestinians and Israelis, who work in or regularly pass by the square. The performance was designed in part to produce this routinization: afer all, bound and blind­ folded humans had not been part of the oriental land­ scape carefully marketed to tourists and developers. The performance disrupted routines of leisurely consump­ tion, positioned Palestinians as something other than courteous servers of shawarma and hummus (which Israelis pronounce “khumus”). For an hour each day, Clock Tower Square was symbolically overtaken by the abject and the deliberately forgotten, Palestinian polit­ ical prisoners who languished in Israeli jails, detainees incarcerated without trial, and stateless colonial sub­ jects whose fates were arbitrarily decided by military courts where conviction rates hovered at 98 percent.32 The routinized momentary presence of the abject, blindfolded Palestinians was aimed at the Israelis who frequented the square. The “bound performance” dis­ rupted the normalcy of occupation: the deliberate choice of Clock Tower Square, in front of the empty façade of the seray, dredged up sedimented memories of terror and violence. Through this performance, activists were not only claiming the site as Palestinian and Arab but reminded spectators that colonial violence and mass expulsion enabled the re­creation of the square as a site of tourism and consumption. Moreover, the daily ap­ pearance of blindfolded and bound “prisoners” was also meant to remind Israelis of the realities of post­ 1967 occupation, trigering uncomfortable memories of their military service. With the exception of the ultra­ orthodox, most Palestinian citizens, and the occasional conscientious objectors, most Israelis enlist at age eigh­ teen for their compulsory military service. The bound performances at Clock Tower Square were designed to elicit less romantic memories of complicity in torture, imprisonment, and repression of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. These unwelcome memories were, most likely, the source of the open hostility that the Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/39/2/313/610863/313shaindlinger.pdf by COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS user 39.2 • 2019 activists encountered as they disrupted the veneer of normalcy and punctured the routines of civilian lives with the shame and guilt of colonial military violence. Thus the daily performance not only challenged the spa­ tial appropriation of the square but—more importantly— temporarily reappropriated and endowed the empty façades that marked the site with substance that under­ mined the colonial order. Commemorating Disaster A year later, on a hot and sunny day, activists gathered at the foot of the clock tower to mark Nakba Day, com­ memorated annually by Palestinians on May 15.33 The gathering was organized by the same activists who had staged the bound performance I described above, in conjunction with Zochrot, an Israeli NGO established in the early 2000s with the aims of educating the Israeli public about the Nakba and promoting a culture of rec­ ognition and reconciliation. Eitan Bronstein, founder and then­director of Zochrot, was on hand and invited the growing crowd to join him on a tour of depopu­ lated Palestinian villages in areas annexed to Tel Aviv afer 1948. In the meantime, more people gathered on the narrow trafc island on which the clock tower is perched, huddled together in a small circle on one side of the tower to escape the scorching midday sun. The crowd seemed eager to listen to an elderly man, sit­ ting cross­leged at the foot of the tower, recounting in Hebrew his painful memories of the Nakba, his voice periodically drowned by the heavy trafc and the honk­ ing of impatient drivers. At the same time, a smaller group of people on the edge of the trafc island was crouching over a large white sheet of cloth, taking turns as each one added words or drawings scribbled with red, green, or black acrylic paint (fig. 2). The sheet was quickly filled with scrib­ bles: at the top, someone painted “1948” and “we will not forget” on its lef side. Directly underneath was the Palestinian flag prominently featured in the middle of the sheet. Most of the sheet was covered with names of places in historic Palestine that were ethnically cleansed partially (al­Quds/Jerusalem, Haifa, ‘Akka/Acre) or com­ pletely destroyed (Zakariya, Bisan, Lubya and Deir Yassin). Someone made a point to remind the audience that Jafa is Palestinian (Yaffa Filastiniyah at the bottom lef) as a way to indicate that despite the ongoing de­ Arabization of the city, its Palestinianness and the root­ edness of Palestinians cannot be undermined, despite eforts to appropriate and commodify its public spaces. That the scribbles were exclusively in Arabic, a language Noa Shaindlinger Figure 2. Palestinian activists scribble names of depopulated villages and towns. Nakba commemoration, Clock Tower Square, May 15, 2013. Photo by the author. that the majority of Israeli­Jews are unable to read or speak,34 points to the intention to defy erasure; not only is the Palestinian national flag featured in public dur­ ing the most nationalistic and militaristic time of year in Israel,35 but the language of the perceived “enemy” is prominently displayed, alien and therefore considered hostile for Israeli­Jews. Furthermore, while the story­ telling performance at the foot of the tower targeted a mixed Arab­Jewish crowd of eager listeners, the group huddled around the sheet and those who actively par­ ticipated in the painting activity were exclusively Pal­ estinian and youthful, the majority appearing to be in their late teens. The painted sheet represented more than com­ memoration of loss and displacement. On both sides of the Palestinian flags were powerful future­oriented invocations: on the right, “returning” (‘Aidat wa-’aidun, in both the feminine and the masculine forms), while on the lef, a rendering of Handhala, the famed carica­ ture by slain Palestinian artist Naji al­’Ali. Handhala rep­ resents its creator as a ten­year­old refugee. He stands with his back to us, barefoot and in tattered clothes. His hands, clasped behind his back, symbolize a rejection of both humanitarian regimes and the futile Arab gov­ Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/39/2/313/610863/313shaindlinger.pdf by COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS user • Wishful Landscapes • Space and Memory ernments. Handhala may be stateless and poor, but he is proudly resilient, willing to engage in armed strugle in order to regain his beloved homeland.36 Both the inscrip­ tion “returning” and Handhala on the sheet represented a call to action: Palestinians should work together as a nation (hence the flag in the middle) in order to defeat settler colonialism and return to the homeland. Although the right of Palestinians to return was explicitly invoked in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 11, 1948,37 and conforms to binding norms of international law,38 the Israeli state has suc­ ceeded in diverting discussions about the fate of the Palestinians in the international community to empha­ size humanitarianism, on one hand, and resettlement on the other. Following Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and with the emergence of the two­state solution in the mid­1970s, the fate of the 1948 refugees has been further relegated to the margins of international politics. The question of the refugees was also deliberately sidelined by the parties negotiating the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. The call for the right of return at Jafa’s Clock Tower Square aimed to symbolically undermine Israel’s continued eforts to reject the refugees’ sense of belonging to historic Pal­ estine and to promote their resettlement elsewhere in the Arab world (and beyond). It also tacitly targeted the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) failure to sincerely promote the right of return for all Palestinians and its subordi­ nation to Israel’s security and demographic concerns.39 Right next to the group painting on the white sheet was Israeli artist, activist, and architect Gil Mu’lem Doron. At the time, Doron was living in Jafa and had been involved in political activism against home demo­ litions and displacement of Palestinians through his artistic work. Doron’s Nakba Day project also consisted of a blank white sheet as a canvas for public partici­ pation; however, in this instance, people were asked to draw a symbolic map of Jafa marked by broken Arabesque­style floor tiles (fig. 3). While artisan­made tiles adorned the floors of many modern Arab homes in pre­1948 Jafa, mass­produced versions have made a comeback in recent years as markers of “authenticity” desired by Jewish gentrifiers, who are also attracted to the high ceilings and oversized windows of restored Arab homes. But unlike the mass­produced Israeli mimicry, Doron’s tiles are broken, their once­lively col­ ors faded, marking true authenticity, as they were col­ lected from sites of destruction along the city’s beaches. Growing audiences streamed from one group to an­ other. People stopped to contribute to the Arabic­language 31 9 320 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • Figure 3. Attendees contribute to Gil Mu’lem Doron’s artwork. Nakba commemoration, Clock Tower Square, May 15, 2013. Photo by the author. sheet, which quickly filled with inscriptions. Doron’s sheet was still largely blank, as some inquired of the artist about the meaning of the project. A few chil­ dren crouched down beside the sheet, drawing tiles with colorful markers, remaking the original patterns and adding their own messages in tiny Arabic inscrip­ tions. Doron’s tile map was figurative. Other than per­ sonal messages by individual contributors, there were no literal markers of the city’s quarters or landmarks. And yet, for Palestinians, each tile represented a specific place. Someone pointed to her drawing and explained, “This is Manshiyyeh.” Another drawing represented ‘Ajami. Rather than reproducing ofcial contemporary or touristic maps of the city, the project was a symbolic invocation of historic Jafa, reintegrating those quarters that have long been expropriated and Judaicized, like the old city and Clock Tower Square. The Nakba Day activities at Clock Tower Square represented a challenge to Israeli society. Rather than stage a protest or a commemoration ceremony in the Arab­majority quarter of ‘Ajami, activists chose a traf­ fic island, a raised platform in the midst of a busy thor­ oughfare, to defy the seeming normalcy of occupation. They intended to disrupt colonial complacency by forc­ Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/39/2/313/610863/313shaindlinger.pdf by COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS user 39.2 • 2019 ing Palestinian presence into the line of sight of Israeli Jews in a political atmosphere of denial and deliberate erasures. The two artistic projects represented forms of indigenous spatial knowledge that defied physical elisions and appropriations. Just as exiled Palestinians re­created their native landscapes in refugee camps,40 and returnees/visitors like Ibrahim Abu Lughod could see beyond the transformation of the city and recog­ nize sites that are meaningful for them41 even if they are physically gone, so can Palestinians who remained produce memory maps and lay their claims to belong. The dynamics of the Nakba Day performance also illuminate the internal tensions over commemoration as a form of agency. The integration of Zochrot, an Israeli­ Jewish NGO that conducts its activities in Hebrew, into commemorative performance organized by Palestinians on a day of national remembrance highlights the mul­ tivocality of memory activism in settler­colonial society and in Israel­Palestine in particular. Although the story­ teller was Palestinian, he recounted his painful memo­ ries of occupation and internal displacement in Hebrew for a mixed audience. Other than Zochrot, the Pales­ tinians who presided over this activity were older and more established within their community, with years of political engagement, such as former municipal coun­ cillor Sami Abu Shehadeh. When I asked him about his approach to organizing, he exclaimed: “we can hold pro­ tests in ‘Ajami all we want, but we would be preaching to the choir. Israelis are going nowhere, and the truth is, we must relate to them somehow.” Abu Shehadeh’s views align with Zochrot’s mission statement, both emphasiz­ ing the significance of co­resisting settler colonialism through role reversal: the Palestinians as authoritative narrators of history and Israeli Jews as listeners.42 By contrast, the group around the painted sheet was youn­ ger and exclusively Palestinian. That they deliberately opted to adorn the sheet with Arabic inscriptions ges­ tures to the more recent trend of younger Palestinians increasingly abandoning older models of co­resistance, which, as Maysa, a student activist, explained to me, is perceived as a form of co­optation. Instead, Maysa and her peers collaborate with their counterparts in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Within this logic, Palestinians are both the producers and the consumers of histories, ridding themselves of the need to convince Israelis of the veracity of their memories. This shif frees them to expand the scope of internal historical debates and chal­ lenge prevailing nationalist doxa. The viscerally hostile response of Israeli Jews walking by Clock Tower Square is not merely repre­ Noa Shaindlinger sentative of the increasing antagonism toward public commemoration of the Nakba brewing on social media and actively encouraged by Israeli right­wing lawmak­ ers.43 As the activities on the trafc island were picking up, three men and a woman crossed over and began an altercation with the activists at the square. The belliger­ ent passers­by, upset at the sight of Palestinian flags in a public space, began hurling racial insults, and in the vain of Im Tirtzu supporters wished attendees a “sec­ ond Nakba.” A kufyeh­clad, bespectacled Palestinian activist interceded between the sides in order to pre­ vent physical violence. Eventually, the four Israelis lef the square, and activities resumed. The incident is indicative of what is at stake for both Israelis and Palestinians: when some Israelis vocally deny the mass expulsion of Palestinian­Arabs in 1948 but simultaneously call for a “second Nakba,” they are not denying the events that lef the majority of Palestinians outside their historic homeland. Rather, they are rejecting the political and moral implications of these realities: namely, that they, as Israeli citizens, are implicated in an ongoing colonial project and that their claims to place are rooted in violent extractions. In other words, by disrupting everyday scenes of urban normalcy, particularly in public spaces that are outside Arab enclaves, Palestinian activists undermine Zion­ ist claims to rootedness and its attendant narratives of “place of origin,” exile, and return. Staging a Nakba Day commemoration that explicitly invokes the right of return directly challenges what is probably the most important tenet of Zionism—the idea that the state of Israel represents a just repatriation of a persecuted and displaced nation to its historical homeland and to the annals of history.44 Figure 4. Activists block the streets around Clock Tower Square during a protest against the Prawer Plan, July 15, 2013. Photo by Haim Schwarzcenberg. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/39/2/313/610863/313shaindlinger.pdf by COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS user • Wishful Landscapes • Space and Memory Connecting Geographies of Destruction A few months later, Jafa witnessed the protests around the Prawer Plan, which marked, perhaps, the height of the Clock Tower Square actions. Ofcially known as the Bill on the Arrangement of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev, the Prawer Plan was designed by Israeli ofcials as a scheme to resettle Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev southern region of the country in existing towns, dissolving the “unrecognized villages” dotting the des­ ert. The intention behind this plan was to evict at least fify thousand of the state’s Bedouin citizens from their homes and lands in order to resettle them in remote and economically depressed enclaves and make room for new exclusively Jewish settlements.45 Palestinian activists in Jafa joined the mass mobilization eforts across historic Palestine and staged local protests at Clock Tower Square. These actions were profoundly dif­ ferent from the earlier 2012 bound performances. First, protesters showed up in greater numbers, filling the square and ofen spilling onto the asphalt and disrupt­ ing trafc. Second, the performances evolved over the previous year to become male­dominant. When a pro­ test was announced, it was young male activists who showed up in increasing numbers with a prepared list of chants. They allocated specific roles and rearranged the positions of participants on the small trafc island. Finally, the Prawer protests were designed to claim Pal­ estinian presence by taking up both physical and sonic spaces. Unlike the silence that pervaded earlier perfor­ mances, these protests entailed nonstop loud chanting, the waving of several Palestinian flags, and the display of countless banners in Arabic and English (fig. 4). I would like now to consider the imaginaries invoked by these performances and the kind of wish­ ful landscapes they produced. Clock Tower Square was to be physically, if temporarily, occupied by Palestinian bodies who are visibly Palestinian, by nationalist mark­ ers such as the flag, and by the kufyat worn around the neck, reminiscent of PLO guerilla fighters. This was not a coincidence. The activists invoked the image of the guerilla fighter as a symbol of national strugle that persists across borders. It is the fight for libera­ tion from settler colonialism that unites Palestinians, irrespective of their relative subordination: as second­ class citizens, subjects of military rule, or stateless refu­ gees living in camps across the border. The Palestinian nation is reimagined as united despite the eforts of the colonizer to dissect the nation’s body and deny its exis­ tence. The image of unity is repeatedly invoked through chants, such as, “Occupation get out / out of the Naqab 321 322 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • [Negev], out of Ramallah / out of Lydda, out of Jafa,” or “The more you legislate / we remain on our land / from the Naqab to Jenin / we remain steadfast on our land / from ‘Ajami to Manshiyyeh / to the Naqab we send our blessing / from the Naqab came the decision / we are the landlords / from Jafa came the decision / will, power and persistence.” The activists reimagine historic Pales­ tine as one again, with Jafa as its political center, sur­ passing Jerusalem, which is rarely mentioned in these chants. Manshiyyeh, mentioned in these chants as ‘Aja­ mi’s counterpart, was Jafa’s northern quarter, utterly demolished and depopulated in 1948, and finally, sev­ eral years later, erased by the Tel Aviv municipality, save the Hasan Bek mosque.46 The image of Jafa invoked in these chants unearths Manshiyyeh, its remains still buried beneath the Charles Clore Park, today a site of leisurely strolls and family picnics.47 The invocation of a long destroyed and literally buried urban quarter during a protest against home demolitions in another region of the country serves as a powerful warning for Israel: Manshiyyeh represents the stinging national defeat of the past, but the resistance to the Prawer Plan is an indication of a new generation of Palestinians that will not yield to colonial power. Put diferently: the Negev/Naqab Bedouin villages will not meet the same fate as Manshiyyeh if “we” (the activists) can help it. Finally, the anti­Prawer demonstrations also saw a significant increase in the participation of Israeli Jews alongside Palestinian activists, signaling a shif in the dynamics of the strugle: though small in number, the visibility of Israeli Jews in the protests represented newly emerging forms of anticolonial alliance that eschewed the Oslo­era “dialogue” model that maintained the political status quo, created a false symmetry between colonizer and colonized, and reinforced ethnic segre­ gation between Israelis and Palestinians.48 The emerg­ ing alliance in Clock Tower Square was Palestinian­led and invoked a vision for political spaces that are inclu­ sionary and that eschew the subordination and obliter­ ation of Arabness. This alliance articulates with other spaces in Jafa that represent potential postcolonial urban geographies through forms of everyday Arab­ Jewish sociability and cooperation.49 Nevertheless, these emerging forms of collaboration also produced fraught moments, when, for instance, Jewish activists quietly complained that since the entire repertoire of chants was in Arabic, they felt marginalized. “Do they even want us here?,” questioned Ronit, who had recently moved to an apartment on Jafa’s Jerusalem Boulevard, occasionally spending her evenings dancing to Arab Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/39/2/313/610863/313shaindlinger.pdf by COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS user 39.2 • 2019 pop music at a local bar. But then again, uneasy political alliances are ofen tinged with moments of doubt and mutual suspicion. Conclusion How do colonized people challenge the continued de­ struction of the material remains of their heritage? The settler­colonial state strives to consolidate its power by asserting control over collective memory through the production of history as well as by systematically eras­ ing, altering, and expropriating the vestiges of indig­ enous material culture. Since 1948, Palestinians have devised strategies to preserve the spatial memories of their destroyed homes through the production of place­ based memorial books, the reconfiguration of refu­ gee camps, and communal commemorative practices, among other things. Indigenous forms of knowledge production about places of origin are indicative of other ways of seeing: Palestinians, for instance, inhabit colo­ nized spaces but are able to “see through” altered land­ scapes. This kind of recognition has rendered urban spaces into layers of a palimpsest made of imagined and remembered landscapes superimposed on mate­ rial ones. These forms of indigenous knowledge and emplacement imply an intimate relationship to place that buttresses Palestinian claims of belonging and at the same time undermines the colonizer’s sense of enti­ tlement and ownership of place. If the demolishment and alteration of urban land­ scapes are designed to normalize colonial occupation and remake space in its image, then the actions that I describe in the three vignettes above and the wishful landscapes they produce work to unsettle this project. Re­occupation and reclaiming of Palestinian spaces aim not just to elicit the colonizer’s anxiety, pangs of guilt, or fear of engulfment, as the case may be; moreover, the sudden disorientation in the colonized city, the mo­ mentary appearance of the familiar as unfamiliar—in this case, Clock Tower Square as a recognizable heritage touristic site—highlight the colonizers’ foreignness and their inability to claim intimate knowledge of place. This disorientation stands in contrast with the famil­ iarity of Palestinians with space, in the face of destruc­ tion and loss. This encounter, therefore, is also a form of conversation: Israeli­Jewish spectators are forced to acknowledge the uncomfortable presence of what has been normalized as invisible, recognize the existence of that which had been suppressed and made subcon­ scious; this recognition also compels Israelis to respond in unexpected ways: some become hostile, while others, Noa Shaindlinger if fewer, join forces with Palestinians and seek new ave­ nues for co­resistance. Finally, these acts of spatial reclamation openly undermine multiple forms of displacement: invoking the Nakba as a point of departure for the settler­colonial state and as a moment of Palestinian collective trauma reinforces the presence of Arabness and Palestinian­ ness within colonized and commodified urban spaces. Although the state controls multiple sites of historical production—through its robust archival practices as well as its ability to reshape landscapes—Palestinians reassert their role as historical agents, actors, and sub­ jects,50 despite their colonial subordination. Through repeated staging of protests, Clock Tower Square becomes once again, even if only fleetingly, part of Arab Jafa. ‘Ajami ceases to be an enclave, as it has been since 1948, and reconnects to its historical center as the activ­ ists narrate the story both of its inception as a modern suburb and of the violence that severed the two. The Clock Tower Square protests are practices of emplacement that produce imaginative remapping of the nation and its colonized homeland. Israel’s spatial practices entail the continued fragmentation of Pal­ estine and of Palestinians: “Israeli­Arabs” who reside within the state’s pre­1967 territories, Palestinians sub­ jected to military control in the West Bank, those who survive under siege in the Gaza Strip, and finally—the diaspora. Those groups are also subdivided according to their geographic location and access to political rights and material resources. While the enfeebled national­ ist leadership has been unable to efectively challenge these processes of fragmentation, grassroots and local organizers, such as the Jafa­based activists, take a lead­ ing role and provide Palestinians (and allies) avenues to refashion their sense of belonging, overthrow colonial boundaries, and craf a vision for the future of Pales­ tine. My analysis of local protests, then, demonstrates multiple forms of anti­ and decolonial engagement beyond the realm of politics and peace negotiations. It is also indicative of the potential of studying materiali­ ties as another site for the battleground over the history of Israel/Palestine, beyond the archives. Noa Shaindlinger earned her PhD from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the Univer­ sity of Toronto in 2016. Her work centers on Palestinian refugees and the futures of their right to return. She is currently finishing a two­year postdoctoral fellowship at North Carolina State University. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/39/2/313/610863/313shaindlinger.pdf by COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS user • Wishful Landscapes • Space and Memory Notes This essay came out of the contingencies of fieldwork and the unin­ tended encounters that taught me more than any book could. I am indebted to the activists I met in Jafa who generously shared their insights and time with me and invited me to observe and take part in their activism for justice. I also owe profound gratitude to all the people who have supported my work in multiple ways: Jens Hans­ sen, Amira Mittermaier, Akram Khater, Daniel Monterescu, Susan Benson­Sokmen, Ian Costa, and Haim Schwarczenberg. 1. Furani and Rabinowitz, “Ethnographic Arrival of Palestine,” iden­ tified a significant increase in ethnographies on Palestine and Pales­ tinians in the past two decades. Notable examples are Allan, Refugees of the Revolution; Gren, Occupied Lives; Hammer, Palestinians Born in Exile; Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair; Richter­Devroe, “‘Like Something Sacred’”; and Sayigh, Palestinians. 2. On the formation of Palestinian citizens of Israel as the state’s internal “others,” see Robinson, Citizen Strangers. For salient exam­ ples of the prolific scholarship on the subaltern status of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, see Abu Saad, “Separate and Unequal”; and Smooha, “Minority Status in an Ethnic Democracy.” In addition, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as Human Rights Watch and Adalah have documented the legal and formal discrim­ ination of the Palestinians within Israel. See Coursen­Nef, Second Class. Adalah’s ample documentation is available on their website. Adalah, www.adalah.org/en (accessed December 27, 2018). 3. See, for instance, Schechla, “The Invisible People Come to Light”; Wakim, “The ‘Internally Displaced’”; Masalha, Catastrophe Remembered; Kanaaneh and Nusair, Displaced at Home; and Sabbagh­Khoury, “The Internally Displaced Palestinians in Israel.” 4. Historian Ilan Pappe therefore aptly emphasized the “forgotten” historical experiences of Palestinians in Israel (or “’48 Arabs”), rel­ egated to the margins of collective memory: in Israel, because they are non­Jews in an avowedly Jewish state; and in “ofcial” iterations of Palestinian nationalism because they purportedly “capitulated” by remaining. Pappe, Forgotten Palestinians. 5. Specifically, the brutality of the Israeli police toward Palestinians demonstrating in Israel in early October 2000. The killing of thir­ teen unarmed Palestinian protesters by the police sent shock waves throughout Palestinian communities in Israel and beyond and marked a turning point in the already­existing tensions between the Israeli­Jewish majority of the citizenry and the Palestinian­Arab minority. See Bishara, “Reflections on October 2000.” 6. Monterescu, Jaffa, Shared and Shattered, 293. 7. Monterescu, Jaffa, Shared and Shattered, provides an analysis of the activities of al­Rabita (and, to a lesser degree, Darna) since its estab­ lishment in 1979. Mark Levine, “Nationalism, Religion, and Urban Politics in Israel” zooms in on the activities of the Rabita and the Islamic Movement in Jafa. 8. Anthropologist Daniel Monterescu identifies them as “radical gentrifiers.” See Monterescu, Jaffa Shared and Shattered. 9. Bloch, Principle of Hope 10. Steward and Strathern, “Introduction,” 4. 11. Bloch, Hope, 3. 12. Jameson, Marxism and Form, 61. 13. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 391. 323 324 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 14. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 392. 15. Monterescu and Shaindlinger, “Situational Radicalism.” 16. See, for instance, Çelik, Empire, Architecture, and the City; Tamari, “Urban Planning and the Remaking of the Public Sphere in Otto­ man Palestine”; Kark, “Contribution of the Ottoman Regime to the Development of Jerusalem and Jafa, 1840–1917”; Kark, Jaffa, A City in Evolution; and Levine, Overthrowing Geographies. 17. See Kana’an, “Two Ottoman Sabils in Jafa”; Kana’an, “Waqf, Architecture, and Political Self­Fashioning.” 18. Zureiq, The Meaning of Disaster; Hardan, “Al-Nakbah in Arab Thought.” 19. See Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe, 83–84; Radai argues no children were in the building at the time, since the blast occurred on a Sunday, when the welfare kitchen did not operate. See Radai, “Jafa, 1948.” Palestinian historian Mustafa Murad al­Dabbagh (Our Country Palestine, 278) argues that at least thirty people perished in the blast, among them “quite a few of Jafa’s educated youth.” See Ahmed­Farajeh, Ibrahim Abu Lughod, 46; The Hebrew­language daily Davar reported on the blast, admitting the building was being used by the municipal social services as a soup kitchen for underpriv­ ileged children, and mentioned that “14 Arabs were killed.” Davar, “Multiple Casualties in an Explosion at the National Committee’s Building in Jafa.” 20. Abu Shehadeh, quoted in Hazan and Monterescu, ‘Ir bein ‘arbayim, 90. Another version of his testimony appears in LeBor, City of Oranges, 108. 21. The phrase was coined by Daniel Monterescu to denote this ambiguous form of sharing Jafa’s urban space. 22. Semes, Future of the Past. 23. Kadman, Erased from Space and Consciousness. 24. Sanders, Creating Medieval Cairo. 25. Rabinow, French Modern; Wright, Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism; Fuller, “Preservation and Self­Absorption”; von Hen­ neberg, “Imperial Uncertainties.” 26. Melman, Women’s Orients; McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya; Daher, Tourism in the Middle East; Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt; Stein, Itineraries in Conflict. 27. Imada, Aloha America; Gentry, History, Heritage, and Colonialism; Mawani, “From Colonialism to Multiculturalism?”; McGregor and Schumaker, “Heritage in Southern Africa.” 28. In the vein of young Egyptian revolutionaries who coined J25 to mark January 25th as the eruption of the mass anti­Mubarak pro­ tests, Israeli activists established July 14, 2011, as the beginning of their housing revolt. 29. Monterescu and Shaindlinger, “Situational Radicalism.” 30. Administrative detention can also be arbitrarily renewed with no limit. See, for instance, Cohen­Almagor, “Reflections on Administra­ tive Detention in Israel”; Feuerstein, Without Trial; and Pelleg­Syrck, “The Mysteries of Administrative Detention.” 31. Traubman, “Human Rights Group Attacks Israeli Government”; Abusalama, “Palestinian Detainees’ Empty Stomachs Are Stronger than Their Jailers.” That hunger strike ended with an Egyptian­ brokered deal that concluded Halahleh and Diab were to be released Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/39/2/313/610863/313shaindlinger.pdf by COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS user 39.2 • 2019 upon the end of their detention. Ma’an News, “Lawyer: Administra­ tive Detainees Agree to End Strike.” 32. Levinson, “Nearly 100% of all Military Court Cases in the West Bank End in Conviction, Haaretz Learned.” 33. Nakba Day has been commemorated by Palestinians in the dias­ pora, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip on May 15, the date the state of Israel was ofcially founded. However, Palestinian citizens of Israel have participated in the annual March of Return on the same day Israelis celebrate Independence Day. The March of Return, orga­ nized since the 1990s by the Committee of Internally Displaced Persons, is an annual event held at the location of a depopulated Pal­ estinian village destroyed in 1948. See, for instance Cohen, “Thou­ sands of Palestinians Mark Nakba Day at March of Return.” 34. Shenhav et al., Command of Arabic among Israeli Jews. According to this report, about 10 percent of Israelis understand spoken Arabic, but only 2.6 percent are able to read an Arabic newspaper, and 1 per­ cent can read Arabic books. 35. Nakba Day usually falls just before or afer Israel marks its annual Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers followed by its Independence Day celebrations. The Israeli blue and white national flag is commonly featured in public spaces, on balconies, storefronts, and vehicles, including in Jafa and around Clock Tower Square. 36. Najjar, “Cartoons as a Site for the Construction of Palestinian Refugee Identity.” 37. UN General Assembly, Resolution 194, A/RES/194 (III), December 11, 1948. 38. Quigley, “Displaced Palestinians and the Right of Return.” 39. The president of the feeble PA, Mahmoud Abbas, claimed he renounced his right to return to his native Safad in northern historic Palestine. See Sherwood, “Mahmoud Abbas Outrages Palestinian Refugees by Waiving His Right to Return.” 40. Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair. 41. Abu Lughod, “Return to Half­Ruins.” 42. Gutman, Memory Activism. 43. In recent years, hostility toward the invocation of the Nakba by Palestinians in Israel (and increasingly by Israeli­Jewish non­Zionist activists) has increased exponentially. Ultra­Zionist NGO Im Tirtzu, for instance, has produced and disseminated a leaflet called Nakba Kharta (Nakba Nonsense), and has been encouraging followers to disrupt Nakba commemoration events. For instance, Im Tirtzu joins forces with other ultra­Zionist groups to protest the annual Nakba commemoration ceremony held outside Tel Aviv University; see Deger, “Im Tirtzu Protest ‘Nakba Bullshit’ at Tel Aviv University.” The scene has repeated itself since. Im Tirtzu has been successful holding sway in Israeli­Jewish public opinion; see Zonszein, “How Im Tirtzu Dominates Israel’s Public Debate.” 44. Raz­Krakotzkin, “Exile, History, and the Nationalization of Jew­ ish Memory.” 45. On the Prawer Plan, see Cook, “The Negev’s Hot Wind Blowing”; and Amara, “The Negev Land Question.” On the so­called unrecog­ nized villages, see Nevo, “The Politics of Un­recognition”; Marx and Meir, “Land, Towns, and Planning”; Abu­Rabia, “Memory, Belonging, and Resistance”; and Yifachel, Roded, and Kedar. “Between Rights and Denials.” Noa Shaindlinger 46. While Hasan Bek still functions as a place of worship for Jafa’s Muslims, nearby half­ruins of a structure were repurposed and incor­ porated into a museum commemorating the occupation of Jafa by the Irgun. 47. On the razing and subsequent burial of Manshiyyeh underneath the Charles Clore Park, see Rotbard, ‘Ir levanah, ‘ir shehorah, 235–40. 48. On the dialogue models as strategies for conflict resolution, see Maoz, “Does Contact Work in Protracted Asymmetrical Conflict?”; and Abu­Nimer, Dialogue, Conflict Resolution, and Change. 49. Among these places are the Ana Lou Lou bar, Café Yafa, and Café Salma, the latter succeeded by café Chai Guevara. See Monterescu and Schickler, “Creative Marginality.” 50. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 23–24. References Abu Lughod, Lila. “Return to Half­Ruins: Memory, Postmemory, and Living History in Palestine.” In Nakba: Palestine 1948 and the Claims of Memory, edited by Ahmed H. Sa’di and Lila Abu Lughod, 77–104. 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