Abstract
The union of art and politics has endured down the centuries, looking to the past, through memory,
and to the future, through desire. The memory of what was or could have been provides a utopia to be
celebrated or mourned, and since 1948 Palestinian and Israeli art has reflected on loss and gain,
sacrifice and security, and presence and absence in the land. Contemporary Palestinian and Israeli art
has converged, seeking peace, critical reflection and an acknowledgement of the impact of the years
of unrest that has been borne by both sides, while technology has afforded a means to trace
heterotopias in the spaces between possession and dispossession. Drawing on Luisa Passerini, Michel
Foucault and Maurice Halbwachs, this article maps the land, utopia and heterotopias in Israeli and
Palestinian artistic practices, and explores the performativity of silence, loss and remembrance
through the works of Sliman Mansour, Reuven Rubin, Tamam al-Akhal and Yael Bartana.
The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today's
memory and tomorrow is today's dream. 1
At once retrospective and forward-looking, the juxtaposition of art and politics draws on memories
and desires to render the internal monologue of the artist, as well as a message evoked through the
intermittent presence of signs and symbols. Two halves of one whole, art and politics share a purpose:
resistance, whether in the context of the ongoing Arab revolutions or striving towards a peaceful
solution in Palestine–Israel, the memory of what was or could have been has provided a utopia to be
celebrated or mourned, a source of inspiration or fury. In the context of artistic practices, utopia
evolves beyond the idyll rendered on canvas; rather, it represents the ‘relationship of the subject to its
desire’2 in addition to the mechanism that shapes the work through a ‘utopian performative’ that
prompts a culture:
… to move farther and farther away from the real into a kind of performative… [that] inspires
perhaps other more local ‘doings’ that sketch out the potential in those feignings.3
While Dolan's analysis of utopia looks to the future, Israeli and Palestinian art utilises local ‘doings’
to portray a past that is both real and unreal, and a future that is by turns cautionary or quixotic.
Regarded from a point decades later in time – or in certain instances, in the past – the land and her
inhabitants are recalled and reconstructed from a subjective position, enabling the construction of
multiple utopias: ‘sites with no real place… society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned
upside down… these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces’.4 Within these spaces art activists have
contributed to the global corpus of political resistance through the visual, literary and audible
mediums, while the artist has shifted from the position of an observer to that of an actor in sociopolitical change, his/her work transcending social boundaries to mobilise the masses and, if
successful, facilitate transition. Approaching their fourth year in 2015, the Arab revolutions are young
in comparison with the conflict between Palestine and Israel since 1948 and the nuances within the
latter encompass trauma, loss, the land and a struggle that determines the informal and formal
boundaries that shape the quotidian.
While open conflict, such as the Independence War (1948–1949), the Six Day War (1967), the
Intifadas and operations in the Gaza Strip, has dominated media coverage of the region, it is the daily
battles that sustain the Palestinian sentiment of resistance. The challenges are not represented on a
scale of best to worst, but along a spectrum of negativity, commencing with the scarcity of equality
that is tangible at checkpoints, in universities and workplaces, moving through periodic limitations on
access to resources and livelihoods, the arrest and detention of family members and, in certain cases,
the loss of life. In the case of the Palestinian community, both within Palestine–Israel and outside it,
the dual forces of resistance and conflict transcend routines to suffuse artistic practices. Perceptible in
the paintings of Sliman Mansour (b 1947) and Ismail Shammout (1930–2006), the cartoons of Naji
Al-Ali (1938–1987) and the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), themes of mourning, the
nation, exile and the gendered nation that is at once the mother, the virgin and the beloved prevail.5
By contrast, the year that brought the loss of Palestine (an-Nakba, ‘the catastrophe’) also realised the
state of Israel, a land that would provide protection, sanctuary and new beginnings. The transition was
equally reflected in the cultural realm through the pre-independence paintings of Reuven Rubin
(1893–1974), the establishment of the artist collective Ofakim Hadashim (New Horizons) in 1948 and
the poetry of Avraham Shlonsky (1900–1973). The year 1948 provided a significant turning point in
the decline and rise of the two states, and the experience of those returning to the homeland through
previous aliyot differed little in terms of the impression made by the land.6 In the case of Rubin, a
noticeable shift occurred between his works completed in Romania, which included religious themes
of asceticism and suffering, and the lighter landscapes of Palestine that featured shepherds, camels
and scenes of daily life in The Sea of Galilee (1926–1928). The land was portrayed as near empty,
fertile and ready for harvest, prompting a convergence between the ‘slices in time’ represented by the
bereft and the returned:7 in 1987 and 1988 the Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour evoked the olive
groves of Palestine through the paintings Olive-picking and Olive-picking Triptych, a warm glow
suffusing the background with a religious tone,8 while Rubin's The Sea of Galilee and Come to
Palestine (1929) by Ze'ev Raban depict trees bowed with fruit against an orange glow that pervades
the skies. However, while the backdrop is similar across the four works, Mansour's works stand apart,
with the human subject dominating the foreground, while the landscape rendered by Rubin and Raban
remains devoid of human elements. The boats sailing the distant sea denote inhabitants (as do the
dwellings), but the inhabitants are few and often vague. The result is a land (almost) without people,
which contrasts with a land not only fecund with fruit, but with the life of a community that nurtures
the land collectively. That the figure in the foreground of Mansour's work is female recalls Sherwell's
concept of the land that gives life not only to vegetation, but to the generations that will sustain it in
the years to come.
RENDERING AND REMEMBERING THE LAND
The years prior to and following 1948 were, in hindsight for Mansour, and foresight for Rubin and
Raban, a period of divine possibilities, as each artist created a heterochrony for the olim,9 whose lives
in Eastern Europe and the United States had altered course to Israel,10 as well as those who recalled
and remained in the land lost. Influenced by the religious dimension of the land, the works of Rubin
and Raban focus on the biblical aspects, breaking with the present to evoke a time in which the land
was inhabited not by Mansour's Palestinians, but by pastures and fauna. Utilising the past to portray
an imagined future, the works beckoned prospective olim to ‘come to Palestine’. For Mansour, the
heterochrony is clear in his break with the present to recall a period of rural tradition that is halcyon,
rather than divine. Time is manipulated and rewritten according to the utopia that must be represented,
and, in turn, the land is reconfigured according to the desires and memories of those who create and
perceive the work. In the years following an-Nakba, the paths of Palestinian and Israeli artists
reflected on memory, conflict and land, each evoking a singular interpretation, polemically touching
upon loss and gain, resistance and rule, and defiance and will. In recent years, a convergence has
occurred between Palestinian and Israeli artists seeking peace, critical reflection and an
acknowledgement of the impact of the years of unrest through street theatre, installations and
cartoons. In turn, the act of remembering and constructing a utopia, both notionally and subjectively,
has evolved from one of nostalgia – whether mythical and distant or real and proximate – to a utopia
that can be realised through the conscious act of questioning existing narratives and addressing the
taboos that have succumbed to silence and collective forgetting.
Yet while the past is reimagined through artistic practices, the question of how to remember is
consciously and subconsciously addressed. For Gross, the process of recalling defines who is accepted
and who becomes ‘other’, as membership of the collectivity becomes contingent on shared
memories.11 The concept of collectivity is, according to Assmann, sustained by ‘bearers’ who bind
the individual not only to a time and place, but also to an identity that marks the group.12 In the case
of Israel, the history of the land and its people provided not only a shared identity prior to 1948, but
one that would prove cohesive in the years following. The bonds forged through membership are, in
turn, consolidated through the socialisation of memory, as the process of remembering is subsumed
within the culture in which the individual is born and raised. Thus, as Halbwachs observed, when an
individual recalls something, he recalls it as a member of a group, and the resulting memories emerge
in accordance with what the group enables him to recollect.13 In a land of dual narratives, histories
and aspirations, the socialisation of memory through culture permeates not only Israeli and Palestinian
society in Israel, but also the communities outside the land and region. Yet, for a memory to survive
for over sixty years and to be ‘lived’ by those who did not experience it directly,14 the trauma must
be emotionally ‘engraved’, for ‘[i]f something was to stay in the memory, it had to be burned in: only
that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory’.15 In the context of the Palestinian memory, the
pain emerges from loss – the loss of the home, the family and, ultimately, the land. In the diaspora the
sense of loss is compounded and felt daily, and the pain is etched into each generation, reinforcing the
Palestinian identity, regardless of whether the individual is in Jerusalem or Amman.
A vivid medium, art affords a repository for the intangible and unspoken, at times overtly, at others
with subtlety. If Geertz's interpretation of art is inverted, the medium draws on the impulses within an
individual in the realms of religion, morality, politics, law and daily activities.16 Subsequently, the
observations of the artist influence the observer, harnessing his/her senses to enter the heterotopia
rendered on canvas, paper, through the lens or on the screen. The notion that ‘[a]rt and the equipment
to grasp it are made in the same shop’ is perceptible in the works aimed at the prospective aliyot of
the early twentieth century,17 as well as the political art of the twenty-first century by artists such as
Shimon Tzabar and Mysh. Collective memory and reconstructions provide a focal point around which
not only can the nation be constructed, both physically and ideologically, but also the consolidation of
self-determination and the representation of a people on a global level.18 While MacClancy's
understanding of the power of art could be applied to the Israeli context, Palestinian art renders ‘the
collective memory of their race, religion, community, and family… secure from the ravages of history
and a turbulent time’.19 The portrayal of events fifty years after they took place could suffer from a
loss of visceral nuance, but, in the case of the Palestinian artist Tamam al-Akhal, the progression of
time has failed to diminish her recollection of Operation Hametz in 1948.
Born in Jaffa in 1935, al-Akhal was thirteen years old when the Irgun paramilitary unit commenced a
five-day siege of the city on 25 April 1948. A fortnight later, Jaffa had fallen and the Arab population
of 90,000 was reduced to 5000, most of whom fled by sea to Gaza or over land to the neighbouring
states where they would reside in Lebanese, Syrian or Jordanian refugee camps or leave the region for
Europe and North and South America.20 The dispossession of the Palestinians of Jaffa features
strongly in al-Akhal's work, most notably Uprooting (1998), which locates the city on a canvas
dominated by a tumultuous Mediterranean Sea replete with boats overflowing with women, men and
children, while in the waves others sink, their hands reaching towards the departing vessels. Tossed
on the waves, they are the first of many: in one of two background images, residents line the streets
down to the shore, possessions on their backs or loaded onto mule-drawn carts that are battered by the
waves. In the second, Jaffa is perceived from afar, retrospectively by those in the boats, plumes of
black smoke obscuring the skyline. The contorted faces of those fleeing evoke anguish, the events
sudden and the loss profound. Uprooting is one of many depictions of the Palestine–Israel conflict
that recalls and captures the moment as it was and as the artist intends it to be remembered. For
Lewison and Bottinelli, the artist affords a lens through a painting, rendering it ‘not simply a depiction
of conflict but also of the conditions under which such conflict may be observed [through] the eye of
the occupier’;21 in the case of al-Akhal, the painting offers the eye of the dispossessed. However, the
lens does not guarantee a candid representation of the artist's narrative, for by nature a multi-purpose
tool, it can magnify as well as minimise, in terms of both the artist's rendering and the interpretative
eye of the viewer. Passerini's instruction to listen to the ‘silence’ so that we ‘can learn the special
language which allows us to be on the same wavelength'22 subsequently becomes fraught with the
ambiguity of subjectivity for both the creator and receiver.
JOURNEYS IN POST-1948 HETEROTOPIA
In the context of the post-Nakba Palestinian self, the consolidation of identity is central to the process
of ‘being Palestinian’ and keeping the Palestinian nation alive for those in the diaspora.23 Art,
transcending boundaries through the mobility of the works via exhibitions, street art or the internet, is
viewable within the homeland and externally. In turn, the connection between the subject matter and
the viewer is sustained, while remaining singular with each experience, according to the social,
cultural and political environment in which the individual resides. The language of art, according to
Bennett, is the result of a subjective process, working to ‘complement history and to work in a
dialectical relationship with common memory’;24 while it is true that art is subjective, the notion of a
common or collective memory reintroduces the fragility as a conveyor of information. The
multiplicities of collective memories yield a discourse from which one might conclude that a
‘collective “physical unit” [does not] exist beyond the individuals’25 and a collective memory
instilled at birth that draws on the ‘residues of ancestral life’,26 one that is nurtured through an
individual's social environs,27 bestowed by fellow group members or guided by the ‘periodic rhythm’
of time,28 commemoration and festivals.29
In the context of commemoration, an-Nakba provides a counterpoint to Yom Ha'atzmaut, or
Independence Day: for the latter, celebratory events are held, while the former – twenty-four hours
later – is marked by vigils, protests, lectures and film screenings, events that engage the next
generation in the act of remembering through a ‘cottage industry of commemoration’,30 drawing on
old and contemporary artistic mediums to convey and sustain the sentiment of loss. The photographs
that have become synonymous with an-Nakba mirror the shift in the landscape of paintings: the
vibrant colours of the farms (Olive-picking, Sliman Mansour, 1987) and the gentle smiles of the
subjects (Salma, Sliman Mansour, 1984) are replaced by monochrome images and muted shades –
Refugee (1951), Cold and Hunger (1951) and The Ill and the Remedy (1952) by Ismail Shammout –
faces drawn, the sea, hills and orchards now flanked by infinite roads, tents and parched trees. The
absence of fecundity in the landscape of paintings portraying displacement becomes synonymous with
the loss of the nation: the utopia that comprised the community and the fruits of their labour is gone,
to be evoked in works portraying the post-Nakba period as a possession to be reclaimed.
Shammout's Means and End (1963) marks a shift from the themes of his works of the 1950s, as
grieving and survival moves towards action and defiance. A rifle clasped to his left shoulder and an
olive branch held aloft in his right hand, the subject commences the struggle not only to regain the
land in the tangible sense, but on a conceptual level, as Said observes:
… the greatest battle Palestinians have waged as a people has been over the right to a
remembered presence… despite the ravages of physical dispossession, military occupation,
and Israeli official denials.31
In recent years, technology has assumed a role in the process of remembrance of the land prior to
1948 and, in the case of iNakba, commemoration transcends film and photography to become a quasivirtual experience that would enable a traveller in 2015 to visit a site that once held a community and
now bears few to no traces of their presence. Launched in April 2014, iNakba is part of the Zochrot
organisation's endeavour to enhance awareness of an-Nakba among the broader Jewish public.
Established in 2002, the name of the organisation was carefully chosen: Hebrew for ‘remembrance’, it
was posited that the word, in its present, female tense, would be perceived as active, but not
intimidating.32 Comprising Jewish and Palestinian activists who organise walking tours and collate
resources on an-Nakba, members strive to ensure that annual attempts to restrict commemoration of
the event in Israel are stymied.33 By reducing the group tour to an individual experience through an
iPhone app, individuals use GPS to locate more than 500 Palestinian localities that were ‘ruined,
destroyed, obliterated after their capture, partially demolished, or remained standing but were
depopulated and their residents expelled’ during and after 1948,34 with features to add comments,
images and video clips in English, Arabic and Hebrew. In certain cases, no trace remains of the
former community, yet, by drawing on archival records, the app facilitates remembrance and
addresses a subject that would otherwise fade from the contemporary national narrative. In turn,
Foucault's ‘space of emplacement’ is enacted through the juxtaposition of technology and
commemoration to reimagine utopia – not as a lost idyll, but as a counter-site”
… with no real place… a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the
other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested,
and inverted.35
Such places present ‘an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface’ and, by virtue of its
placement in proximity to the real, becomes a ‘heterotopia’.
The notion that Palestine was, prior to 1948, a land that was not only uninhabitable but uninhabited
continues to be put forth today. Last year Omer Ben-Lev, a member of the Israeli Labour Party, stated
that when his parents arrived, ‘Most of Palestine was swamps… the newcomers came to Israel, and
some of them died drying those swamps’.36 As the land is contested, remembrance and
commemoration promotes counter-narratives that ensure that the land was – and continues to be –
recorded. While Boullata questioned the means by which Palestinian artists could articulate their
space amidst the physical constriction of the land,37 the answer resides in the acts of remembrance
and the heterotopias that are mapped and physically traced by visitors through apps such as iNakba
and the artist collective Insiyab. Initiated in September 2014, a group of artists, musicians and
activists convened in Kufr Birim, a Palestinian village that was destroyed in 1953 when it was
bombed by the Israeli air force. Working alongside al-Awda, the Palestinian right-to-return coalition,
the group harnesses culture to reverse the erasure of the heritage from the land. Physically enacting
the right of return, members of al-Awda established a camp in Kufr Birim in August 2013, following
a similar set-up in Iqrit in 2012. Over the course of three days, the workshop, coordinated by the
Freedom Bus initiative of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, incorporated the ‘playback theatre’ method
that dramatises real-life experiences, enabling spectators to engage on an emotional and visual level.
The utilisation of street theatre as a means to engage members of the public as well as convey stories
from Palestinian daily life continues the tradition of Augusto Boal's ‘theatre of the oppressed’ and has
been used previously by the Palestinian–Israeli peace movement Combatants for Peace.38 Established
in 2005, the movement promotes non-violent struggle and an awareness of the history and experiences
of Palestinians in Israel through the medium of lectures, reconciliation meetings and street theatre.
Zochrot, Insiyab and Combatants for Peace share not only the common goal of enhancing awareness
of the narratives that are, intentionally or otherwise, overlooked, but also assume a significant role in
the act of remembrance, whether it is of events and spaces past and lost or contemporary acts of
aggression and dispossession. In turn, the land becomes a stage on which Halbwachs's united acts of
remembrance are enacted, sustaining the community and providing a means of articulation that
expands through the contribution of existing and new group members from both sides of the conflict.
THE ART OF SILENCE
The act of remembering can be divided into four contrasting approaches: overt and covert, audible
and silent, conscious and subconscious, and constrained or free. For Fisher, the language of
remembering rearticulates loss and separation and facilitates a dialogue between the speaker and the
listener.39 However, language need not be audible as in the case of songs, lectures, film and the oral
narrative; rather it can be denoted semiotically through paintings, installations, cartoons and silent
commemorations, such as vigils. While the visual nature of non-audible artwork affords a rich
language that could be more profound than the spoken word, the silence induced through the lack of
language, particularly when censored, conceals a silent statement implied by its absence. The void
speaks that which cannot be expressed, but is known either individually or collectively, as observed
by Dabashi as he overlooks Nablus:
There are these silences when you listen to Palestinians marking the scars on their national
body. They seem to run out of words, and even emotions. There is no anger in the air – nor,
though, resignation, just a mere matter-of-factness that leaves life openended.40
The notion of collectively rendering scars on the national body elevates Nietzsche's concept of
engraving to a national level. While the land may be silent, pain is ascribable by those who live on it,
compose narratives about it and reinterpret the physical land as a metaphysical being. The
transmogrification from the land as flora to a human form is complete in Mansour's The Land (1977),
which depicts a woman wearing an embroidered Palestinian dress clutching seven plump oranges in
her arms in the foreground, while in the background an orange grove reaches into and above the
horizon, each tree tended by two women, also in Palestinian dress. In turn, the land and the body
become juxtaposed in the representation of the nation. Alternatively, in the context of silence through
omission, Walid Abu-Shakra's renderings of the land impart the trauma of loss through the absence of
life, since:
[s]eeing human traces, but not those who left them, is the villager's clue that one is looking
not at some anonymous landscape but at a very specific place … [and] the viewer may retrace
the steps of a people's dispossession.41
In the post-1948 landscape, whether retrospectively utopian, as in the case of The Land, or
contemporaneously bleak in Abu-Shakra's Hakoorat el-Loz (1982), the performativity of silence
connotes that ‘silence, absence, and emptiness’ are omnipresent.42
Yael Bartana, Summer Camp, 2007, courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Sommer
Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. This two-channel video installation details the activities of the Israeli
Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) as they rebuild Palestinian houses in the occupied
territories.
In contrast, the absence of dialogue enables the viewer to focus on the language of the body and the
acts that it performs. For Rothberg, silence enables ‘memories to unfold, albeit in an uneven,
nonsynchronous temporality’,43 and through Yael Bartana's video works, A Declaration (2006) and
Summer Camp (2007), the collective memory of the nation is borne and rearticulated through the
visual and performative mechanism. Both shorts are influenced by the material levelled at potential
olim by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) during the 1930s, the score at times muted, at others
dramatic, emphasising the magnitude of the participants' endeavours as they (re)build a land. In A
Declaration, a young man unfurls the Israeli flag astride a boat moored off the coast of Jaffa, and,
momentarily, the camera lingers on the Star of David fluttering across the screen. As the protagonist
slowly and deliberately winds the flag, the pole is replaced by an olive tree that is carried aloft as he
forges across a body of water to Andromeda's Rock, the horizon dominated by the dusk-lit high-rises
of Tel Aviv.
Yael Bartana, A Declaration, 2006, courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Sommer
Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. This work draws on 1930s Jewish National Fund (JNF) propaganda
photography to depict the act of planting an olive tree on the Andromeda Rock, in the sea between
southern Tel Aviv and Jaffa.
Shimon Tzabar, A New Design for the Flag of the State of Israel, 2002, courtesy of Judit Druks. The
artist amended the traditional version of the Israeli flag, carrying the Star of David, to depict a tank,
thereby representing the increasingly militaristic reality.
The transition between the flag and the tree works on multiple levels. Primarily, the olive tree is a
potent symbol in the Palestinian and Israeli narratives,44 and in a universal sense, as an established
sign of peace. Second, the act of planting and uprooting olive trees occupies a central position in the
practice of displacement, as a means both to claim the land and to mourn its loss.45 More recently, the
removal of olive trees in the West Bank for the construction of settlements, and in certain cases acts of
vandalism that have resulted in the loss of livelihoods, perpetuates the cycle of inequity experienced
by Palestinian farmers. Third, the planting of flags has dominated the narrative of conflict and
colonisation down the centuries: as an expression of national identity, it provides a rallying symbol
for the subjects of the nation and as a means to assert their presence in a new space. The Israeli flag
was central to the pioneer narrative before 1948, as Rubin's The Zeppelin Over Tel Aviv (1929)
demonstrates through the flying of what would become, nineteen years later, the national flag.
Bartana's work draws on the essence of the JNF through The Missing Negatives of the Sonnenfeld
Collection (2008) and thereby continues the theme of claiming, albeit conversely, that the switch from
flag to tree denotes a quest for peace rather than a claim for possession. Finally, the rock transcends
the biblical and reaches into Greek mythology to juxtapose the site on which Andromeda was (nearly)
sacrificed for the hubris of her mother, Cassiopeia, with the need to circumvent loss in the name of
national pride by striving for a positive future through peaceful coexistence. Given the composition of
the outcrop, however, the gesture could be perceived as doomed from the outset: the tree can no more
take root in rock than it could in a car park. But therein lies the poignancy: the path to peace is not
only measured through tangible gains; rather, the willingness and journey towards an end that might
or might not be realised indicates a shift in the approach to the cycle of war and peace. Throughout
the piece, a quasi-silence prevails, the only sound wrought by the gulls and the waves hitting the rock.
The result is a passive compulsion to focus on the nuances in the journey of the young man that
reinforces the capacity for silence to facilitate dialogue and question the status quo of the utopia
envisioned in 1948 by the producers of the JNF corpus.
Artistic practices provide the means to (re)construct and recall utopias and heterotopias, and on a
deeper level the desire to recall that which was lost, as ‘the Palestinian recalls the idea of the place
when it is impossible to reclaim the place itself, and when achieving triumph over the coloniser seems
an almost unattainable dream’.46 From the canvas to the physical land, artistic practices gain impetus
through technology and public participation, as Zochrot, Combatants for Peace and Insiyab utilise
public spaces to address the challenges inhibiting coexistence. Street theatre has emerged as not only
a performative form of ‘doing’, but an impetus for further ‘doings’; members of the public engage in
the drama that unfolds and, in turn, the memory of the activity and their participation enables the
subject to be reflected upon through overt discourse or covert rumination. Equally, images can leave
the studio and enter the discourse on the street: A New Design for the Flag of the State of Israel
(2002) created during the second intifada (2000–2005) depicted the Israeli flag with a tank in lieu of
the Star of David, reflecting the increasingly militarised nature of the state. Shortly after, the image
was used on placards and banners as a sign of protest at demonstrations in London. Redesigning the
flag was a subtle yet bold move, the symbol of a nation re-appropriated to critique the state's sociopolitical practices and trajectory. Since 1948, Palestinian and Israeli art has looked to the past, the
future and divided national narratives, but as Israeli art develops a critical tone and Palestinian and
Israeli art activists collaborate on peace projects, the medium that expresses trauma, loss and division
might yet be harnessed to promote a narrative that looks to a cohesive future which acknowledges the
memory and trauma of both sides.
Notes
1 Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, Pan Macmillan, London, 1991, p 83
2 Luisa Passerini, ‘Utopia and Desire’, Thesis Eleven, vol 68, no 1, February 2002, p 15
3 Jill Dolan, ‘Performance, Utopia, and the “Utopian Performative”’, Theatre Journal, vol 53, no 4,
December 2001, p 457
4 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité, October 1984, p 3
5 Tina Sherwell, ‘Imaging the Homeland: Gender and Palestinian National Discourses’,
Thamyris/Intersecting 10, 2003, pp 123–145
6 Plural of aliyah, referring to the return to the land of Israel by Jews in the diaspora. The first Zionist
aliyah took place in 1882, to be followed by five further aliyot until the formal formation of the state
of Israel in 1948.
7 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, op cit, p 6
8 Ganit Ankori, Palestinian Art, Reaktion Books, London, 2006, pp 73–74
9 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, op cit, p 6
10 Raban joined the second aliyah in 1912, Rubin in 1923.
11 David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture, University of
Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2000, p 78
12 Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political
Imagination, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, p 25
13 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992, p 43
14 During the course of fieldwork in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, the author encountered
a five-year-old girl who responded to the question of where she was from not with the name of the
camp or town, but rather ‘Nablus, Palestine’. Her parents said that she was actually fifth-generation
Palestinian–Jordanian, the first family members arriving in Jordan in 1948. See Luisa Gandolfo,
Palestinians in Jordan: The Politics of Identity, I B Tauris, London, New York, 2012.
15 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Random House, New York, 1967, p 61
16 Clifford Geertz, ‘Art as a Cultural System’, MLN, vol 91, no 6, Comparative Literature, December,
1976, p 1475
17 Ibid, p 1497
18 Jeremy MacClancy, ‘Anthropology, Art and Contest’, in Contesting Art. Art, Politics, and Identity
in the Modern World, Berg Publishers, Oxford, 1997, p 2
19 Edward Said, ‘Invention, Memory and Place’, Critical Inquiry, vol 6, no 2, winter, 2000, p 177
20 Ahron Bregman, Israel's Wars: A History Since 1947, Routledge, London, 2002, p 18
21 Jeremy Lewison and Giorgia Bottinelli, Let's Have Another War, no 5, 2002, http://goo.gl/7aiO8,
accessed 6 March 2013
22 Luisa Passerini, ‘Memories between Silence and Oblivion’, in Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah
Radstone, eds, Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts, Routledge, New Brunswick, London,
2006, p 248
23 K Luisa Gandolfo, ‘Representations of Conflict: Images of War, Resistance and Identity in
Palestinian Art’, Radical History Review, vol 106, Winter 2010, p 50
24 Jill Bennett, ‘The Aesthetics of Sense-memory: Theorising Trauma through the Visual Arts’, in
Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, eds, Regimes of Memory, Routledge, New York and
London, 2004, p 29
25 Gross, Lost Time, op cit, p 78
26 Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, vol 8, Princeton University Press, Princeton,
1981, p 156
27 Ernest Schachtel, Metamorphosis: On the Conflict of Human Development and the Psychology of
Creativity, Routledge, London, 2001, p 200
28 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, op cit, p 48
29 Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, op cit, p 24
30 Diana K Allan, ‘The Politics of Witness: Remembering and Forgetting 1948 in Shatila Camp’, in
Ahmad H Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory,
Columbia University Press, New York, 2007, p 273
31 Edward Said, ‘Invention, Memory and Place’, Critical Inquiry, vol 26, no 2, winter, 2000, pp 187,
189
32 The origins of the organisation's name were discussed by Zochrot project coordinator Debby
Farber at a workshop attended by the author under the Inspiratiedag Vrienden van Sabeel Nederland,
held in Utrecht, 27 September 2014.
33 See Luisa Gandolfo, ‘Nakba Day in Palestine: Past Catastrophe, Future Conflict?’, The
Conversation, 15 May 2014, http://goo.gl/5EEH1l.
34 iNakba, Zochrot, April 2014, http://goo.gl/2YeVBC, accessed 20 October 2014
35 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, op cit, p 6
36 The Washington Post, 14 May 2014, http://goo.gl/nHcXMA, accessed 20 October 2014
37 Kamal Boullata, ‘Art Under Siege’, Journal of Palestine Studies, vol 33, no 4, summer, 2004, p 77
38 See Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, Pluto Press, London, 2000.
39 Jean Fisher, ‘Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present’, Third Text 105, vol 24, no 4, July 2010, p
489
40 Hamid Dabashi, ‘Paradise Delayed: With Hany Abu-Assad in Palestine’, Third Text 102, vol 24,
no 1, January 2010, p 16
41 Boullata, Kamal, Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present, London, Saqi, 2009, p 188
42 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust,
Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, p 247
43 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonization, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2009, p 228
44 See Nasser Abufarha, ‘Land of Symbols: Cactus, Poppies, Orange and Olive Trees in Palestine’,
Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, vol 15, no 3, 2008, pp 343–368.
45 See Irus Braverman, Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and the Law in Israel/Palestine, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2009.
46 Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh, ‘Palestine: The Nomadic Condition’, Third Text 101, vol 23, no 6,
November 2009, p 777