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

2. Diverse Absences

33 2 Diverse Absences Reading Colonial Landscapes Old and New It is striking here that the places people live in are like the presence of diverse absences. What can be seen designates what is no longer there: “you see, here there used to be . . .” but it can no longer be seen. Demonstratives indicate the invisible identities of the visible: it is the very definition of a place, in fact, that it is composed by these series of displacements and effects among the fragmented strata that form it and that it plays on these moving layers. —Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life Salma remembers the day the Zionist underground bombed Jerusalem ’s King David Hotel in the summer of 1946. From the front steps of her family’s home in the then Palestinian neighborhood of Talbieh, she and her cousin observed the explosion across British colonial Jerusalem ’s scarred landscape. The blast punctured the serenity of the morning, Salma told me, as both startled girls gazed toward the hotel, their eyes fixed on the tall, regal edifice not a kilometer away as its southern wing crumbled. Relating the experience to me fifty-one years later, almost to the day, Salma stood again on those very same steps. Under the searing afternoon sun, filtered through the long fingers of trees, she pointed in the direction of the King David to the east. Her Jerusalem, a place she knew intimately before 1948, had vastly changed by the late 1990s. Neither she, her kin, nor other Palestinians still reside in Talbieh—or nearly anywhere else in West Jerusalem, for that matter. And yet, here and throughout this part of the city, there remain traces of a former Palestinian existence. 34 ◆ Colonial Jerusalem Subdivided and reconfigured, Salma’s family home is one such trace. The dwelling is now the residence of three Israeli families, one on each floor of this deceptively spacious stone structure. The current occupants might well have been inside the day she and I chose to visit, but they did not appear as my guide, a thin and statuesque figure in her sixties, reclaimed her front steps for a few fleeting moments. Salma was strangely a stranger here, simultaneously an owner and a trespasser, oddly both present and absent. From the vantage point of these stairs, lush foliage and other impediments obstructed the view of the famous hotel. The passage of time also obscured somewhat the clarity of her memories. Israel’s expulsion of about 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 included roughly 45,000 from Jerusalem and its immediate environs. The “transfer” of these families, as Israeli officials and historians have euphemistically referred to these forced evictions, produced radically altered demographic and social realities in a land where both national communities wished to build a state. The area that became known after 1948 as “West Jerusalem” was, until the final months of the British Mandate, an urban environment with a modest but significant degree of mixed Arab-Jewish residential life. However, in less than one year the west side became almost devoid of Arab Christians and Muslims. The Jewish state has, since then, made West Jerusalem overwhelmingly off-limits to Palestinians, including neighborhoods like Talbieh and homes like Salma’s.1 This chapter explores two primary concerns. In the first half, I flesh out some of the contours of Arab-Jewish intercommunal life in British colonial Jerusalem (1917–1948). I examine the extent to which these oftignored pre-1948 social relations included productive and even antiracist encounters in residential and commercial realms. In the second half, I turn to an analysis of specific Palestinian homes, appropriated and reconfigured by the Israeli state over the last several decades. What might their 1. See the Israel Statistical Yearbook, 2012, Table III/1—Population of Israel and Jerusalem, by Population Group, 1922–2009. This source claims that by the end of the fighting in 1948, the Palestinian population in West Jerusalem was 1,100, or roughly 1.3 percent of the population. By 1961, there were 2,400 Palestinians in West Jerusalem, or about 1.5 percent of West Jerusalem’s population. Reading Colonial Landscapes ◆ 35 fate and the neighborhoods they comprise tell us about the designs and visions of Israeli colonial urbanism? What was made present in West Jerusalem once the indigenous Palestinian population was made absent? This book concentrates on housing and spatial politics in this fractured metropolitan area...