Remapping Palestine and the Palestinians: Decolonizing and Research

The abrupt and sudden disappearance of Palestine in 1948 was multidimensional in nature. In a short period of time, the world of the Palestinians collapsed. The familiar home was nowhere to be found for a large number of the Palestinians who found themselves refuges in the lands of the others. Even those who physically escaped the turmoil lost the right to continue to be Palestinians with some becoming the "Arab minority" in Israel and other becoming Jordanians in eastern Palestine that was renamed "the West Bank." Palestine, the land and the country, ceased to exist and its people were denied the right to continue to claim it as their home. Expulsions, destruction of cities, town, and villages, lose of life and exile were but the concluding chapter in the disappearance of Palestine. In more than one way, the Palestinians have been misfortunate that the land they call their homeland is such an ancient land historically connected with holy texts of various religions. For at the age of the colonial expansion of Europe, religious texts were employed in the attempt to conquer this land. Ironically, in the planes to conquer Palestine, the people of the land were rarely considered. In fact, the conquerors rarely even acknowledged the very presence of a population in Palestine. In many ways, the point can be made that the absence of the Palestinians from Palestine was a matter that predated their physical absence by decades as far as colonial imagination was concerned. In the European, and later on, Zionist, politics, travel narratives and visual representations of Palestine, the Palestinians failed to be present. To illustrate this point, let us take the example of visual representation of Palestine, particularly in the arena of photography, in the period that pre-dates its disappearance and the role that might have played in constructing an image of the land as if it was uninhabited.

The first photographic images of Palestine appeared shortly after photography itself was invented in 1839. For the first half a century or so, most photographs that were brought into Europe from Palestine were of places connected with the Bible and not of the people, the towns and the villages. In fact the people of Palestine rarely appeared in the early photographs and that in itself did not seem to be a matter of concern for most viewers at the time. The amazing ability to see the land but not the people was not necessarily a coincidence in the case of photography. The absence of the Palestinian population from most photographs partially reflected both the fact that they were also absent, at some level, from the mind and consciousness of the European or American photographers and a desire to cleanse the holy land from signs and evidence of histories other than the Judeo-Christian one. Palestine was reduced to a location that could attest to the truth of the biblical story, rather than recognized as a real place in this world.

Eventually, images of Palestinians started to appear in the photographs and "carte de visite" both as exotic Orientals (Sheiks, Harems, Bedouins and Clergy) and as illustrations of the biblical ancestors' appearance. In both cases, the premise of the framing eye of the photographer was to remove the photographed individual from history and place him/her in a context more relevant to Europe and its relation to Palestine than to the "real" lives of the native population. Peasants appeared in the photographs with captions that referred to them with anglophile biblical names and were classified into biblical categories of people to whom the European viewer would relate (Samaritans, Jews, Mohammedans, Saracens...etc). And when the "ethnographic" divide was not used, "biblical careers" were introduced and images of fishermen, shepherds and carpenters started to flood the tourist market.

With the birth of Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century, the emphasis on presenting the land but not the people quickly became a trademark of the Zionist imagination of Palestine. What was historically a Christian imagination in nature was soon adopted by Zionism and given a Jewish twist. The Zionist organization was by the turn of the twentieth century...