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

3. Myths, Memorials, and Monuments in the Jerusalem of Israel's Imagination

75 3 Myths, Memorials, and Monuments in the Jerusalem of Israel’s Imagination But then the great wings of a memorial, like those of a panegyric, are not expected to be clipped by tedious fact. —Gore Vidal, Julian Jerusalem is a place where space, memory, and historical invention have intersected in formidable ways over several centuries. Indeed, this most symbolic of cities has, in crucial respects, come into existence through the discourses, memories, and myths that describe it. Today, both Palestinians and Israelis insist that Jerusalem be recognized as their respective national capital. Neither would accept a settlement of the conflict that negates their right to self-determination here. However, though there exists a parity of desire for the city among various religious and national communities, in the capacity to represent and reconfigure Jerusalem since 1948 there has been no parity of power. In this chapter I continue an analysis of the spatial construction of identity and difference in this segregated urban realm by detailing how struggles between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, colonizers and the colonized are all too often clashes over the meanings attributed to specific places. In doing so, I explore what Edward Said (1995) aptly refers to as Israel’s “projections” of Jerusalem and how these typically mythic and partial portrayals have been advanced through a range of nationalist memorials. These cultural sites, I argue, do not simply represent the contours of Israeli colonial rule but aid in shaping them, as well. As such, they are illustrations of what Bernard Cohn (1996) refers 76 ◆ Colonial Jerusalem to as colonialism’s “forms of knowledge” and technologies of cultural control. In the course of my research, I came upon no fewer than four dozen Israeli places of formal nationalist remembrance in the Jerusalem area alone. Frequently dedicated to military victory and valor, the sites are found in all sections of this city. These memorials are of varying size and scope, from modest plaques affixed to commandeered Palestinian properties (like the Jamal home examined in chapter 2) to the remains of damaged Israeli tanks from past wars left near busy streets and highways. They are mammoth structures with expansive exhibit halls, like Ammunition Hill (Giv’at Hatachmoshet) in illegally occupied East Jerusalem, and rolling green and wooded sites like Independence Park (Gan Ha’atzmaut) in West Jerusalem, built over the ruins of the centuries-old Ma’mam Allah Islamic Cemetery discussed in chapter 1. These places of remembrance articulate remarkably consistent nationalist messages, usually blending the Jewish state’s claim to exclusive rule over Jerusalem with assertions of the Jewish people’s “eternal” spiritual connection to this urban center. They are also comprised of a host of predictable absences. Palestinian attachments to the city—their mourning , their memories—are seldom if ever mentioned. Indeed, while the term “Arab” is occasionally used in these memorials’ narratives, rarely is “Palestinian.” When either find their way into exhibit text or pamphlets they are almost always associated with hostility or “terrorism” directed at Israel. Memorials of this sort are where governing authorities and Zionist organizations like Taglit-Birthright Israel and Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) squire tens of thousands of Israeli citizens and foreign tourists each year. Just how effective these cultural sites are in educating Israeli and international opinion is unclear. But that the Jewish state has invested heavily in such “meaning machines” is fairly evident. Israel has utilized appropriated Palestinian homes in myriad ways over the last sixty-five years. Their chief purpose has been to house Israeli Jews as part of an effort to forge demographic dominance over the Palestinians in Jerusalem and throughout the country. However, in a few instances these dwellings have been converted into more explicit Myths, Memorials, and Monuments ◆ 77 representational places, including Israeli memorials, monuments, and museums.1 This chapter will focus with particular attention on one such locale, a home appropriated from the Palestinian Baramki family in 1948 and utilized by the Jewish state in a manner at once distinctive and emblematic. Before doing so, however, I trace out some of the ways in which Palestinian exiles like the Baramkis have been made peripheral in their own city— spatially as well as historically. In other words, how the memory of Israeli sacrifice and valor so often relies on the negation of Palestinian pasts. I explore how Arabs and Jews have been shaped by the city’s division and the...