Mapping Exile and Return: Palestinian Dispossession and a Political Theology for a Shared Future

Return Visits to ‘Imwas and the Liturgical Subversion of Ethnocratic Topology

4 Return Visits to ‘Imwas and the Liturgical Subversion of Ethnocratic Topology “A specter haunts the Middle East, the daunting specter of Palestinian-Jewish binationalism.” –—Udi Aloni1 “Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.” –—Michel de Certeau2 “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.” –—Luke 24:31 (NRSV) In this book I have examined competing political theologies of exile, considering how a political theology of exilic landedness (as articulated in different, yet I would argue complementary, ways by Yoder, Raz-Krakotzkin, 127 and others) might counter Zionism’s political theology of negation of exile. I have also analyzed what mapping practices these political theologies support. Questions that have driven this investigation include: What forms of countermapping might not only oppose Zionist practices of dispossession and cartographic erasure, but also subvert the exclusivist, nationalist logic that animates so many mapping and counter-mapping projects, charting instead alternative forms of political organization? What forms of political life might be shaped by an acceptance of exile as vocation and an acknowledgment of divine extraterritoriality (Yoder)? What types of practices and actions flow from a commitment to live in exile within the land (Raz-Krakotzkin)? Previous chapters have offered tentative answers to these questions, in particular the Bir‘imite mappings of return discussed in chapter 3. To deepen and develop these tentative answers further, I will describe and analyze the countermappings produced and performed by the Zochrot Association, a decadeold Israeli organization dedicated to “remembering the Nakba in Hebrew,” giving particular attention to its alternative mapping practices at the site of the depopulated village of ‘Imwas on the western edge of the West Bank. Zochrot’s cartographic performances, I argue, should properly be understood as liturgical actions in the sense of liturgy advanced by political theorist Vincent Lloyd as a practice that creates a space in which the hegemony of social norms is suspended, thus pointing to new political possibilities. More specifically, following Lloyd and Catholic theologian Jean-Yves Lacoste, I contend that Zochrot’s mappings and at least some cartographic practices of Palestinian refugees should be viewed as exilic vigils, actions in which return is shaped by the exilic commitment to building the city for others and that anticipate a coming, binational future. Byzantine and Crusader-era remains within ‘Imwas’ ruins commemorate the biblical account of the encounter between the resurrected Jesus and two of his disciples as they walked along the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35).3 To visit the ruins of ‘Imwas today within the park created by the Jewish National Fund on the village’s lands is to walk within a haunted place. Michel de Certeau has observed how all places are haunted, haunted in the sense that they become places rather than coordinates on a Cartesian plane thanks to the memories, stories, and legends individuals and communities attach to them. Certeau’s observation certainly rings true for what Zali Gurevitch has called “the double site of Israel”: while Zionist cartography seeks to construct and portray an exclusively Israeli Jewish landscape, the landscape remains haunted by traces of the prior, never completely effaced Palestinian habitation.4 Zochrot’s countermapping practices call attention to those traces, and in doing so arouse and 128 | Mapping Exile and Return invoke a specter that appears threatening to many Israeli Jews, namely, the specter of binationalism. “Zionism’s significant Other—the intolerable one that mustn’t be seen—is the Palestinian Nakba,” Zochrot founder Eitan Bronstein asserts. “It is kept a secret, like a fantasma, a ghost that continues to walk through our space and time and continues to interfere in strange, sometimes uncontrollable ways.”5 By highlighting the palimpsest character of the Israeli landscape, Zochrot provokes a conversation within the Israeli Jewish public about the binational specter uncovered by mapping Palestinian refugee return back onto the landscape, a conversation about whether that specter must be encountered as a threat, or if it might instead herald a future way of living in the land. But Zochrot does not simply instigate argument and debate over the future of binationalism. Through its counter-mappings, I argue, Zochrot performs the promise of binationalism in the present through enacted rememberings of the past. These alternative cartographic performances are liturgical actions, in the sense of liturgy developed by Lloyd and Lacoste. Specifically, by building on Paul Virilio’s account of dromocracy, I argue that the...