Kevorkian Center Speaker Defines Israel’s Colonial Logic

by Katherine M. Metres

At the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, Tom Abowd spoke on “Excavating Israel’s Colonial Logic.” A Columbia University Ph.D. candidate in anthropology, Abowd discussed how Israel uses imagery portraying Jerusalem as the “eternal, undivided capital of Israel” to assist its goal of colonizing the city.

The lecture preceded the announcement of Israeli plans to build a large new Jewish settlement in Jabal Abu Ghneim/Har Homa. Abowd had relevantly observed that “the ‘culture core’ of East Jerusalem—the walled Old City and the sites of religious significance it envelopes—is used symbolically to give legitimacy to the rings of settlements which fan out into occupied Palestinian territories, the primary sites of physical appropriation and demographic transformation.” After their 1967 conquest of the city, the Israelis enlarged Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries to include Jabal Abu Ghneim and other expropriated West Bank territory.

Abowd showed slides by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism to illustrate his thesis that “domination is made to appear natural, ‘optionless’—and even progressive.” One post-Oslo poster, for example, portrayed “Israel” as a dove that included all of occupied Palestinian territory and pieces of all the surrounding countries. A more common image that Abowd calls “political” is a picture of the Western Wall and the al-Aqsa Mosque labeled “Israel.”

This image represents more than Jewish religious feeling for the site. It mirrors an official Israeli policy to push Palestinians out and settle Jews in East Jerusalem, which has until recently been predominantly Arab. Abowd said, “There is a simultaneous desire to create the impression of eternal ownership while at the same time radically transforming the city and the space called ‘Jerusalem.’”

Abowd concluded, “What is demanded of the outsider—and in fact of the Palestinian—is to be simultaneously historical, trans-historical, and sensitive to the presence, importance, and claims to the land by the Jewish people (dating back to the time of King David) while at the same time being entirely ahistorical and effacing the long, central reality in this horrible colonial narrative: namely, that the indigenous population has claims to the land that supersede those of settlers newly arrived from Brooklyn or Moscow or Belarus.”

Columbia Speaker Questions Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam

Uptown, Columbia University sponsored a lecture by Professor Ann Elizabeth Mayer on "Islamic Law and Human Rights Law: Conundrums and Equivocations.” Mayer spoke to a roundtable of scholars at the University Human Rights Seminar, which this year is focusing on religious issues.

Professor Mayer pointed with concern to the current trend to fuse elements of Islam with human rights law. Mayer acknowledged that Islam can be interpreted in constructive ways that provide cultural legitimacy for human rights. Nevertheless, she said, progressive Islamic trends are impeded by entrenched reactionaries.

Mayer illustrated her thesis with the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which states that “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’ah.” Mayer said that the declaration provides protections that are inferior to internationally accepted norms on freedom of religion, association, and press; equality of rights and equal protection of the law; and the observance of democratic principles, among others.

Mayer observed that religious leaders in Islam (as in other religions) present their views on rights questions as if they represented a consensus of believers. Yet, she opined, no such consensus exists; Muslims’ attitudes on rights questions are more likely to be influenced by politics than by religious doctrine. Furthermore, since women are excluded from positions of religious authority, Muslim feminists who challenge the notion that Islam mandates the inferior status of women are unable to effect change.

Kevorkian Center Films Feature Portrayals of Mideast Minorities

The Kevorkian Center presented a film festival entitled “Debating Center and Margin: Minorities in Middle Eastern Cinemas.” The series featured films on Berbers and Blacks in Algeria, Armenians in Lebanon, Afghan refugees in Iran, Nubians in Egypt, Kurds in Iraq, Palestinian refugees and citizens of Israel, and Yemeni immigrants in Israel. The Washington Report sampled four of these extraordinary films.

“Machaho” (Once Upon a Time) by Belkacem Hadjadj is the first Algerian film in Berber. Yet it explores a topic that, unfortunately, is not confined to any particular community in the Middle East: honor killings. The theme is a father’s revenge after a young man recuperating in his home impregnates his daughter. After beating the young woman, the father sets off to find the man responsible. On his way, he interrupts a tribal ritual and is tied up in the woods by angry tribesmen. Meanwhile, the young man returns to marry the daughter, and a healthy son is born.

The story takes a tragic twist when the father succeeds in killing the youth. Finally, his family’s honor avenged, he returns to his family, only to drop dead. With a title that alludes to fairy tales, this film clearly intends to teach a lesson: The very bonds of pride and solidarity that have enabled Middle Eastern communities to survive harsh conditions can have tragic results when individuals act as both judge and jury.

The documentary “Istiqlal” (Independence) won Director Nizar Hassan a prize at the Jerusalem International Film Festival. The film explores the dilemmas Israel’s “Independence Day” poses to Hassan’s neighbors, Palestinian citizens of Israel in the town of Mashed. Forced by the economic realities of jobs that depend on Israeli authorities, schoolteachers and truck drivers swallow their feelings of humiliation and observe Israeli national rites. The mayor uses his connections to Israeli leaders to garner development aid and to further his political ambitions.

Schoolchildren, however, voice nationalistic sentiments frankly. A young boy observes that the Israeli flag does not even make an attempt to represent its Arab citizens. Rather, the symbolism of two blue stripes for the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, with the Jewish people in between, represents total conquest of the Arabs. A girl says that Independence Day makes her sad, “because the State of Israel is independent, not us.” She continues, “To me it represents the egotism of the Jewish people, like when they said that Palestine is a land without a people for a people without a land.”

The difference between the two generations is not solely due to economics. The children are coming of age in a period shaped by occupation and the intifada. Their elders, on the other hand, are closer in age to “the Disaster,” as Palestinians widely refer to the 1947-49 conquest of their country. Furthermore, the children have internalized the value of free speech and the right to speak without fear. One young person says he will raise a black flag to protest Independence Day because “we have free speech like the Jews.”

Rashid Masharawi’s 1995 film “Intizaar” (Waiting) explores the experience of another group of Palestinians: the refugees. Residents of the squalid Al-Shati refugee camp in the Gaza Strip criticize the international community for failing to restore their lost homes. The families of Al-Shati, Masharawi’s among them, once owned small farms where they made an independent living. However, almost 50 years later they live on the charity of the United Nations Refugee and Works Administration (UNRWA).

Refugees say that the U.N. could have better met their needs by building factories to provide them independent employment. Without job opportunities in the Gaza Strip, most breadwinners must work in Israel. This situation gives Israel economic and political control of the refugees, as the border closure that began in 1994 attests.

More fundamentally, the United Nations could have forced Israel to cede territory obtained by force or at least to allow the refugees to return to their homes. One camp resident says, “The U.N. gave aid and tried to make people forget about their country....The U.N. cannot replace our country with flour.” The film’s title aptly captures the refugees’ enduring hope that eventually their rights will be restored to them. Those hopes, however, have suffered a blow since the Palestinian Authority took over without substantially improving refugee conditions.

Finally, “Unpromised Land” (ha-Eretz ha-Lo Hovtahat), directed by Ayelet Heller, tells the untold story of the displacement of Yemeni Jewish pioneers by Kibbutz Kinneret. According to Heller, herself an Ashkenazi immigrant, in 1912 a group of Yemeni Jews settled near the Sea of Galilee. “Lake Kinneret” was part of a messianic vision for the Yemenis, who had longed for it as a “sacred love.” In draining the swamps and cultivating the land, many died of malaria, scorpion bites and hard labor.

Yet in 1914 the “promised land” became “unpromised.” Over the Yemenis’ protests, authorities gave the land to a group of Ashkenazi pioneers who wanted to establish a banana plantation kibbutz. The Yemenis were loaded on vehicles and forcibly relocated to another site. The story is suppressed by kibbutz tour guides.

The repercussions of the decision, which symbolizes official Israeli oppression of Arab Jews and non-Jews, still reverberate. In the film, an old man cries, remembering his grief and humiliation. Ashkenazi descendants of the original kibbutzim differ in their judgments on the event. One man defends the decision in the name of “development,” while another decries it, asserting, “No one can erase someone else from history.”

This theme runs through all of the recent lectures and films. Whether it be Israeli ideologues, erasing historic Palestinian rights to Jerusalem; Palestinians longing to return to their homes in Israel; Islamic authorities excluding women’s voices when determining a religious consensus on human rights; or European Jews dominating Arab Jews, in the modern Middle East all voices must be heard and respected.