Dorit Naaman
Jerusalem, We Are Here is an interactive documentary that digitally brings back Palestinians to the Jerusalem neighborhoods from which they were expelled during the 1948 war. Almost 70 years after the Nakba (Palestinian catastrophe), participants collaborated on a suite of short films and audio files organized as an online walking tour, and a map was developed to house the neighborhood residents’ documents, photos, and stories. As an archive of participants’ stories, Jerusalem, We Are Here challenges hegemonic ideas about Jerusalem that abide by a notion of singular sovereignty and entail forgetting those who are still awaiting justice. In what follows below, Dorit Naaman, Alliance Atlantis Professor of Film and Media at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and the director of Jerusalem, We Are Here, discusses the process of creating Jerusalem, We Are Here and using mapping to bring the Palestinian past into the present in order to consider a different, possible future. Where appropriate, the editors of GrayLit have included screenshots of Jerusalem, We Are Here, hyperlinks, and quotes from participants, but these barely begin to capture the depth and intricacy of the project, which is freely available online.
There are quite a few entry points to the story of discovering the other Jerusalem, so let us begin by meeting Marina, a Cypriote-American, and a second-generation Palestinian exile. Let us enter her story here: watch the video, listen to the audio, and come back.
“I realize that all the hooks that memory has have gone now. It’s...The house, back in 1986, it was still there. It was still our house, or my mother’s house. I could still feel that it was our house, and a stranger was in it. Now the house is gone. It doesn’t matter that the bottom structure is there, the house is gone. And it almost feels like a death.”
Let us also meet Nahla Assali and her son Anees, as they enter the house Nahla lost as a child during the 1948 war. I met Nahla, Anees, Marina, and many other Palestinians from Jerusalem while working on the interactive documentary, Jerusalem, We Are Here.
“I was born here, and I would like to see the house I was born in.”
For me, the the project started with a hand drawn map, which Hala Sakakini produced in 1950 from memory. Katamon was predominantly a middle-class Arab Greek-Orthodox neighborhood, housed by teachers, civil servants in the British mandate, consulates of European and Arab states, and a few family owned hotels. If you walk the neighborhood today all that is visible of this rich history is the architectural testimony (mostly in the International style) signaling that it was once an urbane Palestinian neighborhood.
I found the map sixty years after the Nakba (or the Palestinian catastrophe, when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War). The map gave me—an Israeli Jerusalemite—a capacity to move beyond the Israeli idiom of an “Arab neighborhood,” an idiom that means high real-estate value but no Palestinians in sight. I started looking for the Palestinian owners of the homes, tracing documents, maps, bills, and photos.
As I dug deeper into the invisible, the buried, the suppressed, even the bombed, I started seeing the neighborhood differently. The British maps and aerials gave me an impersonal bird’s-eye view of what used to be, but with a stroller in tow, and a babbling one-year old, I walked up and down the neighborhood as if I was wearing invisible glasses, seeing afresh, and importantly, at a human scale.
“When there is no justice, people continue to feel unheard, unrecognized, unacknowledged, and the pain is perpetuated.”
As I passed houses in the neighborhood, I could “see” Hala Sakakini and her sister Dumia’s birthday party, a tea at the Moushabeck’s, and Marina’s mother, Anna, posing as a cocky teenager, wearing shorts, a sailor’s cap, and a cigarette in hand. All of these I came to know by the way of photographs, and slowly but surely, I became an embodied archive of the Palestinian history of Katamon, an odd experience, given that it was not my ancestral history, and that many of the Palestinians from Katamon who grew up in the diaspora had no access to those memories. I started wondering how to share this knowledge with Palestinian descendants, and how to make visible that which most Israelis have no interest in knowing.
But then a different process started, and this one caught me by surprise: the more I learned about the Palestinian history of the neighborhood, the more Israelis wanted to know. It took me a while to realize that humanizing the Palestinians, educating Israelis about them, and sharing their stories, was a necessary, but utterly insufficient condition to evoke change. I realized that I wanted to bring the Palestinian past into the Israeli present, to trouble the notion of ultimate and ethnically singular sovereignty, and to try and imagine a different future for us all. In mainstream Israeli discourse, the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees equals the destruction of the State of Israel and is thus a “no-go” discursive zone. For most Palestinians, the Right of Return is at once a personal right and a collective right, without which no solution to the political impasse can emerge. For a long time I wasn’t sure if I could make an intervention into this seemingly zero-sum perception of territorial control. But slowly, organically, a non-didactic path forward emerged.
We formed a dedicated team of Palestinians and Israelis, and through Jerusalem, We Are Here attempted to do just that: we layered history into the present, creating an audio-visual text that offers fresh perspectives about the relationship to both the lived-in space, and to history. In the form of a virtual tour, the collaborative project allows glimpses not only into Palestinian life before 1948 but also now, as seen in Nahla’s and Marina’s reactions to the visits to their families’ homes.
In an online community generated map, we have made every house that existed prior to 1948 a live link populated by information given to us by visitors to the project.
For instance, when Firas el Saleh—who has never been to Jerusalem—sent photos and a personally drawn map, based on his father’s memories, I knew exactly where places were. At an event in Washington D.C., two women started weeping after I passed over their father’s house. They both went to Jerusalem trying to locate it based on his instructions and failed. Only now, after he has passed away, they found the location on our map.
In Bethlehem, an audience member asked me: “aren’t you worried this map will serve as the basis for claims for reparations or Return?” My answer was: “no, I am no longer afraid. It will make me happy, because without reparations and Return, we cannot move forward.” I also said that in the 1940s the neighborhood housed multiple couples across the religious/ethnic divide of Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, and no-one was expelled or shunned. It certainly was a more tolerant time, and if we want to move forward, perhaps we need to look back.
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“Without reparations and Return, we cannot move forward.”