On a short distance trip from Ramallah invited me to drive with
him to Bethlehem – 28,5km, which in any free country takes less than 1 hour, thirty
minutes into the trip, palestinians are stopped at an Israeli checkpoint,
pulling into a huge queue of cars. The place is engulfed by an apathetic
silence, indicative of how anormallly normal the situation is for those
experiencing it. This is Palestine. You can never predict when to move or to
stop. People have lost any sense of what a meeting time means. You arrive when
you arrive.
Welcome to Palestine – an open-air museum of colonialism.
For most people nowadays, colonialism is part of a bygone era. The
majority of the world’s population has no first-hand experience of it, and many
cannot imagine what it means to live under total foreign control. Today we have
museums of colonialism, where people can go to learn about how this form of
rule affected natives’ freedoms to live, to move, to speak, to work, and even
to die peacefully. We live (supposedly) in a postcolonial world, and museums of
colonialism serve to transport visitors back to a cruel era, granting them a
glimpse of the damage this type of governance wrought on native communities.
What if, however, there were an actual place in our world today
where colonialism and post-colonialism co-existed? Herein lies the sad, almost
incomprehensible Palestinian contribution to the museum industry. If museums of
colonialism reimagine the past in a modern setting, Palestine is both past and
present – a colonial and postcolonial reality. In Palestine, there is no need
to create a museum of colonialism: the whole country functions as such.
At any museum, you can expect to be able to explore different
sections on different themes. The same holds true in Palestine – it has various
sections, each displaying a different layer of colonialism. There is the West
Bank, where you can see illegal Israeli settlements, expropriated land, a
separation wall, and a physically controlled population. Then there is Gaza,
where open-air museum meets open-air prison, as two million Palestinians have
been living under an Israeli blockade for more than 15 years. And if you are
more into surveying a surreal case of colonialism, then head to Israel proper
and find out how Palestinians who stayed in historic Palestine after the
foundation of Israel live. There, you will learn about stolen houses,
demolished villages, second-class citizens, and institutionalised racism.
Open-air museums seek to give visitors a direct experience of what
it was like to live in the past. When I tell friends that settler-only roads
surround tiny villages all over the West Bank, they respond with a disbelieving
gasp. For many, it is inconceivable to imagine colonial-era conditions in our
time, and yet they have been the status quo in Palestine for decades. People
who would like to learn about colonialism need look no further than Palestine.
It is colonialism incarnate.
Recognising 21st century Palestine as an open-air museum of colonialism
casts the longstanding Palestinian-Israeli conflict in a different light.
During the latest Israeli attack on Gaza, some supporters of Israel legitimised
its use of force by noting that any sovereign state would have reacted
similarly to defend itself had it been under rocket fire from another state. Hamas launched rockets into Israeli
territory, so this logic goes, and so Israel has a right to fight back.
This repeated argument ignores one crucial reality of the
situation: Gaza is not a state. The West Bank is not a state either. In fact,
there is no Palestinian state. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians
is not one between two sovereign states. Rather, it is a conflict between a
colonised people and their coloniser.
Framing Palestine as a colonial question is essential to
understanding the peculiarity of the Palestinian condition. For many people
around the world, Palestine is an enigma. How is it that for so long
Palestinians have been stuck in a situation that is seemingly so unchangeable,
fixed, intractable? Statelessness, uprooting, refugeehood, and resistance have
practically become permanent descriptors of Palestinians. The conflict between
Palestinians and Israelis has evolved into a cornerstone of our modern
soundscape – something always happens there, except what happens never brings
about any serious change to the status quo.
If Palestine is often viewed as a persistent dilemma whose
resolution is long overdue, it is because Palestine is more of an anomaly than
an enigma. Palestinians have not enjoyed the kind of history that most people
in the colonial era have. In most cases, the story of former colonies followed
a linear path: colonialism, anti-colonial struggle, and then independence – a
new nation-state. This pattern was so forceful and the defeat of colonialism so
successful that the last few decades have witnessed the emergence of a powerful
new field of intellectual inquiry aptly named “postcolonial studies”.
Ironically, one of the grand masters of this field was Palestinian – the late scholar
Edward Said.
Not so for Palestinians. Unlike other would-be nations in the
Middle East, such as Jordan, Iraq, and Syria, Palestine did not witness an end
to a British or French Mandate that would lead to the formation of an
independent nation-state. Rather, the termination of the British Mandate of
Palestine in 1948 led to what Palestinians view as another form of colonialism.
The Zionist movement, which would form Israel and result in the
destruction of Palestinian society and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine (a
series of events known in Palestinian historiography as the Nakba, or
Catastrophe), has successfully managed to halt the linear progression of
Palestinians’ path to self-determination. Both before and after 1948,
Palestinians have been struggling to resist first, British and then, Zionist
colonialism; realise their dream of a free, independent state; and cast off
their own specific, multilayered experiences of imperialism.
Put bluntly, Palestinians have yet to enter the postcolonial world
order. As individuals, they live in the 21st century, but as a stateless
nation, they are still captive to the pre-1948 colonial moment. This is the
anomaly of Palestinian time: as Columbia University professor Joseph Massad
characterises it, Palestine can be understood as a “postcolonial colony”, a
region where two periods, two world views, two eras, fiercely collide. This is
why it functions as an open-air museum of colonialism – it is at once past and
present, with the exploitative policies and practices of colonialism on
perpetual display.
It is dangerous to view Palestine as solely a human rights issue –
it is drastically more. Palestinians are a living demonstration of what barbaric
colonialism looks like. They simultaneously belong and do not belong to the
postcolonial order. For them, 1948 is not just a memory – it is an ongoing
reality, a moment in time that has been stretched to define who they are, and
who they are not. Palestine has been turned, brutally, into a permanent museum
of colonialism whose doors should have closed long ago.
That is, should have never been opened.
