The Palestinian Museum’s Family Album Project: The Intimate Side of History in Palestine

[Palestinian Museum logo.] [Palestinian Museum logo.]

The Palestinian Museum’s Family Album Project: The Intimate Side of History in Palestine

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was issued 13 May 2015 by the Palestinian Museum.]

The Palestinian Museum’s Family Album Project: The Intimate Side of History in Palestine

Ramallah: The Palestinian Museum researchers have been traveling around the occupied West Bank for months now. They are gathering photos and testimonies of events that happened before and after the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians - 60% of the population of Palestine at the time - were dispossessed from their land.

Under the slogan ‘Your pictures, Your Memories, Our History’, the Palestinian Museum’s “Family Album” project seeks to unearth the photographic treasures hidden away in many Palestinian homes, revealing images of key incidents and well-known personalities as well as different aspects of Palestinian life before and after the Nakba. The photos will soon be available through a portal accessible from all over the globe.

According to Palestinian Museum director Jack Persekian the project is intended to document visually key aspects of Palestinian history, life, culture and society. Collecting and digitising photographs that have for years lain forgotten in cupboards and drawers, the Museum will be able to provide an extraordinarily rich new resource for researchers and interested members of the public, one that will hopefully be a starting point for diverse creative projects.

As Persekian stressed,“The photographs taken by so many Palestinians constitute a hugely valuable archive that must be preserved and protected, especially given the fact that so much of the Palestinian archive has already been lost over the years.” He called upon the Palestinian public to begin archiving their own photos themselves, as a means of helping protect a national identity that is constantly under threat.

“We all know that our land and our rights and our resources have been systematically taken from us,” he added, “But we seem less aware of the terrible loss of our libraries and archives, our books and pictures – things that collectively constitute our heritage, our history and our identity and present them to the world.”

The Family Album project targets Palestinian families both in Palestine and in the diaspora. Interviews are held with the owners to contextualize the images before they are digitized and stored in an archive; this archive will eventually act as a collective, visual representation of this intimate side of life, history, culture and society in Palestine.

The Palestinian Museum building, which is currently being constructed in Birzeit – 25km north of Jerusalem - is specifically designed to house archives. The Museum is also engaged in training its employees in this field, equipping them to deal with this kind of archival work. The Museum’s network of partnerships, digital archives and electronic platforms will also help to make this information accessible both to the local and global publics.

The Palestinian Museum, a flagship project of the Welfare Association, will open its doors to the public in Spring 2016.

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[Graduates from the Friends School, Ramallah, 1940. From the family album of Janet Mikhail. © The Palestinian Museum.]
 

\"\"[Adele ‘Azar holds up a photograph of her son Salim ‘Azar, who was martyred during the bombing of the Dar Islim printing house in Jaffa, in 1948. The photograph was taken in Gaza in the early 1950s. From Salim ‘Azar’s family album. © The Palestinian Museum.]

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[A photo taken in 1925 of Yacoub and Yousef Burbar, both originally from the town of Birziet. Yacoub, who lived in the USA at the time, has juxtaposed his own picture in the States with the picture of his brother Yousef in Birzeit. The photo contrasts the different lifestyles of these two brothers in their separate contexts. From the family album of Najeh Burbar © The Palestinian Museum.]

 

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[[The British Army enters Jerusalem, 1917. From the family album of Said Husseini © The Palestinian Museum]

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[Abdel Qader Husseini (right). Uknown place, mid 1930s. From the family album of Said Husseini © The Palestinian Museum]urbarurbar

 

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[Abdel Qader Husseini (right). Uknown place, mid 1930s. From the family album of Said Husseini © The Palestinian Museum.]

 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412