Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine's History

Bibliographic Data

ID3984207
AuthorsRana Barakat (corresponding author), Barakat, Barakat Barakat (corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume5
Issue2
Pages1-15
Publication date2018-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNative American and Indigenous Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2332-1261 • E-ISSN: 2332-127X
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/nai.2018.a721563
OpenAlexW2942497938
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited15

Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine's History Rana Barakat (bio) A man builds a house and says,"I am native now."..."I don't like wars,they end up with monuments." —FROM NAOMI SHIHAB NYE'S "JERUSALEM" before april 1948 and the start of the Nakba war, the "catastrophe" of Zionist settler expulsion of Palestinians to create the state of Israel, Lifta, like all the other urbanized villages in the Jerusalem area, was home to Palestinians. But after that and for nearly seventy years since, many have referred to Lifta as the "only abandoned Arab village in Israel not to have been destroyed or repopulated since 1948." However, while it may be popular to refer to it this way, this oft-repeated description is not entirely accurate.1 Still, the village of Lifta, located in the western corridor of Jerusalem, just northwest of the main city center, is a rather unique site. In 1948 Zionist settlers violently destroyed and built over large parts of the village. However, there remain more than fifty standing structures in the lower section of the village that were spared the work of bulldozers in 1948 and 1949.2 This essay argues that Lifta's history and fate as a Palestinian place with Palestinian people who continue to call it home is part of the larger Indigenous historical narrative of Palestine. However, the uniqueness of Lifta is often excised from the dominant narrative, creating a predicament that raises a series of epistemological, political, and ethical questions.3 By examining the politics of Lifta on the local and international stages, I aim to understand how Lifta has been subject to a process of what I call "museumification." The main question posed here is how we can return Lifta to an Indigenous articulation of Palestinian history and how that restoration might in turn facilitate [End Page 1] a different sort of return—one of Palestinians to Lifta as part of a collective right of return to a decolonized Palestine. History of the Present: The Israeli Court Case for Lifta The complex story of beginnings is a part of a larger project on the Nakba in Palestine that I explore elsewhere for Lifta as well as the whole of historic Palestine.4 By April 1948 Zionist forces had driven the entire Indigenous population of Lifta from their homes and village, leading the inhabitants who survived the Zionist attacks, like those from other surrounding villages, to begin their refugee journey. Today the descendants of the people of Lifta live in neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Amman and throughout the world. In the history of the "destroyed villages," this particular exodus story is actually only unique as far as the specificities of location within the larger Palestinian narrative of the war in 1947–49.5 Various wings of the Zionist military forcibly emptied over five hundred villages, propelling nearly three-quarters of a million Palestinians into their refugee journeys during the Nakba war.6 Lifta is part of this larger story, but it has also, through time as well as through various tactics of settler manipulation of the narrative and the space, become a story in itself. In this settler narrative, the uniqueness of the story of Lifta begins with how this particular exodus is memorialized as a "beginning" to an "end" of the Palestinian history in Lifta. That is, as the "only remaining abandoned Arab village," the settler narrative of the place becomes one framed as a story of preservation. Lifta's story of preservation is a drama full of all kinds of actors—from settlers who want to be natives, settlers who want to make their own style of native chic, natives who were metamorphosed (and who in some ways and instances metamorphosed themselves) into folk stories, and, off this stage framed by the settler and imperial powers, Indigenous Palestinians who work to return. To understand the unique part of Lifta's Nakba drama we must fast-forward to the twenty-first century. In 2003 the Israel Land Commission issued a public tender for construction in Lifta. Various arms of the settler state's motivation for this political move included the acceptance of proposals for

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Ethnology · Indigenous · Literature · Memoir · Narrative · Palestine · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Archaeological Research and Protection · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts

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