Walking to Unsettle Jerusalem

We are happy to announce the publication of the essay “Walking to Unsettle Jerusalem” by Dorit Naaman, director of “Jerusalem, We Are Here” (JWHR), in the first issue of the journal Palestine/Israel Review (PIR)

PIR is a new online, biannual publication edited by Sonia Boulos and Tamir Sorek. It is “is an open access journal that provides a platform for exchanging knowledge, scholarship, and ideas among scholars who share the relational, integrative, and wholistic approach to the study of Palestine/Israel.The journal publishes studies in the humanities and the social sciences that emphasize the social, cultural, economic, and political dynamics between the Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine/Israel from the nineteenth century until the present. The journal will cover these dynamics in Palestine/Israel (from Ottoman times to the present).”

Dorit’s peer-reviewed paper examines the half a dozen walks that she guided or co-guided with Anwar Ben Badis while researching and constructing JWRH. She recounts the methods she employed to defamiliarize the space, bring in the Palestinian history and narratives, and “unsettle” settler narratives. The paper, which is based on a post written in this blog in May 2019, brings the experiences of guiding the walks (primarily with Israeli participants) into a settler-colonial, academic, artistic, and activist framework. 

A link to the paper is available on our Academic References page. 

In the opening editorial of the first issue of PIR, Honaida Ghanim and Tamir Sorek argue:

Seven and a half decades since the inception of the Nakba, it is no longer possible to deal with Palestinian and Israeli societies as separate objects of knowledge. They have become intertwined, like conjoined twins; each domain is the other side of the coin of the opposite field, linked by complex, diverse, and multilayered relationships in which violence, conflict, contradiction, tension, erasure, substitution, exclusion, superiority and subjugation, resistance, steadfastness, destruction, construction, cooperation, and interaction are intermingled.

Is there room for intellectual work in the post-7 October 2023 dark universe? The answer the authors provide is that “By bringing ‘Palestine’ and ‘Israel’ into the same epistemological field, we aspire to reshape meanings and open up the possibility of decolonization, rather than legitimizing the colonization of Palestine.”  

The editorial is a must-read for anyone who rejects the binary of either Israel or Palestine. ✹