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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).”

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Marina Parisinou

Expanding the Map

To ask for a map is to say, “Tell me a story”

— Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
by Peter Turchi

There are two parts to the Jerusalem, We Are Here (JWRH) interactive documentary: the tours and the map. The tours are, true to their name, guided tours of Katamon. The visitors select the Green, Red, or Yellow tour which they then follow on a walk along the streets of the neighbourhood (by means of Google Maps) while listening to narration. There are stops along the way—the houses of the participants or historical locations—where they can watch videos, listen to audio, or read about a place or person.

Just like the tours, the map of JWRH tells a story—many stories, in fact. It tells of the people who lived, worked, and played in Katamon and beyond, before they were scattered by the winds of the 1948 war to different parts of the world. Each house, each building contains one or more stories, one or more testaments to the life that was. Unlike official maps which are typically created by states using scientific measuring tools, our map has been developed organically, from the ground up, with the collective memory as its main resource, and stands contrary to the official story. 

This blog post traces how the map was created and evolved. It also announces a significant expansion which is under way, thanks to the generous financial support of Tony Mansour and his family. 

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JWRH on JQ

JQ 89 - Spring 2022

In 2021 the executive editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly (JQ) invited Dorit Naaman, Marina Parisinou and Mona Hajjar Halaby to co-author an essay for the journal. The Jerusalem Quarterly, published since 1998 by the Institute for Palestine Studies, is “the leading journal on the past, present, and future of Jerusalem. It documents the current status of the city and its predicament.”

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Marina Parisinou

TWiP: West Jerusalem

The August issue of This Week in Palestine (TWiP) is dedicated to West Jerusalem with the caption: ‘We Too Shall Never Forget.’ The term West Jerusalem refers to those neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, outside the walls, that were occupied by the new state of Israel in 1948 and as a result were cut off from the rest of the city (which was occupied by Jordan until 1967 and became known as East Jerusalem). German Colony, Katamon, Baq’a, Talbiyeh, Greek Colony were neighbourhoods of Palestinian middle classes of all stripes: Christian, Muslim, Arab, Greek, Armenian… ‘In May 1948, an entire educated, cultured, cosmopolitan, and vibrant community of Palestinians was decimated. True, many moved on and rebuilt what they had lost, but the scar remains and the injustice continues. Somehow, this scar is genetic and is passed on from one generation to another,’ writes Sani Meo, publisher of TWiP, in The Last Word of the issue.

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Mona Hajjar Halaby: “In My Mother’s Footsteps”

“In My Mother’s Footsteps: A Palestinian Refugree Returns Home” is the title of a new memoir by Mona Hajjar Halaby, published today by Thread Books.

Mona is one of the key collaborators of Jerusalem, We Are Here. We are thrilled for this new accomplishment of hers, offer our warm congratulations – and look forward to reading her book.

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Dorit Naaman

Walking to “Unsettle”

Introduction

“Hearing Arabic in these streets and hearing about the people who lived here gives me double vision,” an Israeli woman told me emphatically. “I grew up in Katamon, and the Palestinian past of this neighborhood was never part of my landscape. I can promise you that I will never walk these streets in the same way!” she proclaimed. The woman was attending a guided walk, one of half-a-dozen public walks I guided or co-guided while doing research for, and production and dissemination of, Jerusalem, We Are Here, an online project designed with Palestinian and international audiences in mind. But as an Israeli engaged with uncovering a buried Palestinian past, I wanted to reach Israeli audiences as well. The engagement in the space had various manifestations, with public guided tours being an evolving core. The design of the tours was organic and intuitive, but my goal was to use them as an experiential and structured vehicle for considering not only the Palestinian past, but also the future, and Israeli responsibilities towards that future.

In a fraught political space with active and continuous forms of erasure and exile, walking, by itself, does not have the capacity to reveal entanglements or remake place. I first started learning the Palestinian history of the neighborhood from Ghada Karmi’s memoir “In Search of Fatima” and Khalil al Sakakini’s diaries. But as I physically walked Katamon, I had no anchors to any of the landmarks mentioned in the books. Even former public institutions do not have plaques identifying them, let alone individual houses. While most Israelis know they are walking in a former middle-class Palestinian neighborhood, the large Israeli flags, welded iron Star of David or Menorahs on gates and fences, and the street names, all work to suppress the Palestinian history. As a tour guide, if I wanted to activate not only an expanded understanding of the past, but also an implied present and imagined future, I would have to first unravel Israelis’ well-knitted narratives. In effect, I was working – gently – to “unsettle” Israelis.

Dorit Naaman in Katamon
Dorit Naaman guiding a tour in Katamon, May 2017
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Marina Parisinou

The Beginning of the End

This was first published on the author’s personal blog on 5 Jan 2018
– the 70th anniversary of the bombing of the Semiramis.

It was a dark and stormy night. No, it truly was! “Torrential rain, accompanied by thunder and lightning fell in Jerusalem all Sunday night“, wrote The Palestine Post on 6 Jan 1948 noting that the belfry of the Dormition Abbey had been struck by lightning and windows had been broken. “Throughout the night there was heavy rain and one thunder-clap at 3.50 a.m. awakened many persons in all parts of the city.“

Like in most of the neighbourhood, in a corner stone house in upper Katamon, only a few blocks away from the monastery and church of St Simeon, the Kassotis family – my mother (just a week short of her 18th birthday), her parents and two sisters – would have been awoken much earlier, had the storm allowed them to sleep in the first place. To begin with there was the sound of grenade for at 1 am on Monday, 5 January, 1948 – exactly 70 years ago – the Hotel Semiramis, two doors down the street from the Kassotis, came under attack by the Haganah, the Jewish  militia.

Kassotis house in Katamon.
Photographed by Jules Parisinos, April 1974
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Marina Parisinou

At The Regent

Two heads, one bald, one full-hair, are peeking out from above the red velvet chairs. Their owners, Anwar Ben Badis and Mona Hajjar Halaby, who conduct the Arabic and English tours, respectively, of the Jerusalem, We Are Here (JWRH) interactive documentary, are exchanging family memories of the place. Dorit Naaman, the creator and director, joins them as up on the big screen fragments of an old reel start rolling.

It’s July 2015 and we are filming the opening shots of JWRH at the Regent, the longest-running cinema in Jerusalem. Today it has a different name, but to us, as we go about remapping this area and bringing back, albeit digitally, the people and the life that existed here till 1948, it is and always will be the Regent.

Filming at the Regent – July 2015
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Dorit Naaman

The Assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte

The junction of Hapalmach and Ha’Gdud Ha’Ivri streets in Jerusalem is unassuming. Hapalmach  — an acronym meaning strike forces/company — is a street named after the elite militant wing of the Haganah, the underground army of the Jewish community in pre-1948 Palestine. Ha’Gdud Ha’Ivri, or the Jewish Legion, was established following the British conquest of Palestine from the Ottomans in World War I, and disbanded in 1921. Like many other streets in Katamon, the names assigned after 1948 commemorate the 1948 war. But the victor did not leave a trace to the horrific events of 17 September 1948. 

Here, the Stern Gang (a right wing Jewish paramilitary group) ambushed a convoy of vehicles carrying Count Folke Bernadotte, the U.N. Mediator in Palestine, and assassinated him.

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Anwar Ben Badis

The House with the Stairs That Hug You…

A few days ago, I guided a tour in the Talbiyeh neighborhood, and we came to the house of Dimitri Hanna (the current address is Disraeli 13). When entering the house through the gate, one is astonished by the symmetrical staircases, both rolling like a vine, as if hugging the one who enters. I felt the stairs’ hug, and I heard a voice: “Don’t be afraid, we, the stairs, speak Arabic. Ahlan Wa Sahlan. Welcome.”

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