Theft of the Nakba Narrative - Left Curve

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cultural appropriation since the 1930s. Discussions of cultural appropriation, however, appeared in North American and Western European academia only in the late 1980s, and traveled to Israeli academia at the end of the 1990s. Paradoxically, it is the Israeli academics who are recognized as pioneers in the discussion of the cultural confiscation of Palestine. The Palestinians’ own research and writing about the takeover has been completely overlooked in the West. 3. Both Israeli academia and the Israeli fine art establish ment—the subject of my MA dissertation—have merged Zionist content with Western avant-garde ideas. Curators, artists, museum managers, art historians and critics have helped absorb Western intellectuals into the Zionist narrative. 55 The Yemeni Shoshana Damari sings “I am from Safed” written by the Poles Vilenski and Alterman, who are using the Arab Jewish performer as a means to indigenize themselves. There are three distinguishable phases to the Israeli appropriation of Palestinian heritage. In the first phase, the Zionist movement, and then the State of Israel, made great efforts to indigenize the European Jewish colonizers. They associated their culture with the local heritage, claiming, “the return of an Phase 1 - A Artwork by Tzivi Geva “Kufiya No. 25” 1990. Phase 1 - B 4. Rosemary Comb argues that researchers who study and define the culture of the Other without being deeply familiar with it commit an act of cultural violence. In most Israeli writings about Palestinian art, Arabic resources are almost completely absent. 5. The Israeli intellectuals’ fashionable confessions of the cultural appropriation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine create the illusion of self-criticism. The recurring pattern is as follows: First, the Israeli inflictors commit the crime of expelling residents, destroying towns and usurping culture. Afterward, they deny the violence. Later, when there is no danger, they confess their violent deeds—an act that wins them international forgiveness and legitimacy, along with widespread acceptance of the facts they have produced. The Israeli Kufiya, 2007. indigenous people to its homeland after two thousand years.” This phase primarily involved the theft of various elements from Palestinian heritage that were then redistributed all over the world as ancient Jewish heritage. For example: The Palestinian Kufiya. Left: The first days of the Ein Hod Artists Colony. Right: Yitzhak Danziger 1977 “environmental art” project Oak tree planting ceremony in memory of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) elite unit Egoz who died in combat in the Golan Heights in the 1973 war. After the Nakba, the Israeli intellectuals dedicated their work to supporting the seizure of Palestinian land and physical property, and de-Arabizing all of the above.
The first project is an art exhibition entitled “Kadima: The East in Israeli Art.” It was held at Israel’s national museum in 1998, which openly examined the phenomenon of cultural appropriation. Kadima boasts about using the writings of Edward Said and the term “Orientalism.” Like the Israeli academics, the Israeli art establishment has started to admit to the role of art in the Zionist strategic appropriation of Palestinian heritage. Gratziela Trachtenberg, the project’s academic adviser and main catalog’s author, wrote: “The Arab is a means of returning to the ‘Jewish past,’ because he was considered to be the one who preserved some of the Hebraic costumes in his heritage.” Phase 2 Left: David Ginton 1997: Two Flags on Two Fields, 120 x 86 cm, wax on canvas Right: Metzer-Messer, 1972. Earth, each hole 80 x 80 x 80 cm. Environmental art project of Micha Ulmann. In the second phase, after the 1967 war Israeli intellectuals devoted themselves to representing the conflict between Israel and the people of Palestine as a symmetric struggle between two indigenous people. Such a representation supported the official discourse adopted by Israel’s Ashkenazi Left, who called for “two states for two peoples”. At this phase the Israeli intellectuals repre- In the third phase, since the end of the 1990s, Israeli intellectuals have fully admitted to the Nakba, and have even produced research on it—rewriting history as a Phase 3 Third Phase Appropriation in Israeli Fine Arts sented themselves to world intellectuals as progressive and opposed to the occupation. For them, the occupation meant only the 1967 seizure of the remaining 22% of Palestinian land. The intellectuals also declared the Israeli soldier to be a victim of this occupation (see Shohat 1989). consequence. My research examines several projects on art and art criticism from this phase, but due to space limitations I will discuss only two: Art project 1 To the East (Kadima): Orientalism in the Arts in Israel. Catalog of the exhibition in Israel Museum 1998. Head curator Igal Tzalmona wrote: “Eliezer Ben- Yehuda [the Hebrew language reviver] considered the Arabs, and the Bedouin in particular, a descendant of the ancient Jews, as well as the Yemeni and the Sephardic Jews, [...] as if they maintained a Torah-era lifestyle. They have all become empty and transparent signifiers, stuffed with Zionist contents and turned into biblical figures. In the Zionists’ view, the land was given to the Jewish colonizers in advance. By this logic they can reclaim place.” Tzalmona even wrote: “The production of ‘Betzalel’ was an integral part of the Zionism propaganda system.” 56
Page 1: Zionism is a movement founded in th
Page 5 and 6: Book 2: Sanctification of Land: Jew

Theft of the Nakba Narrative - Left Curve

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