Palestinians: The Land and the Law, an Inverse Relationship

THE POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF THE LAND, BEFORE AND AFTER THE NAKBA Prior 1947, the Palestinians, who hoped one day be part of a sovereign Arab Palestine, whether within Syria or as an independent state, were able live in and move over their land freely. When they were displaced, it was almost always as a result of financial transactions (where land was bought and sold over their heads) or economic need (unemployment). Of course they had no political rights, but they maintained physical access the land. Despite the encroachment of both the British and the Zionists, they were able prosper in some parts of the country. (1) Before the land was lost them, physically in part, and politically in its entirety, Palestinians had the same type of deep attachment to as other traditional or semitraditional societies. (2) Their interest in the land was implicit, rather than obsessively verbalized, since they took it granted as a place they had lived in generations and which provided them with physical and symbolic sustenance. It was what the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls a rootedness characterized by its unself-conscious quality, and opposed the sense of requiring distance between self and place. (3) And it was certainly not an attachment the land as landscape, that was a particularly Western phenomenon. W.J.T. Mitchell speaks ironically of the ethnocentric and self-justifying perceptions of colonialist Westerners, but his analysis of the Palestinian relation the land prior the 1947-48 nakba has a great deal of pertinence in that it is describing a situation in which indigenous people are both in and of the land: The primitive or aboriginal dweller on the land (literally, the pagan or rustic villager) is seen as part of the landscape, not as a self-consciously detached viewer who sees nature for its own sake as the Western observer does. In addition, the native dweller is seen as someone who fails see the material wealth and value of the land, a value that is obvious the Western observer. The failure of the native exploit, develop and improve the landscape is, paradoxically, what makes it so valuable, so ripe appropriation. The failure exploit the land, its undeveloped character, also seems confer a presumptive right of conquest and colonization on the Western observer, who comes armed both with weapons and arguments underwrite the legitimacy of his appropriation of the land ... Landscape thus serves as an aesthetic alibi conquest, a way of naturalizing imperial expansion, and even making it look disinterested in a Kantian sense. (4) As historians have shown, the pre-history of contemporary Palestinian identity can be found in the particular configuration of the maqamat, or holy shrines, that peppered the territory and the particular form of religiosity of Palestinian mountain dwellers as well as plains people, in which attachment a particular place within the countryside was central. Each village, or at the very least each district, had a saint (wali) who protected the villagers. The wall's name was always invoked during prolonged absences from home. (5) The coherence of the Palestinian land, expressed economically, socially, and culturally, had made it possible and logical in the 19th century the European powers, in the course of their maneuvers over the Eastern Question in 1840, offer the Egyptian ruler Muhammad All control over the so-called pashalik of Acre, with borders that have since become universally familiar, since for the first time five European powers had defined the contours of that which would in the twentieth century become mandatory Palestine. (6) In other words, while the Palestinians cared very much about their land and had done so generations, they were entirely in-and-of it and thus largely unself-conscious about it until the nakba, when everything changed. …