Future with Nayrouz Abu Hatoum

Transcript

Future with Nayrouz Abu Hatoum

Yulia: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I’m Yulia Gilich, member of the founding collective of ICSZ, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. In today’s episode, I’m joined by Nayrouz Abu Hatoum to discuss “future” as a keyword in Critical Zionism Studies. Future is as vast of a concept as it is under-discussed. And like with all keywords, one conversation is never enough to fully unpack it, but it feels especially true when we talk about future. So this episode is the first in a short series of conversations about future and how central it is to the Palestinian liberation struggle, to the anti-Zionist struggle, and in fact, to all anti-imperialist, decolonial, abolitionist, liberatory struggles.

In this first conversation, Nayrouz Abu Hatoum demonstrates that despite the violence that the Israeli state inflicts on Palestinian daily life, violence that affects their ability to imagine and predict the future, Palestinian struggle for liberation is always already future-oriented. We will post our guest’s more detailed biography in the episode notes, but let me just say that Nayrouz Abu Hatoum is associate professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Concordia University and a co-founding member of Insaniyyat: Society of Palestinian Anthropologists. The basis for our conversation is her article, “Decolonizing [in the] future: Scenes of Palestinian temporality,” which we will link to in the episode notes and on our website. The article offers us multiple articulations of Palestinian futures as imagined by Palestinian artists. 

So let’s get to it. Nayrouz, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. 

Nayrouz: Thank you, Yulia, for inviting me and for being in conversation with me. I want to start by saying that I’m joining from Tiohtià:ke, which is in the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. And I think it will be interesting to talk about temporality and future in this conversation, particularly because I want to reaffirm the fact that Indigenous people, in the context where I am, in Montreal, are not something of the past, but are living in the present and in the future. 

Yulia: Thank you for starting with this and immediately connecting Palestinian struggle with struggles of all Indigenous people against colonialism and imperialism, in fact, struggles for Indigenous futures. And I want to start by asking you to give us sort of an overview of how Zionism and Israeli settler colonialism restrict, curtail, and threaten Palestinian future.

Nayrouz: I would characterize as three main spheres that I think Israeli settler colonialism restricts Palestinian temporality. And this will help us, of course, understand then, against this background, why it’s important to think about different ideas of temporality and futures. But one is really through settler colonial policies and bureaucracies that are very violent towards Palestinian sense of living and sense of world-making, or everyday life in Palestine. The second one is the spatial configuration and control over spaces by imposing limitation of access to places through checkpoints. And the third point is creating this discourse that aims at placing Palestinians in temporal purgatory, forever suspended in time. So in these three examples, what happens is a continuous attempt at harming Palestinian sense of control over their everyday life and their futures, and their sense of sovereignty over time and spaces. 

And as for the first one, which is the bureaucracy, it’s clearly manifested through the way in which Israel tries to impose particular policies in Palestine, from the river to the sea, in the West Bank, in 48, in Jerusalem, and in the Gaza Strip. And I’m speaking about these four kind of spaces, because they do have different legal configuration in relationship to the Zionist state. So, for example, any permits required for building a house, permits to pass a checkpoint, family reunification documents. So we have a lot of cases like that, where you have Palestinians from the West Bank marrying a Palestinian, let’s say from Jerusalem with Jerusalem identity card, or from Palestine 48, having to struggle for years waiting in limbo to get any kind of family reunification so they can live under one roof. And this is increasingly becoming impossible. You know, people submitting permits to go to hospitals in Israel. Particularly, we see that in the case of Gaza before October, where there was like a long line and a long way just to get access to any medical care. So your everyday life is kind of bogged by these administrative bureaucracies. Also, if you think about administrative detention, if you think about even imprisonment and family visits to these prisons, it’s all about bureaucracy and permits, and you end up waiting indefinitely, if at all, you’ll be getting any answer or any of these permits required. And in most cases, most of these permits are rejected anyway, but Palestinians still kind of do it repeatedly. 

The other one is, I want to think about how the Israeli military regime in the West Bank and also in Jerusalem, where my research was mainly centered, the whole idea of kind of shifting and restructuring of the space in a way in which it always excluded Palestinians. So for example, there’s over 500 checkpoints between permanent and short term military obstacles in the West Bank today. And they slow Palestinians mobility, they slow Palestinian time as well. And they’re scattered all over the West Bank and in Jerusalem. And this is like another way in which, through these checkpoints, literally, the Israeli army can block mobility and block people from moving from one place to another. And the other one is the construction of the Separation Wall, or the Apartheid Wall, which is not only restricting space and time, but also visual landscape. In some cases, the Wall blocks the view, but really in most cases, what the Wall done, which was constructed in 2003, is it’s created a situation where Palestinians are cut from their own neighborhood, cities, farms, agricultural farms, schools, hospitals, work. So on a daily basis, where Palestinians were able to move between these different areas, now, with the construction of the Wall, they have to, like, circle around and then pass a checkpoint in order to go, literally, to the other side. And this makes any movement that used to be maybe 10 minutes across the street or across the end of the block, it’s about an hour-45 minutes, and you have to acquire permit to move through these spaces. 

And the last one is really this discourse that the public, kind of colonial discourse, that the Zionist regime creates and uses, which uses time almost like as a tool to gain some kind of leeway or some kind of exceptionalism. I’ll give you an example. When the Zionist regime constructed the Wall in the West Bank, they basically marketed it as temporary so they can answer the international community that you can’t cite a violation of humanitarian law because we’re going to demolish it. It’s just a matter of when the Palestinians are ready to negotiate. So they play with time in this way, and that was their argument for the longest time. And it’s interesting to see that the Wall that they built in the West Bank, which spanned like almost double the length of the West Bank, because it goes inside the West Bank, it confiscate lands and all that, it was the second largest economic structure in the Israeli state since the 50s when they built the National Water Carrier project. So it cost billions over billions, and how this billion structure is really temporary after they invest this much money. So it was clearly a way to just shut down conversations about the inhumanity and illegality of the Wall. 

And the last example is an interesting one, the way in which the Israeli regime in the West Bank adopted some of the Ottoman land laws. So for example, there is this idea of “Ardh Mawat,” which means Dead Lands. And during the Ottoman era, in Palestine and all over the region of the Ottoman Empire, if a land was not cultivated for seven years, it will be confiscated, it will move to the governing power. So after the occupation of West Bank and Gaza, Israel used this law against the Palestinian but in order to do that, they declared some areas as military zone. They fenced it up. They told the Palestinian farmers, you can’t go there. And then seven years later, they say, oh, legally, according to Ottoman law, it should move to the governing body, and it’s us. I mean, they didn’t really need to use the law, but they played with the law in order to kind of, like, enhance this legitimacy. But again, it’s also like about time, you know, you hold the land for seven years unattended. So these are kind of the different ways that Israel uses bureaucracy and spatial violence and kind of control over time to continue its control of the Palestinian people. 

Yulia: I think it really demonstrates that settler infrastructure that is designed to colonize land also necessarily colonizes time. And despite these colonial conditions, in your article “Decolonizing [in the] future,” you write that Palestinian temporality and way of relating to future is distinct from a kind of linear, Western, colonial time. You analyze several artworks by Palestinian artists who articulate various visions of the future in their work, and you come to a conclusion that future is intimately related to the everyday and that Palestinian time is rather cyclical than linear. Can you unpack these ideas for us? 

Nayrouz: So the relationship between the future and every day in these different case studies that I look at has to do with the fact that going back to Yara Hawari’s argument, which I quote in the article when she stated that it’s really hard to think about the future when your everyday is bogged and kind of pulled down by the struggles of the everyday. So against these colonial bureaucracies and policies and spatial confinement, that the struggle on a daily, everyday basis, is really hard, and then it also makes it hard to think about a future. That was where I started thinking about the idea of everyday life and Palestinian future, and how sure once your everyday life is really consumed by making ends meet, by, you know, wasting all this time on checkpoints or not knowing what the next day is going to bring. Still, I believe that there is a way to think about Palestinian future, or still the future was evoked and imagined, even though the everyday life was kind of pulling these desires to think about the future down. 

So then I started to think about the relationship between everyday life and imagination of the future. And one argument that I make is that despite the difficulty of imagining future, Palestinians do imagine in future. And in fact, Palestinian everyday life and insistence on staying in place is oriented toward the future, because we know in the settler colonial context the telos, the end result, the finished project is the displacement erasure of the Indigenous. So Palestinians are future-oriented by everyday actions, by staying put, by cultivating lands, despite all the violence that it comes with, by creating families, building homes and so on. Or for example, in the refugee camps in Palestine and outside Palestine, you have the memory of the villages, the memory of Palestine is evoked almost in daily basis, sometimes through graffiti, sometimes through songs and music and posters and flags and whatnot. And sometimes actually through living this very difficult life of refugeeness in the camps, but knowing that there is a refusal to be rooted in the place, because rootedness in this case in Lebanon or Syria or Jordan, means that you give away or you erase your demands for return. So you can see how this idea of return, which is future-oriented, is really lived on a daily basis. Like the best example is the fact that for the longest time, Palestinian refused to build roofs on their homes in the camps because they believed that building roofs, in the 70s and 80s, this meant that they give up their right of return. So they’re living with roofless homes knowing that this means that every day I’m committing to return to that future. 

So I believe that, basically despite attempts to control Palestinian temporality and deprive Palestinian from thinking about the future, a lot of their actions are actually already future-oriented. And honestly, I can think of a better example today than Palestinians in Gaza, who are going through this horrid genocide on unprecedented scale, where we see these images of many people returning to their destroyed homes, cleaning them, and making sure that they can live in them, even though these homes are rubbles. So I think these are different ways in which I see the relationship between the future and every day.

As for the idea of Palestinian time being cyclical rather than linear. I think here, by linear I mean the settler, kind of Western, modern understanding of time that it’s oriented towards progress, advancement, like wealth, if you think about capitalism, even like occupying the frontier. So there is this idea of linearity that’s attached to like colonialism, capitalism and so on. So what I mean by time is cyclical is that our sense of temporality hinges really on evoking the past a lot, and the past is part of the present. And this temporality is almost fueled by this memory of the past. And the best example is the Nakba that it’s evoked as recurring or continuous. And of course, many people wrote about how the Nakba is continuous, even though it was a rupture in time in 1948 in which Palestinians were displaced in masses and the cities were depopulated and destroyed, it is a structure and not one event. So the future has to do with resolving the past or the return of refugees to their homes. 

So if I want to talk about one example that stood out for me in the article, in the way in which cyclicality of Palestinian time is manifest, it’s really through my friend, who’s an anthropologist and filmmaker, Hadeel Assali, who’s also from Gaza. Hadeel wrote this speculative fiction text in 2020 and it imagines a liberated Gaza in 2024. And this letter was addressed to her lover in New York. And in this visit to liberated Gaza, which Hadeel didn’t live through the liberation, she just visited it after, she describes how people talk about liberation through evoking the time before the Nakba. So currently liberated Gaza is an open geography that extends to southern Palestine, economic, cultural connection to the region. So and this is how the future of Gaza looks for Hadeel in this kind of a speculative letter. But this is how Gaza district was prior to Zionist colonization. It was an economic center in southern Palestine and vibrant cultural hub, and extended regionally without any limitation in that sense. 

And the other example that I think for me addresses the cyclicality is return. Even the term return, it’s like you return to a place you’ve been in before, and you have third, fourth generation refugees who have never been to Palestine, because they were born in exile, but they insist on this return kind of evoking their kin, their parents, grandparents. 

And my final example I addressed shortly in the article, towards the end, when the Unity Intifada, you know, broke, and following the Sheikh Jarrah protests, it was there were mass protests inside Palestine, everywhere from Gaza to the West Bank, clearly Jerusalem and 48, but also in the diaspora, in North America and in Europe. People started this trend hashtag that says, you know, “tweet as if it was free” so but in Arabic (غرّد كأنها حرّة) “gharred ka’anaha houra.” And they would, for example, put an image of a bus ticket from Beirut to Haifa in the 40s and say, I’m visiting Haifa tomorrow. Or an image of grandmother’s village which was destroyed, and saying, you know, I’m visiting grandma, I’m visiting the village tomorrow. And then hashtag, you know, “gharred ka’anaha houra.” And it was really curious for me to see how they evoked the past again from the archive, animated, brought it to life to think about future liberation.

Yulia: These examples are really helpful in illustrating this cyclicality, right? How Palestinian future is rooted in Palestinian history, how it’s intimately connected to the past. And another example of an artistic rendering of a future that you write about in the article is Samar Hazboun’s photographic project, and you write that in that work, we can see future unfolding, or, in fact, not unfolding spatially as well as temporally. Can you walk us through that process? How does it manifest? 

Nayrouz: So I came across Samar Hazboun’s work, and then I was able to interview her, and it was really interesting, because she’s from Bethlehem, and she did this project in the Bethlehem region in a village called Walajeh. And I actually was in Walajeh during my fieldwork about a decade ago, I was actually looking at the wall as a subject for my dissertation. So Samar’s work is as I described in the article, she places women and children in front of the Wall. You know, women wearing black, children wearing white. She’s thinking about hope and darkness through these kind of different color schemes. But the interesting thing is she placed them in this part of the Wall in Walajeh that was still under construction, it was open. And it was, I think, open for over a year, because the community in Walajeh took the Israeli army to the Supreme Court of Justice in Israel, that’s the only place Palestinian from the occupied Palestinian territory can appeal against the army, in which 99% of the cases, they reject their appeal, and they favor the army. But they took this case, and for that time, you have a year where the wall was not finished. So it was literally, there was an opening in the middle. It was really funny and dark, because for Samar, this is the time before everything closes. And then you have a whole community that will be either cut from Bethlehem or Jerusalem, and they will probably need special permit. And in fact, there is a story of a house there that managed to appeal multiple times to the court, and basically the army built kind of one man tunnel for him. So there’s a tunnel for this one house. It’s really absurd. But for Samar, she was thinking about how she grew up in Bethlehem, and how for her, like, the terrace landscape, Bethlehem, and the mountains, and the hills, now it’s all kind of covered with the Wall. So she was thinking about our generation which grew up and saw the landscape in the West Bank and in Jerusalem without the Wall, and meanwhile, you have a generation who will not have that memory, or a generation that will be born anytime after 2000, I guess and four or five, they will only know reality of a Wall. So she was thinking about the way in which the space can affect people’s relationship to memory. 

Yulia: What I noticed in the article is that you are very attentive to the politics of statehood, and you criticize it as one that’s imposing a single hegemonic narrative of the future. Yet you also warn the reader that your interest in non-statist futures is not an invitation to abandon the national struggle. Can you say more about the idea of Palestinian statehood and its relationship to future? 

Nayrouz: This is something that I’m a little bit anxious about, and I think it’s really coming from wound about the Oslo Accord. Like, I don’t want to use the word of trauma, but it’s kind of a wound. Because of the failure of Oslo, we are confronted with the problematic idea of state, particularly state that rises from negotiation and not liberation. So like the Oslo Accord, which was signed in 1993 between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel, which promised a state, and again, it was like another limbo, kind of purgatory promise that was never achieved, even though we’re still kind of haunted by this dead process. So many Palestinians were already skeptical from the start about this agreement, but over time, more and more people just literally saw the failure of it. So it’s not like that’s what Palestinian Liberation Movement is thinking about statehood. It’s not like this is the best model. It was such a problematic and such a terrible model, and it was through negotiation that really didn’t make any sense. You know, it didn’t only reaffirm, you know, colonial suppression of Palestinian it also completely erased the Palestinian refugee question, and Jerusalem was also somehow erased from this kind of negotiation. I mean, Israel didn’t want to negotiate about Jerusalem, or about the right of return, but now what we have is no right of return, and Jerusalem is completely controlled by Israel, West and East. 

So the Oslo Accord was structured in a way that gave Palestinians a promise, but that’s it. So again, you’re always waiting for something else to come after this promise, for the promise to be fulfilled. And obviously, after it was signed, the Israeli state completely violated all the Oslo agreements and elements by increasing settlements and increasing checkpoints and all that. So insistence on statehood is important, I think liberation needs to be the first process. Then perhaps thinking about statehood. I feel that a lot of Palestinians, even in the protest now, they talk about liberation, they don’t talk about statehood. And liberation perhaps could allow kind of, to think about sovereignty in a different way, to think about broader ideas of freedom. Maybe even Palestine would have no borders. I mean, it’s part of a region that it’s, you know, by largely Arabic speakers, there’s a lot of commonality between Bilad al-Sham, the Levant, you know, so even these borders were already colonial. 

And I think it is curious that a lot of the examples that I saw around when I was writing these articles, plus the two speculative stories that I looked at, and it seems like the statehood is not what is central. And I think in the example of Aamer Hlehel’s play that he published in the Arabic Journal of Palestine Studies was really interesting. That Arabic volume in 2018 was dedicated to imagination. So I picked up the story from there. And Aamer Hlehel basically warns us against kind of a negotiated form of statehood, against this kind of repeated Oslo situation, almost like Oslo 2.0 and it should be a better version, but it’s not. And in his play, which he titled البلاد تتّسع للجميع, which means The Country Can Contain Everyone, is about a bureaucratic encounter basically, between this man, Jamal, who’s about to get married. And he’s going to this office that is dedicated to giving land and apartment allocation to refugees in a post-Zionist state that it’s called Israel-Palestine. And it’s an encounter between Jamal and clerk, who is Palestinian, and whose boss is Jewish, his name is Sammy. And supposedly it’s bilingual, they all speak all languages, and it’s in the text as well – you can see also Hebrew and Arabic letters. And the idea is that Jamal, who’s a refugee from Safourieh, a village near Nazareth, he ends up being an internally displaced so he lives in Nazareth, and he’s going because now he heard that after reconciliation and after abandoning the Zionist state, what they call the Zionist state referring to the Israeli regime as that’s of the past, and now we have a new reality in which Jews and Arabs, as the language in the text, are equal. 

So he wants to go back to his village and live in his village. But the secretary tells him that you can do that because this particular law only apply to Palestinians who in 48 left and are living outside the Zionist state, basically. So then a huge fight picked up in the office, where Jamal is really upset. And he’s saying, you know, my uncle left, ended up in Lebanon, but my father ended up in Nazareth. And why I can’t be treated the same. I want to go back to my village. So then Sammy, the Jewish boss in this office, has this brilliant idea by saying that, you know, the more Arabs, Palestinian, return to Safourieh, more likely the Jewish inhabitants of the settlement in Safourieh, called Tzipori, will probably be threatened by this situation, and they’ll probably already they want to move to Tel Aviv. So, you know, we have few available apartments of settlers that you can actually take over. So Jamal is confronting Sammy by the fact that this is not his land. What you’re giving me is not the particular land, but also you want me to live in a settled home. So it doesn’t make any sense. 

And again, there is a whole like repetition of this idea that but now situation is different. We are post reconciliation. This past logic doesn’t exist anymore. And I think for me, the play offers basically a scenario after reconciliation in this new post-Zionist state, in which the author warns us that this regime will still heavily rely on Zionist grammar, even though it is post-Zionist and it fails to address the historical injustices of settler colonial structures of race, ethnicity and space. Because the Jewish people will move to Tel Aviv, which is again on other Palestinian villages, but there is this acceptance of the fact that Jewish people would not want to live next to Arabs. So it’s not really decolonial. And this scenario of a state that is a product of reconciliation reflects its limitation of attempting reconciliation without fully addressing the past and without adhering to Palestinian Liberation and return. So de-Zionization, while a framework that Aamer is presenting as a critique to this post-Zionist scenario, still doesn’t really account for the Palestinian epistemologies of how they relate to the land. So it’s an interesting story, but it really places critique to a possible, viable form of a state, but we need to attend to the past and to the Nakba, but also worry about the Zionist grammar that might continue to exist. 

I’m not sure if he was also thinking about South Africa, and I’m not really familiar so much to South African context beside whatever I hear, which is also while apartheid was defeated, still apartheid logic of anti-Black racism and white supremacy prevails. And if you want to little bit talk about reconciliation, the example of settler Canada also speaks to this failure of reconciliation. And while as a settler in this context, I will follow the lead of the Indigenous people in their struggle for liberation, but I also know that Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established in 2008, created some kind of a rift between many Indigenous people who thought that this reconciliation is really cover and just a lip service, and it’s really not useful for sovereignty or for liberation, and even like improving the lives of Indigenous people in the Canadian context. We are now, about 15 years later, after the reconciliation, we see the severe disappointment that many Indigenous people have with this process, because, like, you didn’t resolve racism, and also you didn’t resolve situations which are still prevalent, like the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. So Hlehel and others, and we can look at other examples, we can see how reconciliation can be really problematic. It just kind of rebrand the settler colonial regime in a different way. 

Yulia: This distinction that you make between liberation as a project and statehood as a project, and maybe they overlap and maybe they don’t, is really useful in understanding why liberation must take precedence and why liberation needs to be at the forefront of the struggle, precisely to guard against the inevitable failure of a liberal nation state as a framework for freedom. And Hlehel’s play illustrates this failure where, in this negotiated, ostensibly post-Zionist state, there may even be a law about return and repatriation of formerly occupied lands to Palestinian refugees, and yet it still falls short of liberation. It does not return all of the land. It does not take into account all Palestinians. And it does not resolve the power inequality that Zionism creates and reproduces. 

And what I found interesting about this play is that it answers what I consider to be the most annoyingly persistent question about Palestinian future, and that is, what will happen to the settlers, what will happen to Jewish Israelis when Palestine is free. And while Hlehel offers an answer, this answer does not actually apply to a truly liberatory decolonial future. And you know, I don’t actually think Palestinians need to answer this question. This question places the burden of ensuring and protecting settler future on Palestinians. So I’m not asking you to answer this question, but I wonder if you can say more about how the artist whose renditions of the future you analyze approach this question, and how do you feel about having to contend with this question at all? 

Nayrouz: I mean, honestly, from whatever I’m witnessing here in Montreal and in other places, in terms of like, the way in which Palestinian articulate, you know, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. It’s free for all. It’s basically Palestinian can be free, and Jewish people can also be free to live equally with Palestinians. So I don’t see it as like a call, as many Zionists claim, a call to genocide or a call to ethnic cleansing. But it’s true that I don’t think many Palestinians engage deeply with this question, particularly like artists or writers. I mean, I haven’t seen much of that, and I’m sure there will be more of these engagements because of the pushback against our ideas of liberation. 

But definitely I can see that there is this Zionist anxiety, and it is curious to notice why genocide, or like throwing them to the sea, is the first thing that they imagine that’s going to happen to them in a liberated Palestine. And I do think it’s absurd that this is the kind of future they think will be if Palestinians are actually free. And it’s absurd that genocide is the first thing that settlers think about in terms of Indigenous future, even though the reality shows otherwise. 

Yulia: Yeah, I think of this colonial fear of annihilation as two pronged. On one hand, this ostensible threat of a future genocide becomes a justification for the very real genocide that Israel is enacting right now in Gaza and genocidal policies it has been imposing on Palestinians for 76 years. But also, I think the settler anxiety about the Indigenous liberation of the future is actually the anxiety about the failed future of the settler project, about the loss of power and control. As you said, colonial temporality is linear and directed towards a singular vision of settler future, and the very articulation of and the very insistence on Palestinian future, liberation, and return deviate from that imagined settler futurity. So Palestinian future poses a very real threat, not to the lives of Jewish Israelis, but to the future of the Zionist project itself. 

Nayrouz: Yeah. And I was thinking about, you know, this whole notion of colonizing the moon, or colonizing space, is intricately related to progress, to technology, and it is about colonization. So I think that’s the idea of future that I want to criticize, a future that’s attached to progress and to development that hinges on exploitation and on ethnic cleansing, depopulation, destruction. 

Yulia: Nayrouz, thank you so much for this conversation. Listeners, you can read Nayrouz Abu Hatoum’ article, “Decolonizing [in the] Future,” on our website, criticalzionismstudies.org. Check out the episode notes for the link and the transcript of this conversation.

Until next time. Solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.