(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The farmer sitting on a rock by Lavi's pine trees a few kilometers west of Lake Tiberias in Israel, by what according to the sign is called The South African Park, have understood that this is far from being a naturally wooded area or a park. He wants to know the history of his village, he says. It is also the story of his children. The farmer is aware of the importance that his identity is also linked to the place. Because this is the village that Palestinians have always called Lubya – which he calls "my village". The city housed over a thousand Palestinian residents in 1948, before they were driven out by Israeli forces. The area was razed to the ground. A planting was named The South Africa Park, with a barbecue area at a newly built road junction – with no visible remains of coal.
All this covers the old Palestinian village. Because Lubya's Palestinian history was to be erased. For almost 75 years, vegetation has grown over the village's remains of the old Palestinian cultural landscape. But the farmer will dig it up. He wants to know. Lubya's story is his story, however ugly it may be.
The people behind the film The Village under the Forest , the South African filmmakers Heidi Grunebaum og Mark Kaplan, interviewed this farmer, but also helped him find answers. Archaeologists, as excavation journalists, will be able to find traces that the bulldozers, the army and the planting have not been able to remove. Beneath a cover of bushes and barren soil lies the archive of civilization, waiting for someone to unearth it. Then they will find Lubya.
The narrative becomes even stronger if you also ask the question to Emile Habiby i The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist (1974): "Who erected the buildings, paved the roads, dug and planted the earth of Israel, other than the Arabs who remained there?"
The Wannsee Conference – a mirror image of the brutality of anti-Semitism
Together with my Palestinian taxi driver, I sit on a Saturday in 2018 at this barren crossroads with the sign Livi, at the pointless barbecue place with no charcoal remains, and look at the cactus that pushes forward from under the bushes and testifies that here it has been a completely different life. With houses, courtyards, water points and children playing.
She unearths traces of lived life, of thinking, art, abuse and victories.
But today everything and everyone is gone. And I think this gives a glimpse of what it must have been like to be crushed by the atrocities of the Nazis after the Wannsee Conference. Being a problem that is "solved" by being wiped out. Lubya's coiffed exterior, which covers up a tragedy, becomes for me a reflection of the brutality of anti-Semitism that lived with an apparently civilized exterior. Because after the Wannsee "conference" on 20 January 1942, the participants went back to Berlin, a short hour's drive. They put their children to bed and drank their wine with their spouses. They tried to build a cultured life on corpses and covered graves.
Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Rites of Death
A day later, I brutally skip over to the beautiful, modern Tel Aviv Museum of Art. There I meet curator Rona Sela. She will show me the museum, but primarily tell me about her life's project: saving Palestinian archives.
Can you think of anything more dead than old archives in hidden cellars? Not for an archivist. Not for Rona. Because we are talking about unearthing – not forgotten villages – but hidden sources of Palestinian history: archives, photos, film material and testimonies of Palestinian life and history that are almost forgotten. She unearths traces of lived life, of thinking, art, abuse and victories. A wild gnome of a life that some have tried to bury forever, since it did not fit into their plans for this country. But then came Rona Sela and others like her.
Sela first takes me up to the top floor with a work of art, a long, beautiful frieze. If I understood that this is a protest against what she calls the eternal war? Not immediately, I had to admit. A frieze in relief like a long undulating band, a wreath of carved stone that literally encircles the floor. Nice ornament, beautiful architecture, I think, But it is more, it is a funeral wreath, a symbol with a literally killing message: Israel is a country in eternal war, "a never ending funeral", with continuous feeling with the forces of death, with the rituals of death, with the aesthetics of death. Not many kilometers away stands the grotesque apartheid wall which tells the same thing. On that wall, the art is graffiti and barbed wire. But the message of the eternal war is the same.
The wall Rona Sela has to fight is primarily legal. Her challenge is: "What can I do?" with and in this warring state with the world's fifth largest army? She has responded by fighting to have the old archives released. It is an arduous battle.
As the occupier, Israel accommodates itself to the occupied. Sela writes in the book Palestinian Materials, Images held by Israel > (2018):
"The State of Israel condemns Palestinian history and culture to annihilation and oblivion by means of two main mechanisms. Firstly, by looting and confiscating historically and culturally significant archives and collections. And second, by withholding and censoring them in Israeli archives. There they are subjected to an oppressive apparatus with a clear intention to hide them from view and to rewrite or reinterpret them in favor of the Israeli state.
This device includes limiting people's access to material as well as locking it, deleting information, controlling who is allowed or not to see the material. They claim ownership of occupied material and subject the material to the occupier's laws, rules and norms for their archives (instead of the original owner's laws and rules) and protect their use against tendentious interpretation and cataloguing.”
To rewrite, marginalize, torpedo, ridicule, remove their art, their properties, values and the ultimate extinction.
In the same way that the identity of the Jews was tried to be erased, not only through the worst mass murder in history, but via the many actions to rewrite, marginalize, torpedo, ridicule, remove their art, their properties and values in search of the final solution to the "Jewish problem », where the grotesque Wannsee conference in beautiful surroundings marks the absolute low point of Nazi culture, Sela's life has been about reversing the "erasure" of the Palestinians' identity.
She has dedicated her life to gradually rebuilding parts of the Palestinians' identity, their culture, their history. The soft-spoken middle-aged woman does not say "look at me" but "look at them". "Since 1948, Israel has worked to remove the Palestinians' identity and culture," says Sela. And she will be a living protest against this:
“We have leveled their villages, bought and confiscated their land, removed their names, hindered their development, built them behind high concrete walls and increasingly narrow and discriminatory laws, in increasingly sophisticated ways. Today we are an apartheid state," she says. "And not least we have looked for and removed cornerstones of their culture, that which carries the history of the Palestinians: the documents that show ownership rights to properties, sources of local knowledge, memory books and documentation of lived life: the libraries, the archives, the tactile memories."
Visual historian and Jewish researcher
As a Jew, she is trained to see the importance of the visual, the tangible and the physical in culture. The visual story. "If we Jews took over 'a land without people' in 1948, then we also had to remove the traces of 'what was not there'," she says. She discovered that as a visual historian she had opportunities that the Palestinians themselves did not have. She could talk to soldiers, and she could claim her right in the legal society. Many were there, many could tell about extensive burning, but also about hidden warehouses and archives, which could be opened if you had the right key.
She finds soldiers who took part in clean-up operations in Palestinian areas, who could tell about destroyed archives and libraries in Palestinian municipal buildings, schools, libraries. Much was destroyed after 1948, but much was collected in hidden or inaccessible archives. "As a Jewish researcher, I could use my right of access to find and rescue what still existed. It was and is a puzzle in which the players are not always as open or willing to participate," she says. "In the same way that we Jews demand the return of stolen property, art, and objects, the Palestinians have the right to return their stolen history, their objects, their road signs."
It's almost 75 years ago now. Rona Sela's excavation work is urgent.
Some are more likeable than others
One of her ugliest examples is not so old, it is the robbery of the Palestinian film archive in Beirut during the Israeli occupation there in 1982. Rona Sela is aware that Israel is a brutal colonial power that rules over those who previously lived in the country. But her goal is also to tell Jewish Israelis about the part of their history that is kept hidden from them. They too have the right to this.
It is dehumanizing to deprive the people of their history.
In the essay Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure – Israel's Control over Palestinian Archives she talks about what drives her. And on Al Jazeera on 11 August 2017, she reveals what "shaped a special and planned part of Israel's history". In the documentary Looted and Hidden: Palestinian archives in Israel (2017) she presents new material from this part of the country's history. It is dehumanizing to deprive the people of their history. It can quickly lead to demonization and false images of threats. And the way forward can be ugly – like burying villages and burning archives.
Rona Sela's open, digging hand also shows us a tool that belongs in the toolbox for fighting racism and anti-Semitism. And it is needed in a country that more and more admit is an apartheid state where the laws increasingly state that some are more equal than others.
Rona Sela objects to this. In picture by picture, film reel by film reel, archive by archive, she unearths the bedrock from which historians, students and artists can build bridges, not only within the country's borders, but far, far beyond them.
