Remembering Past(s), Imagining Futures: The Politics of Hope in Palestine

Using hope as a category of experience, this dissertation explores the ways Palestinians and their Israeli-Jewish allies undermine urban spatial expropriations under Israeli-settler-colonialism. Focusing on the city of Jaffa, I analyze the ways in which the Israeli state and the Tel Aviv municipality succeeded in ‘burying’ histories of mass expulsions, organized violence and appropriations of private and public spaces. I then follow the fortunes of Palestinians – those who remained in Jaffa and became a minority under regimes of neoliberalization and Judaicization, and those who were expelled, found themselves de-nationalized and precarious refugees, some confined to decrepit camps, while others pursued opportunities for meaningful political engagement and armed struggle. The dissertation ends with a powerful gesture towards a future that undermines the colonial present and its attendant sense of hopelessness: I explore how both Palestinians and Israeli-Jews engage with the ideas of reconciliation and “living together” in the “Jaffa of tomorrow.” My focus on hope as a category of experience hinges on two main intersecting axes: temporality and place. Just as political identities are rooted in the refugee camp experience and informed by the quotidian and the present, on the one hand, and memory and absence on the other, so, I argue, is Palestinians’ understanding of the local. Rather than accepting normative assertions that define the local as a bounded place that is both community-making and exclusive of those outside of it, I wish to suggest that locality, and attachment to it, is much more multi-directional, dispersed in time and space. This understanding brings to our line of sight those people who are geographically external to place, in this case Jaffa, but have nonetheless powerful attachment to it. In many ways, then, Palestinians are fighting for the right to belong against submerged histories of ethnic cleansing and entrenched colonial denial of their attachments to places they were expelled from.Ph.D.2018-11-30 00:00:0