Palestinians in Israel constitute a rare case study in modern history, one of a community that lost most of its cities almost overnight, when during and immediately after the Nakba, Zionist military forces executed a semi-complete effacement of a majority of Palestinian cities. Seventy-one years after Israel’s sweeping attempts to de-urbanize Palestinian social life, Palestinians have forged alternative cultural and intellectual initiatives to practice their “right to the city” in Israel. Attending to the phenomena of cultural spaces and cultural cities, this talk will display how cultural urban policies operate in settler colonial cities, and how indigenous cultural urban spaces confront and comply with these policies. It will illustrate how social, political, and economic conditions shape the emergence of Palestinian cultural spaces, arguing that these “Palestinian cultural pockets” challenge urban power relations, the subordinated status of Palestinians’ citizenship, and revive their historical right to the city .
Between ‘Parallel Time’ and Parallel Space: The Scene and the Unseen of Palestinian Cultural Spaces in Haifa
Himmat Zoubi (EUME Fellow 2018/19), Chair: Zeina G. Halabi (American University of Beirut / EUME-CNMS Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2018-20)
Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin
Himmat Zoubi (هِمَّت زعبي) is a Palestinian researcher and feminist activist, she wrote her dissertation on “Control Surveillance Discipline and Everyday Resistance: The Case of Haifa during the Military Rule” in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University. She has completed two Master's degrees, one in Criminology and another in Gender Studies. She contributed to several book chapters and articles in both Arabic and English on gender, cities and settler colonialism, memory and oral history, indigenous knowledge and resistance. Nowadays she is a EUME fellow and her current project focusses on “Culture Spaces and ‘The Right to the City’: Palestinians in Israel as a Case Study”.